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THE END OF NOTHING (W12)

It’s the end of the module. But it’s definitely not the end of reflecting about specific design thoughts or methods. It’s actually quite the contrary. For me I have only entered the world of design theory and I’m still in the beginning of it. I have extremely enjoyed this seminar since I picked up many aspects of design thinking, theory and methodology. I learned to form my own opinions about specific subjects and I actually found out which topics really interest and motivate me. This module kind of showed me that Interaction Design is definitely the right choice that I’ve made. Additionally, it finally made me able to clarify my own definition of what Interaction Design means for myself. I feel more secure when I talk and discuss about it. It’s unbelievable how many new insights I’ve gotten since the beginning of the module. Design has so many facettes, and I think there are many more existing. I’m looking forward to it.

Thank you for reading along :)

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SPECULATIVE DESIGN, DESIGN & ART (W11)

So this weeks theory class was, among other things, about the relationship between Art and Design in context of Speculative Design. To be honest, it’s one of the subjects I find extremely interesting because it’s a whole new take on what the purpose of the design object is. One question which arose in the class was, if Speculative Design goes more towards the direction of Art or Design. Overall it’s a very difficult and also very subjective question to answer. Since the Arts and Craft Movement in the 19th century untill the time of the Bauhaus - and still on-going, the question whether an object is defined as Design or Art always popped up. In my opinion it depends on many things. It depends on the motivation behind the artist or the designer, what the object should represent, or if it even should represent anything. Who even says that everything always needs to be categorized and defined? Another thing is the purpose of the object. Should people be able to use it? Did the designer or artist design/create it according to the end-users needs? Or did they put their own expressions into an object? There are so many questions to be asked to the artist or designer, before being able to answer the question whether something is more art or design. An important question to ask yourself concerning this topic is also, what design and art means to you. I’m not going to share my opinion on this here. I think it’s something which can be quite personal and my definition is still evolving and can change from time to time. But it’s a great question to ask yourself, where you can reflect on your own thoughts about it. 

Quotes that define the meaning of Speculative Design pretty well: “Where typical design takes a look at small issues, speculative design   broadens the scope and tries to tackle the biggest issues in society.” (Tony Ho Tran)

“Speculative design thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely. Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality.” (Dunne, Rabby. Speculative Everything: Design, Dreaming, and Social Dreaming)

Where typical design takes a look at small issues, speculative design broadens the scope and tries to tackle the biggest issues in society. It seeks to answer questions like:

How should design impact the entire world?

How can we design for a healthier ecosystem?

What can we do to influence future cultures?

How can future technologies impact our products and services—and vice versa?

What don’t we want to see from the future?

Speculative design tries to imagine what it would be like to design without the current limitations of technology, culture, and politics in mind.

READINGS Auger, James. 2012. “Speculative design: The products that technology could   become”. In Why Robot? Speculative Design, the domestication of technology and the  considered future. PhD Thesis. RCA, London.  Campbell, Jim. 2000. “Delusions of Dialogue: Control and Choice in Interactive  Art”. In Leonardo. 33:2. 133-136. Dunne, Anthony and Raby, F. 2001. Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic   Objects. August / Birkhäuser.  Edmond, Ernest A. 2014. “Human Computer Interaction, Art and Experience”.   In Candy, Linda & Ferguson, S. (eds.). Interactive Experience in the Digital Age.   Evaluating New Art Practice. Springer. Tsaknaki, Vasiliki & Fernaeus, Y. 2016. “Expanding on Wabi-Sabi as a Design   Resource in HCI”. In Proceedings of CHI ‘16. 

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INNOVATION IN DESIGN (W10)

One thing we learned this week is that innovation can either happen by observation of humankind, innovation as a research discourse, innovation by taking inspiration of the nature, and so on. Innovation even can happen by accident or with a market pursuit. Basically it can take place everywhere. Design does not only have one role and neither does innovation. When we look at the object as a research discourse, it shows us, that research can be different. It does not always have to be emphasized on theory. We should start thinking in a different way about theory.

