Current, Issue 07: Design Research Journal

[Material Practices] What is Critical Making / Garnet Hertz – Material Matters: How Do, We Do Hybrid Social/Make Sites in Knowledge Creation and Applied Partnerships / Keith Doyle – [Sociability & Community] Make Known, Make Possible, Make Shift / Lisa H. Grocott – All for 1, and 1 for All: A Secret Society for Type 1 Diabetics / Lucinda McGroaty – [Embodied Practices] An Interview with Kate Fletcher / Louise St. Pierre – Critical Design. Critical Making. Critical Use? / Héléne Day Fraser – Improv & Design: A Generative Tool for Working with Zero-waste Pattern Cutting / Natalie Tillen – [Sustainability & Social Innovation] DESIS: Design for Social Innovation & Sustainability / Louise St. Pierre – Ditch the Bottle: Plastic Bottles & Design Activism / Tina Yan – Contributors"The journal is designed, edited, produced and marketed by undergraduates in communication design with article contributions from students in both the graduate and undergraduate programs, alumni and faculty. We welcome new readers and celebrate the beginnings of a communicative venture to challenge the way we imagine process, discern the validation of the designer and explore the ethos of creative intelligence."--from website.Editors: Dr. Glen Lowry, Celeste Martin & Deborah Shackleton – Copy Editors: Rebecca Moir & Alick yeung – Art Directors: Jordan Tate & Tina Yan – Production Mangaer: Katrina Yu – Communication Manager: Robin Spence – Designers: Christina Hsu, Jessica Lee, Rebecca Lee, Rebecca Moir, Danica Norton, Tiffany Peng, Kaeley Slaney, Robin Spence, Ying Tang, Alick Yeung & Scott Zhao – Photography: Isabelle Ranieri, Angie Wu & Katrina Yu – Illustration: Toshie Kaligis – Cover Design: Toshie Kaligis ¬– Logo Design: Evans Li – Blog: Rebecca Lee, Ying Tang & Katrina Yu – Web Blog Support: Grant GregsonPublished annually

A study of the experiential service design process at a luxury hotel

This thesis explores the process of designing experiential services at a luxury hotel. These processes were surfaced by means of a methodology that used the principles of jazz improvisation. Due to similarities between experiential service design and elements in jazz improvisation, representing experiential service design through the jazz improvisation metaphor leads to a new framework for exploring the process of experiential service design that is iterative in nature. A gap in the service design literature is that experiential service design is not operationalized in organizational improvisation, and one contribution from this study will be to fill that gap. This study contributes to the field of knowledge by exposing a new perspective on how experiential services can be better designed by adapting some of the design tools from this luxury hotel; a second contribution is a recommendation for how the improvisational lens works as an investigative tool to research experiential organizations. In the process, some new dimensions to understanding complexity are contributed. The research process utilized qualitative research methods. Frank Barrett (1998) identified seven characteristics of jazz improvisation which I have used as a heuristic device: 1) provocative competence (i.e., deliberately creating disruption); 2) embracing errors as learning sources; 3) minimal structures that allow for maximum flexibility; 4) distributed task (i.e., an ongoing give and take); 5) reliance on retrospective sensemaking (organizational members as bricoleurs, making use of whatever is at hand); 6) hanging out (connecting through communities of practice); and 7) alternating between soloing and supporting. This research is grounded in the body of literature regarding complexity, organizational improvisation, service design and experience design. The role of heterogeneous minimal structures that are fluid and optimize uncertainty is central to this investigation. Themes such as sensemaking and the role of story, meaning-making, organizational actors' use of tangible and intangible design skills, and embracing ambiguity in efforts to design experiential services are explored throughout the dissertation. The anticipatory nature of experiential service design is a principle outcome from the data that is incorporated into the new conceptual framework highlighting a "posture of service"

Bicycles and plants : designing for conviviality and meaningful social relations through collaborative services

In our modern times, people’s daily needs and affairs are largely arranged by goods and services provided through institutional and market mechanisms. There is little space left for people’s capabilities of doing things by themselves. This thesis looks at alternative services bypassing institutional and monetary mechanisms: the type of services where people work with and for each other. It investigates how service design can provide opportunities for people to contribute to and with each other as capable individuals and develop meaningful social relations. Two service cases are investigated. One is an existing service of a self-repair bicycle workshop run by a subcultural community. The other is a series of design interventions called ‘Plant Hotel’ where people help water other’s plants as a form of collaborative care. The study of the first case of a self-repair bicycle workshop looks at services as capability building. The workshop supports and strengthens people’s capabilities in bicycle repair and building. By ethnographically studying the mundane and situated practices, experiences, and materials in the workshop, the study investigates how this kind of service is actually organized and experienced. The findings show that instead of helping make visitors’ repair work faster and easier, the community insists on leaving adequate space for people to struggle and negotiate the repair process. Through this finding, differences between the self-repair service where people act as capable agents and commercial ones where people are as served customers are revealed. With this, the study calls awareness to re-examining some taken-for-granted design assumptions, such as the construction of users and the use, and articulated values, especially in the tradition of user-centred design. The second case of the design interventions of Plant Hotel explores a service as new social relation creation. The series includes five Plant Hotels addressing five types of social relation. By involving people in watering other’s plants in the specific context, it discusses what meaningful social relations can be generated from collaborative care for plants. Instead of aiming to provide direct answers, the interventions create opportunities to support and provoke people to look for and negotiate with the meaningfulness. Through the interventions, the thesis proposes a discursive and provocative role of service design that goes beyond the solution-orientated tradition. The new role indicates that the new social relations to be designed do not suggest solutions or preferred models. Rather, they become enquiries into articulating issues of social distinctions and boundaries, and reflecting and challenging existing social relations. All in all, this doctoral work proposes service design as an agent of capability building and a relational agent of creating new social relations and challenging social boundaries. It demonstrates the ways in which daily services are designed to support individuals’ long-term learning and capability building rather than the easy and fast completion of tasks, and also to open up new spheres for meaningful social relations outside institutionally and economically structured boundaries