One aspect which I found really interesting in todays class is the innovation value. It’s always important to reflect on the value of innovation of your product or your service. Is it really needed? And what does it differ from the other services? Are some basic questions you could ask yourself. Keywords like desirability, feasibility and viability can lead to and value the innovation. Many factors like time can make the process of finding out the value differ from project to project. It depends on what you want to achieve. Another thing which can turn out to be a game changer in evaluating is, when you ask yourself what surprises you. By that I mean things you didn’t expect or consider from your feedback of the users. It’s a very interesting perspective to see things, which you didn’t before. Something which is or was, but you didn’t see.

Innovation and success is for many people a cause and effect relationship. The only thing which is basically important concering this, is your own definition of success. What is success for you? Is your goal to reach as many people as possible, or make a fortune, or even the attempt to improve a certain system? I guess, there’s no right or wrong. It just has to be something that really motivates you.

To sum it up, I’d like to try to answer the question what innovation means for me. As I mentioned above, design does not only have one role. It can either be an end-product for a certain target group or it can even appear as a research discourse. So basically for me, innovation does not only have one role either. Innovation can be looked at from different angles. If I’d answer this question from the perspective of the end-product with the motivation of consumption, innovation would be about the improvement of efficiency, practically and the ultimate goal of optimization (and of course to invent something which has never been produced or ever seen...). But to be honest, that’s not how I want to answer this question. For me it’s more about finding out things for and about me, and try to work with this finding, accompanied by a creative strategy which helps me to visualize and produce this vision. The motivation behind it has an influence of the definition of innovation as well. It’s really difficult for me to sum up the meaning of innovation since lots of factors - ever changing parameters - vary from time to time. Nevertheless I hope, I was kind of capable of grasping the meaning of innovation comprehensible for you, my dear reader... But if not, I get it. I’m still working on understanding the meaning for me by myself. I think it’s a process, where I learn from project to project, what it exactly means for me and I hope I’ll be able to put it into words, which are more accessible for the others.

READINGS Blanchette, Jean-François. 2011. “A Material History of Bits”. In Journal of the   American Society for Information Science and Technology. 62:6. 1042-1057. Jones Rhys, Haufe P., Sells E., Iravani P., Olliver V., Palmer C. and Bowyer, A.   2011. “RepRap - The Replicating Rapid Prototyper.” In Robotica, 29.  Kelley, T. (2001). The Art Of Innovation: Lessons In Creativity From IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm. Crown Business. 23-52. Ou, Jifei, Dublon, G., Cheng, C., Heibeck, F., Willis, K.D.D. & Ishii, H. 2016. “Cilllia - 3D Printed Micro-Pillar Structures for Surface Texture, Actuation and   Sensing”. In Proceedings of CHI ‘16.  Seago, Alex & Dunne, Anthony. 1999. New Methodologies in Art and Design   Research: The Object as Discourse. In Design Issues. 15:2. Summer 1999. 

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VISUAL ABSTRACTIONS (W9)

Nowadays the subject Big Data becomes more and more important and people, who aren’t specified in this subject, tend to know the meaning behind Big Data. What most of them don’t know, is the meaning behind collected Data for the advantage of design. Why is Data important for design?

Data can help us toward making improvements and discovering new possibilities. It’s a way to tell the story of real people using technology and to improve the experience of the design through data. The constant goal is to discover something you didn’t know before, and often this happens when we learn something new about how people fit technology into their everyday lives.

Big Data is data generated by machines recording what people do and day. Many experts argue with Big Data, for all its power, can leave big questions unanswered, such was why people take action or why they don’t. Big Data is still mostly about the what, and less about the why. It’s less connected to the reality of lived human experience.

„If Big Data is the archeology of user experience or the study of the traces that people leave behind, thick data is more like anthropology, exploring lives as they are being lived online.“

Pavliscak, Pamela. 2015. Data-Informed Product Design. O’Reilly. 

Thick data are kind of ethnographic studies. It’s less systematic and more intuitive. More than just filling in where Big Data leaves off, thick data can provide a new perspective on how people experience designs. Big Data gives new insights into what people do on their own. Thick data reveals motivations, intent, emotions, which Big Data can’t provide. Pairing thick data with Big Data is becoming a big part of the planning process to map out customer journeys. So, to sum it up, Data can reveal patterns and trends to drive innovation. We can use data to improve the product experience and it can measure success. The more inclusive the definition of data becomes, the more application it has toward product design.

One question which is not really approached (and I missed a bit) in this weeks literature is the safety and the consciousness of the customers. How can we ensure that customers know that they’re part of a research when they are using a product or service? Is there a way to assure a certain deal or compensation between customers and researchers? And would there be a certain change of behaviour when they know, that they’re being analyzed? I guess that’s a whole other subject...

READINGS Buxton, B. 2007. Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Morgan Kaufmann. 76-81.

Eggers William. D., Hamill R., Ali A. 2013. “Data as the new currency.   Government’s role in facilitating the exchange”. In Deloitte Review. 13. 18-31.  Fisher, D., DeLine, R., Czerwinski, M., & Drucker, S. 2012. Interactions with big data analytics. In Interactions. 19(3). 50­-59. 

Mackinlay, J. D. & Winslow, K. Designing Great Visualizations. Study for   Tableau Software. (undated, retrieved November 2013). Pavliscak, Pamela. 2015. Data-Informed Product Design. O’Reilly. 

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RE:EVALUATION (W8)

Evaluate a design is a fundamental part of the design process. Evaluation simply confirms that the product will work as it is supposed to, or if it needs a certain refinement or adjustment. It involves collecting and analyzing information about a concept’s characteristics and outcomes. Achieving a good user experience requires the product to be evaluated, and running effective evaluations involves understanding not only why evaluation is important but also what aspects to evaluate, where evaluation should take place, and when to evaluate.

„The choice of evaluation methodology - if any - must arise from and be appropriate for the actual problem or research question under consideration“

Greenberg, S., & Buxton, B. 2008. “Usability evaluation considered harmful   (some of the time)”. In Proceedings of CHI ’08.

The most important aspect in the beginning of an evaluation is to know what you want to find out or what you’re trying to solve. Therefor we need a method that truly informs us about that question. The method which is used here is mostly the usability evaluation. In many cases a combination of methods (empirical or non- empirical, reflective) will help to enrich the discussion of a system’s validity. The most important thing is though, to find a balance between the different methods.

But evaluation can be harmful if it’s applied inappropriately. It is important to recognize that usability evaluation is just one of the many methods that comprise the user-centered design toolkit. There are many other aspects of user-centered design that are just as important, for example understanding requirements, considering cultural aspects, developing and showing clients design alternatives, etc. Another aspect is to judge whether a usability evaluation at one particular point in the design process would produce any advantages. Therefor it’s always important to reflect on the process and consider the pro’s and con’s. To validate one’s work there are also other methods, for example expected scenarios of use, reflections, case studies or participatory critique.

Often there’s a tendency where the evaluators end up focusing too much on already known problems, and that the questions they ask during a test to concern problems that the user expects, rather than problems actually experienced during the test.

Evaluation can take place before, during and after a project. When you evaluate before a project you mostly just evaluate your ideas, intuitions and the hypotheses. A way to approach this is via field research, interviews, desk research or discussing with peers and advisors. It’s all about setting objectives. When you evaluate during the process it’s about evaluation work-in-progress directions, which can be prototyping, enacting or storytelling.You’re setting controlled experiments with different criteria or rules. After the process, basically when it’s finished, it’s also important to evaluate. It reaches objectives, missing objectives and contributions. Outcomes can constitute forms of evaluations with methods, lessons learned, new toolkit or taxonomy of related work.

There are methods in evaluation that can also be very creative. Evaluation is a design process, not science. 

READINGS Bardzell, J., Bolter, J., & Löwgren, J. 2010. “Interaction criticism: three readings of an interaction design, and what they get us”. In Interactions. 17:2. 32–37.

Greenberg, S., & Buxton, B. 2008. “Usability evaluation considered harmful   (some of the time)”. In Proceedings of CHI ’08.

 Nørgaard, M., & Hornbæk, K. 2006. “What do usability evaluators do in practice?: an explorative study of think ­aloud testing”. In Proceedings of DIS ‘06.

 Preece, J., Rogers, Y., & Sharp, H. 2002. “Introducing Evaluation”. In Interaction Design. Wiley.  