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

A Political Theory of Engineered Systems and A Study of Engineering and Justice Workshops

Since there are good reasons to think that some engineered systems are socially undesirable—for example, internal combustion engines that cause climate change, algorithms that are racist, and nuclear weapons that can destroy all life—there is a well-established literature that attempts to identify best practices for designing and regulating engineered systems in order to prevent harm and promote justice. Most of this literature, especially the design theory and engineering justice literature meant to help guide engineers, focuses on environmental, physical, social, and mental harms such as ecosystem and bodily poisoning, racial and gender discrimination, and urban alienation. However, the literature that focuses on how engineered systems can produce political harms—harms to how we shape the way we live in community together—is not well established. The first part of this thesis contributes to identifying how particular types of engineered systems can harm a democratic politics. Building on democratic theory, philosophy of collective harms, and design theory, it argues that engineered systems that extend in space and time beyond a certain threshold subvert the knowledge and empowerment necessary for a democratic politics. For example, the systems of global shipping and the internet that fundamentally shape our lives are so large that people cannot attain the knowledge necessary to regulate them well nor the empowerment necessary to shape them. The second part of this thesis is an empirical study of a workshop designed to encourage engineering undergraduates to understand how engineered systems can subvert a democratic politics, with the ultimate goal of supporting students in incorporating that understanding into their work. 32 Dartmouth undergraduate engineering students participated in the study. Half were assigned to participate in a workshop group, half to a control group. The workshop group participants took a pretest; then participated in a 3-hour, semi-structured workshop with 4 participants per session (as well as a discussion leader and note-taker) over lunch or dinner; and then took a posttest. The control group participants took the same pre- and post- tests, but had no suggested activity in the intervening 3 hours. We find that the students who participated in workshops had a statistically significant test-score improvement as compared to the control group (Brunner-Munzel test, p \u3c .001). Using thematic analysis methods, we show the data is consistent with the hypothesis that workshops produced a score improvement because of certain structure (small size, long duration, discussion-based, over homemade food) and content (theoretically rich, challenging). Thematic analysis also reveals workshop failures and areas for improvement (too much content for the duration, not well enough organized). The thesis concludes with a discussion of limitations and suggestions for future theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical research

Encountering design for development: An exploration of design value and ethics in practice

In recent years, there has been a turn to design practices with the promise of more human-centred outcomes. However, the value of this shift remains understudied in social change settings such as D/development. This thesis explores the distinct value of design for D/development from the standpoints of the actors closely intertwined in its projects. The discussion is grounded in understanding little-d development as ‘human flourishing’ based on the self-determined life that one would like to live. Whereas big-D Development is conceptualised as the Eurocentric post-WWII system to transition Global South countries into modernist, capitalist economies. Following a period of ‘prolonged crisis’ relating to its top-down power, outside-in knowledge flows, rigid working cultures, and questionable impact – some scholars consider Development as a ‘grand design gone sour’. Actors operating within this system are facing a challenge of reinvention. Given this backdrop, there is growing adoption of design practices in the search for, and transition toward alternatives. The discussion regarding the value of design in this thesis is grounded in understanding the act of ‘designing’ as an ontological, collaborative and social process of cultural exploration. Such acts of designing are deeply in-tune with the struggles and aspirations of human experience; and can drive the transformation of things, beings and Being. Yet, there remains limited empirical evidence regarding how encountering design is of value to actors involved in complex social change processes. Drawing on an ethnography of projects in Ghana and Kenya, as well as interviews with citizens/users, implementers, funders and designers; I argue that acts of designing can build trust, integrate knowledge, sustain ownership, enhance relevance, affirm agency, reduce risks, reorient accountability, strengthen capability, and challenge power dynamics. This makes the value of design relevant in the search for, and transition toward alternatives. However, this contribution is contingent on the navigation of a variety of ethical dilemmas. As such, this thesis elucidates how design is encountered, what kind of value it offers actors, and what is required for this value to be realised in social change settings such as Development projects

Dissolving the Dichotomies Between Online and Campus-Based Teaching: a Collective Response to The Manifesto for Teaching Online (Bayne et al. 2020)

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching

Interactive Placemaking: Creativity and User Experience at Urban Installations

Interactive placemaking offers many new opportunities for the consideration and design of urban place, particularly through offering engagement with the creativity and experiences of local populations. This thesis explores the recent area of interactive placemaking from analytical and creative perspectives in developing a framework for both describing behaviours and producing design guidelines. The thesis begins by drawing together and building on existing work in HCI and Design to provide an initial framework for the analysis of interactive place. The framework combines theoretical and practical threads to look at two central questions: how do people behave in interactive places, and how do we design such interactive places? The assumption underlying the thesis is that users' behaviours in public spaces can be observed, abstracted, and formalised to the extent that designers can use in designing and evaluating interactive public installations. In observational studies of four interactive installations the thesis progressively develops the original framework so that it is usable, accessible and understandable by designers. The thesis then goes on to evaluate how twenty design students used the framework to realise a number of public interactive installations in the city of Chicago. The thesis concludes by combining insights from existing research and insights from the studies conducted to present a comprehensive and robust framework structure. The main contribution of the thesis is thus a new generative and evaluative framework for interactive placemaking