 Sengers, P., & Gaver, B. 2006. “Staying open to interpretation: engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation”.  In Proceedings of DIS ‘06.

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EVALUATING BY NARRATION (W7)

Telling a story helps people to understand different scenarios or happenings. You’re able to showcase the usage of something through representation, which helps the audience to get a better understanding of something. Showing a real context helps to generate a human experience, like empathy, of the audience. In relation to design, storytelling has lots of benefits. Generally you could say, that it’s a very important tool to help us evaluate success or failure, or to rethink our concept. Basically it’s a mirror of purposes and intentions of your own design concept, similar like the purpose of a prototype. Storytelling can help us for gain funding as well, a way to sell your own idea.

There’s not only a positive side about it, storytelling can be counterproductive though. The danger of staying at the level of illustration can occur really fast. Another aspect is, that it can be manipulative, for example TED Talks. The danger here is a certain automatic guidance of the one who narrates the story. It can happen that stories are too simplistic and not open enough. Therefor, you need a lot of responsibility when publishing a storyboard. A successful story can turn into a failure as well, accordingly to Joëlle.

Designers are in the constant mode of selling their design to customers, clients, potential kickstarter funders, etc. To do so, it’s always important to keep the aspects like business priorities, what it can contribute to the world, politics, culture and emotions, and ones’ marketing-presentation strategy in mind. Thus it’s always important to stay true to yourself and the other side. Showing empathy and sympathy to the outside world helps you to get further. Honesty and authenticity are other important parameters to enhance your chance in the big world.

READINGS

Auger, James. 2012. “Demo or die: Overcoming oddness through aesthetic   experience”. In Why Robot? Speculative Design, the domestication of technology and  the considered future. PhD Thesis. RCA, London. 

 Hertz, G. & Parikka, J. 2012. “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media   Archaeology into an Art Method”. In Leonardo. 45:5. 424–430. Ishii, Hiroshi & Ullmer B. 1997. “Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces   between People, Bits and Atoms”. In Proceedings of CHI ‘97. 

Ishii, Hiroshi, Lakatos, D., Bonanni, L. & Labrune, J. “Radical Atoms: Beyond   Tangible Bits,Toward Transformable Materials”. In Interactions. 19:1. January/  February 2012. 38-51.  Kim, J., Lund, A. & Dombrowski. 2010. “Mobilizing Attention: Storytelling for   Innovation”. In Interactions.

Loch, Christopher. 2003. Moving Your Idea Through Your Organisation. In   Laurel, Brenda (ed.). Design Research. Methods and Perspectives. 

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THE QUESTION OF THE PROTOTYPE (W6)

I’ve always understimated the power of prototypes. I never really knew how many benefits it can result to. This lesson really showed me the importance of this step in a design process. Prototypes are communicating ideas among clients and manufacturers. They try to find out if there are certain needs and problems regarding the user experience. Prototypes can lead to evaluation and testing of your own product or service. It can help you on so many levels and help you to get one step further in the process.

“The sketch pad is not just a convenience for artists, not simply a kind of external memory or durable medium for storage of particular ideas. Instead, the iterated process of externalising and reperceiving is integral to the process of artistic cognition itself” (Clark 2001, p.19)

A prototype is a mirror of your own ideas. It demonstrates the current concept, it shows what it can do and how it can be used. It can help me to understand where I want to go. So basically protoypes aren’t necessesarily a medium to help you, they are rather a collaborator that works with you. Prototyping is an advanced way of thinking. It’s a way to think where you learn by doing something. What I mean by that is, while you’re working/thinking on/about your prototype, you’re kind of in a mode of advancing your concept. But how far do you want to go with a protoype? There are low and high fidelity prototypes. Fidelity is a degree to which the detail and the quality of an original resemble the final product. Low fidelity (non functioning prototypes) is a fast way of creating a prototype, which is mostly made with paper or cardboard. It shows what it could do, but there’s no input where an user could react to. High fidelity (functioning prototypes) is more precise and it already shows the functionality. The problem with high-fi protoypes are that the feedback is mostly less critizising than low-fi prototypes, since it’s a less advanced version and looks less “intimidating”. But the two parameters that shows you how far you can go with protoyping is money and time. Cybernetics is a system of organisation or governance. It’s allowing interactions without pre-determining all of the components of those interactions. It’s kind of like a frame, that is set but free to move within. It’s a great tool to create conditions, and helps you to find out where you want to steer.

READINGS Montgomery, Will. 2013. “Machines for Living”. In Wire. 243. 28-35.

 O’Sullivan, D. & Igoe, T. 2003. Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers. Premier Press.

Pask, Gordon. 1971. “A Comment, a Case History and a Plan.” In Cybernetics, Art,  and Ideas. Edited Reichardt, Jasia. London: Studio Vista. 76-99.

Ramakers, Raf, Anderson, F., Grossman, T. & Fitzmaurice, G. 2016. “RetroFab: A  Design Tool for Retrofitting Physical Interfaces using Actuators, Sensors and 3D  Printing”. In Proceedings of CHI ’16.

Youn­Kyung, L., Erik, S., & Josh, T. 2008. The anatomy of prototypes:    Prototypes as filters, prototypes as manifestations of design ideas. In ACM Trans.  Comput.­Hum.Interact. 15(2). 1–27.

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THE EXPERIENCE AND THE USER-EXPERIENCE (W5)

Everyday we experience things, whether it’s something ordinary or the complete opposite of it. We are always encountered with something. Experience can happen on many different levels... it can be physical, emotional, social, mental, etc. But the most important and interesting one, especially for us designers, is that experience is subjective.

One example concering the different experiences, is also a very cultural aspect. The people using the LAN Houses in Brasil (Free, Social, and Inclusive: Appropriation and Resistance of  New Media Technologies in Brazil. In International Journal of Communication.) experience the usage of the internet or computers/laptops completely different than us. Some of the people in Brazil can’t afford an own device, so one of the only ways is to go to a LAN House. The surrounding, the version of the computer, the device itself... all these factors have an influence on somebody’s experience. I have other factors than some of them. I have another experience. We all experience objects differently, no matter what cultural background or whatsoever. According to Don Norman in the video “The term “UX”“, when you buy something, open the box and find it, for example, extremely scary... all this is User Experience (UX). Everything you touch can be defined as an User Experience. Nowadays in the more digital age, this term is kind of misused, says Norman. People think when they design websites or apps, the UX is the website, app or another device, etc.  But it’s more than that, it’s everything we experience in life, world or the service which we interact with. Designer assess experience with both a form of subjectivity and objectivity. There are two different approaches:

The evaluative approach: track if the results are achieved

Observing: interviews, conspicuity, bodystorimng, etc.

In my opinion trying to track somebody’s User Experience is a very interesting task. It’s something so complex in the first moment, but after analyzing and breaking down the observed things, you can make certain conclusions on something, which helps the on-going process of improving the service.

So maybe in a phase where you’re working on a prototype, it could be quite essential to collect different user experiences from the target group, to get one step further in the concept.

READINGS boyd, danah. 2007. “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of   Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” In MacArthur Foundation Series on   Digital Learning – Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David    Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Horst, Heather. 2011. Free, Social, and Inclusive: Appropriation and Resistance of  New Media Technologies in Brazil. In International Journal of Communication. 5.  437–462.  

Kaye, Joseph, Levitt, M. K., Nevins, J., Golden, J. & Schmidt, V.  “Communicating Intimacy One Bit at a Time”. In Proceedings of CHI ‘05.

Krueger, M. W., Gionfriddo, T, & Hinrichsen, K. “Videoplace - An Artificial   Reality”. In Proceedings of CHI ’85.

 Merholz, P., Wilkens, T., Schauer, B., & Verba, D. (2008). Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design. O’Reilly Media, Inc. (Chapter 1 + 5)

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HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION (W4)

“Interaction Design is for people - design for human use. When we interact with technology or with others through technology we are increasingly faced with computers. Computers are what make interaction design challenging.”

Bill Verplank 

Yes, computers are what make interaction design challenging. But what about us? What about the humans, or more the users? Or even the interaction that makes interaction design challenging? Personally, I think all three aspects flow together into the difficulty of it. Computers are a complex system, they function in a way, that is already preset for all upcoming circumstances in an abstract way. Us humans, us users, we all have different presets. We are all different in a cognitive or psychological way, we act different, we have different backgrounds and other norms, and so on. Which concludes that we all have a different behaviorism. So that’s why interaction makes IAD challenging, as well as computers and humans.

PARTICIPATORY DESIGN One important discipline is participatory design, which could ease the challenge of the humans/users (and the interaction) which make IAD challenging. Participatory design is a method to develop processes involving the community to build better results. Depending on the field, stakeholders creating a process can include researchers, designers, developers, architects, and politicians. The professionals will work in conjunction with community members, consumers, or end-users to make the systems better for everyone involved.

HCI (HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION) HCI (human-computer interaction) is about a multidisciplinary field of study focusing on the design of computer technology and, in particular, the interaction between humans (the users) and computers (Interaction Design Foundation). For us interaction designers, HCI is a good plattform to translate these theoretical aspects into our products or services. It shows us different methodologies that we can use and work with.

UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING Mark Weiser, widely acknowledged as the father of ubiquitous computing, envisioned ubiquitous computing as a technology embedded in the physical environment, providing useful services without disturbing the natural flow of human activities. It is viewed less as a descrete field of technology, but rather as an emerging application of information and communications technology that is integrated into the every day world more than ever before. The goal is to meet the claim of “everything, always, everywhere” for data processing.

Ubiquiotous Computing is getting more and more important in the nearer future to ease our everyday living. I know to little about this huge theme to judge and to evaluate it, but aren’t there any negative aspects about it? Even though it can make many daily activities faster and more cost-efficient, may it threaten the privacy and create questions surrounding user consent?

READINGS Buur, J., Fraser, E., Oinonen, S., & Rolfstam, M. 2010. “Ethnographic video as design specs”. In Proceedings of SIGCHI Australia’ 10.

Liz Danzico . 2010. “From Davis to David: Lessons from Improvisation”. In Interactions.

Fogg, B.J. 2003. “Conceptual Designs”. In Laurel, Brenda (ed.). Design Research. Methods and Perspectives.

Gaver, Bill, Dunne, T., & Pacenti, E. 1999. “Design: Cultural probes”. In Interactions, 6(1), 21-­29.

Oulasvirta, A., Kurvinen, E., & Kankainen, T. 2003. “Understanding contexts by being there: case studies in bodystorming". In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 7(2), 125­-134.

Sanders, E., & Stappers, P. J. 2008. “Co­creation and the new landscapes of design”. In CoDesign, 4(1), 5–18.

Verplank, Bill. 2008. Interaction Design Sketchbook.

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DESIGN IN THE EVERYDAY CONTEXT (W3)

In this blogpost “Design in the everyday context” I will talk about two themes which were represented by two class-colleagues, the relation between Science Fiction and Interaction Design and the term Defamiliarization, and a few learnings from this weeks literature that I’d like to manifest.

SCIENCE FICTION AND INTERACTION DESIGN: HOW ARE THEY RELATED? We all know Science Fiction from movies such as Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Minority Report, and so on. These movies have a purpose to entertain us. There are characters in different stories involved. When we look at (Interaction) Design, it is a “product” which is meant to function and to enrich our everyday life.

What they both have in common is the aspect of an (user) interface, which is used for communciation. Mostly shown on screens or surfaces that interact with the activity of a human (specific gestures such as wave to activate, push to move, turn to rotate, swipe to dismiss, etc.) There exists a constant feedback between Sci-Fi and the (design-) engineers. It’s a very inspirational source for the engineers regarding all the creativity which is used in Science Fiction. It’s a great tool to set yourself in a different state and to completely rethink something. I could imagine that it would help us designers to think out of the box, to step out to the impossible as a creativity boost.

Science Fiction consits a huge variety of possibilities. Possibilities without any limits and rules. It’s speculating about ideas on how the culture could evolve in the future, it could test ideas or new innovative technologies, or it could question our common sense or even our humanity. It kind of leads to a more or less to a dystopian imagination of our world (viewed from nowadays). But let’s wind back to the sixties, in the time where everything seemed so new and where the urge to renew the system was immensively high. All the devices and the HCI constructs which are seen in the movies were designed without awareness of the consequences which lay in the further future. It was an utopian imagination on how they could extend the living experience on another level. It’s quite interesting to look at the both terms: utopia and dystopia in relation to Science Fiction. In my opinion the thought behind a Science Fiction movie used to be utopian. Till nowadays, it evolved more to a dystopian direction through the development in our society. The aspect of the Zeitgeist has a huge influence on the content of the Science Fiction movies, I think. DEFAMILIARIZATION Defamiliarization is about looking differently at things that occur ordinary to us. To repurpose or rethink the familiar. It’s a usefool tool for creating space for critical reflection and thereby for opening up new possiblilites for the design of domestic technologies. Norman (1988) made us look again at things that we use in our everday life: door handles, kitchenware, etc. By asking ourselves simple questions like “What is glass for? What are the affordances of glass? “Glass is for seeing through and for breaking”. (Normann 1988:9). Through this technique he’s making a trivial object strange. To sum it up: he defamiliarizes the familiar. Making our everyday life and technologies strange provides us designers the opportunity to actively reflect on, rather than passively propagate the already existing politics and culture of life. Defamiliarization can be a very useful tool for us designers to generate new ideas and approaches to the already known. It’s a great way to create different perspectives and views of something. There’s no empirical solution to something since every approach has its own perk. It widens our field of possibilites in a certain creative process.

FLUIDITY (DE LAET & MOL) Fluidity is a term that is constantly used in the literature about the Zimbabwe Bush Pump. In the text it is described as an object, which isn’t bounded, that doesn’t impose itself, that is adaptable, flexible and responsive. A fluid object, which is proven to be stronger than one which is firm (Morgan, 160).

“The designer knows when he has reached perfection, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away”. (Morgan, 160)

How do we adapt this to the act of design? Designing something fluid means to create things that are, just like described above: adaptable, flexible and responsive. You leave things open and create possibilities for the user on using it however s/he desires to.

PROBLEM SOLVING THROUGH DESIGN (CARROLL) Design is, among other things, about responding to situations in the world by creating artifacts to facilitate our daily activities and to enrich our experience. But to do so is extremely challenging and it brings many difficulties with it.

Six characteristic and difficult properties of design by Carroll

Incomplete description of the problem to be addressed

Lack of guidance on possible design moves

The design goal or solution state cannot be known in advance

Trade-offs among many interdependent elements

Reliance on a diversity of knowledge and skills

Wide-ranging and ongoing impacts on human activity

“Reliance on a diversity of knowledge and skills”

It’s always important to involve clients and prospective users when designing for a specific field. For example cooperative and participatory design, making people with a real stake in the usefulness and usability of the certain technology a part of the team. They participate in the workshops along with the designers.

READINGS Bell, Genevieve, Blythe, M. & Sengers, P. 2005. “Making by Making Strange:   Defamiliarization and the Design of Domestic Technologies”. In ACM    Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. 12. 149-173.

Carroll, J. M. (2000). “What is Design?” In Making Use: Scenario­Based Design of Human­Computer Interactions. The MIT Press.

Kirk, David S., Chatting, D. J., Yurman P. & Bichard, J. 2016. “Ritual Machines I  & II: Making Technology at Home”. In Proceedings of CHI ‘16.

Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol. 2000. The Zimbabwe Bush Pump:   Mechanics of a Fluid Technology, In Social Studies of Science. 30/2. 225–63

Donald Norman. 1988. The Design of Everyday Things. 54-80.

Daniela Rosner and Jonathan Bean. “Learning from IKEA Hacking: “Iʼm Not   One to Decoupage a Tabletop and Call It a Day.” Proceedings of  CHI’ 09.

Shedroff, N. 2012. Make it So. Rosenfeld Media.

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PERSPECTIVES OF DESIGN (W2)

When reading a book, the news or something else, it’s always important to reflect a few points to indicate the credibility of the text. The year, author and the publisher are only a few to start with.

In nowadays world of flooding amount of news we get, it’s difficult to differentiate the articles and the facts. What is even true? Is it even proven? For example when looking at the publisher of a text, it needs to be double checked, what the motivation behind the publisher is, or even the political attitude, which can influence a lot in an article. An example is the free-newspaper 20 Minutes. I mean yeah cool, it’s for free, I can read the news in the shortest time, keep myself updated by a minimum effort and I understand everything! But there are so many layers behind this. Layers that are not visible for the reader. They are playing with the headlines to give a wrong impression of an article. They are paid by several companies so they write something good about them. Nothing good is ever for free, there’s always a cost. We can’t ever know if we are getting brainwashed unconsciously or not, when we don’t start questioning the huge amount of informations we receive. Another aspect on how to check the credibility is, if it’s peer-reviewed. Did people from the related field review the text? -

As designers we have intentions. Sometimes it’s really hard to steer the consequences, since the gap between intended and unintended consequences can be really little. An example is Facebook or Instagram. In the first place, they designed these platforms for social networking. What it ended up to be, is a platform full of commercials which lead to public propaganda which are adapted to each user. Thus it’s an aspect to keep in my mind when designing: lay out the concequences it could result to, the intended and the unintended ones. Through this analysis it could be possible to prevent a certain reaction from the users of the designservice.

To conclude the second lesson for me, I’m going to end with a few questions: Who are we designing something for? How do we prevent a biased design without proper research about a certain topic?

READINGS Carroll, J. M. (2000). Making Use: Scenario-­Based Design of Human­Computer Interactions. The MIT Press. “the Process”

Dreyfuss, H. S. (1955). Designing for People. (26-­43).

Dubberly, H. ­(2004). How do you design? Dubberly Design Office.

Kolko, J. (2011). Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis (Oxford Series in Human­Technology Interaction) (1 ed.). Oxford University Press, USA.

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DECONSTRUCTING INTERACTION DESIGN (W1)

WHAT IS INTERACTION DESIGN?

In todays course we discussed the terminology of “Interaction Design”. “Interaction Design” can be defined in multiple ways, there’s no empirical definition.

Funnily on the same day, the guy who sold me coffee asked me what I was studying at ZHdK. I had to smile a little and recap the discussion we had earlier in class. So now there I had it, my chance to define the term for myself. How would I define Interaction Design for myself? My answer to the coffee guy was that Interaction Design is about relationships. Relationships between humans, humans and computer or humans and informations, etc. Whether it’s an analysis or an approach to solve a problem, it all falls into the terminology of Interaction Design. It was quite difficult for me to extract all the defintions I know of in a short time. I mean I wanted to give Interaction Design its justice. But this is how I would define it to a person, who is not active in a design-related field. Of course, Interaction Design is so much more. It can also open other design-fields such as Critical/Speculative Design, Social Design, Experience Design, etc. It’s absolutely beautiful how difficult it is to find a fixed defintion for this field. And the amazing thing is that the term is still evolving. It’s an on-going process that has such a big and wide future. One definiton that we came up in class, which I couldn’t get out of my head was, that Interaction Design is a “transfer of information with all senses”. It can be understood on so many layers. You can’t just see Design, or, feel Design. What about hearing? Or even tasting or smelling Design? What about experiencing Design in a new way? So I’m going to conclude with a question for myself: How can I design and involve all senses, not for me, but for the user? How can I use the experience of the user, as a medium for my design? 

HOW DO WE WORK AS INTERACTION DESIGNER?

Another thing we talked about in our class, was about Design Processes. How do we work? What kind of steps do we go through while working on a (group-)project? To start of, we had to transfer back into our past module “Digital Fabrication” and ask ourselves, which steps we went through while working on the group project. The six steps we came up with (picture above):

communication (spreading our ideas)

possibility of realising the idea

experimenting the different concepts

accepting each idea

killing darlings

accepting and moving on

There are always so many factors which can influence your design/work process. It’s never easy to define your process in a simple and linear way. It always jumps back and forward. It can repeat itself, or even maybe steps that happen parallel?

The work flow can be so different everytime influenced by so many factors.

Excursive Method

There’s a method called “Excursive method” which is built up like this: investigation, play, everyday, tensions, enactment, dissemination. It will for sure create more awareness during the process in the upcoming projects.

READINGS Löwgren, J. & Stolterman, E. (2007). Thoughtful Interaction Design. The Process (15­-41).