The Designer as Ethnographer: Practical Projects from Industry

Bichard and Gheerawo (RCA) were invited to contribute this chapter by the book’s editor, Professor Alison Clarke (University of Applied Arts, Vienna), who brought together ‘key thinkers and practitioners involved in making and theorizing our contemporary material and immaterial world’ (p.9). The book charts how designers have begun to use social research as part of their practice, whilst also presenting an anthropological perspective of both the consumption of design, and those involved in the design process (Bichard and Gheerawo). Design anthropology is an emerging discipline and this edited volume was the first to bring together designers, design researchers and anthropologists. The chapter describes ethnographic design research and highlights the temporal tensions between respective practices in both design and anthropology. Following Rees’s (2008) suggestion that the fieldwork methodology of anthropology could learn much from design, Bichard and Gheerawo argue that design(ers) could benefit from the reflexive perspective of anthropology. The use of ethnography in design research is especially pertinent in Bichard’s work with partners from disability and ageing communities. The flexibility of the ethnographic approach has afforded collaborative design research processes, bridging the creative experience of the designer/researcher and the life experience of the partner. A review of the edited volume in Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society (2013) described Bichard and Gheerawo’s chapter as ‘one of the best offerings of the book’. Bichard presented adapted versions of the chapter in her series of guest lectures on design anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London (2010 and 2011)

Participatory Scenario Generation: Communicating Usability Issues in Product Design through User Involvement in Scenario Generation\ud

Scenarios have proven to be a valuable tool in evaluating and communicating usability issues in consumer product design. Scenarios are explicit descriptions of hypothetical use situations. Realistic scenarios can serve as a valuable frame of reference to evaluate design solutions with regard to usability. To be able to achieve this required level of realism, involving users in scenario generation is essential. In this presentation we discuss how and where users can be involved in a scenario based product design process by means of examples of design projects that were executed by master students Industrial Design Engineering of the University of Twente. \ud \ud We distinguish direct and indirect scenario generation. In direct scenario generation the user is actively involved in a participatory scenario generation session: the scenarios are created together with users. Indirect scenario generation is an approach in which scenarios are created by designers based on common analysis techniques like observations and interviews. These scenarios are then offered to users for confirmation. Both types of user involvement in scenario generation can be aimed at either current use scenarios which describe the current situation or future use scenarios which include a new product design. \ud \ud The examples show that all strategies can be applied successfully to create realistic scenarios. Which strategy to choose depends among others upon risks and privacy issues, occurrence of infrequent events and availability of users. Furthermore, the variety of approaches shows that there is still a lot to explore with regard to benefits and limitations of the many techniques that can be applied in generating scenarios for consumer product design. We hope to contribute to this field by means of the research in our group and the work of students in the SBPD course\u

Restarting Britain2: Design and Public Services

This is the second publication in the Design Commission’s ‘Restarting Britain’ series. The first set out the strategic importance of design education as a driver of economic renewal and growth. This report turns to the question of public service renewal.In the context of politics and governing, the word ‘design’ is applied liberally – the design of legislation, the design of policy, the design of public services – with little thought as to the significance of the word itself. Here we shift our focus to that word ‘design’, and explore its potential for creating cost-effective public services in the 21st century. Part-polemic, part-manual, this report is the culmination of a nine month inquiry,and our response to a substantially increased appetite for more information on the subject of design in public services.Design, as a creative process, can be applied in almost any field of practice. Traditionally we see design being used in the world of consumer goods, but it is increasingly infiltrating other areas of life. In the course of the inquiry we discovered many brilliant examples of good design thinking being applied, with positive results, to public or governmental challenges - often involved in reconfiguring public services in places where resources are diminishing, or need is growing, or both. However design thinking is by no means commonplace in government.Through the publication of this report we have suggested ways of normalising this kind of practice. Our recommendations included pushing for much stronger design leadership in central government; increasing design capacity (and commissioning capacity) across government through training, and aggregating of good quality information; and building capacity in the design sector itself to respond to social and public challenges

Co-design of human-centered, explainable AI for clinical decision support

eXplainable AI (XAI) involves two intertwined but separate challenges: the development of techniques to extract explanations from black-box AI models, and the way such explanations are presented to users, i.e., the explanation user interface. Despite its importance, the second aspect has received limited attention so far in the literature. Effective AI explanation interfaces are fundamental for allowing human decision-makers to take advantage and oversee high-risk AI systems effectively. Following an iterative design approach, we present the first cycle of prototyping-testing-redesigning of an explainable AI technique, and its explanation user interface for clinical Decision Support Systems (DSS). We first present an XAI technique that meets the technical requirements of the healthcare domain: sequential, ontology-linked patient data, and multi-label classification tasks. We demonstrate its applicability to explain a clinical DSS, and we design a first prototype of an explanation user interface. Next, we test such a prototype with healthcare providers and collect their feedback, with a two-fold outcome: first, we obtain evidence that explanations increase users’ trust in the XAI system, and second, we obtain useful insights on the perceived deficiencies of their interaction with the system, so that we can re-design a better, more human-centered explanation interface

Context and culture in human computer interaction: usable does not mean senseful

Computers and their interfaces are part of the spaces from which social reality emerges. They are indicators of direct and indirect cultural negotiations between the networks of production and consumption of these technologies. Technology is thus conceived as not only a product, but also as part of a cultural process of encoding and decoding. This implies a new concept of the Human-Computer relationship that breaks the prevalent idea of symmetry between human and computers as abstract information processing entities, i.e. it re-humanizes users as persons and re-locates computers and its interfaces as tools in real sociocultural settings. The paper briefly discusses the main theoretical strands that study the shaping of computer systems design and use by context and culture. These are Situated Action, the Semiotic perspective, Scenario-based Design, Activity theory, and the Systems-Management approach. Further, the role of ethnography, qualitative methods and intercultural studies are discussed as important contributors to a better understanding of the significance of context and culture in computer use and design. The Hermeneutic approach of Gadamer and Winograd and the idea of technology as interpretatively flexible text shaped by specific genres and tastes, serve as the main cornerstone of this discussion. A starting theoretical framework composed of three cultural dimensions (workplace, tool-related, and personal background) is proposed for researching the role of culture in systems and interface use and design. The main reflection from this discussion is that the question “Does this technology make sense for them?” is rarely made in pursuit of successful systems design. Therefore, the direction for research presented here tries to answer the question of how people situated in concrete cultural configurations make sense of computer systems

Contextual user research methods for eliciting user experience insights in workplace studies

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contribute with experiences and reflections on user research methods that we have tested in our studies of users\u27 experiences in office environments. Theory: Previous workplace studies with qualitative data approaches mainly rely on traditional methods such as interviews and observations. Based on user-centered design research, we outline methods that can be used to facilitate understanding the interrelations between users and their surrounding environment. Design: Three methods and their variations were applied in different case studies to facilitate understanding of user experiences in office environments: (i) spatial walkthroughs, (ii) card sorting, and (iii) experience curve mapping. Findings: Spatial walkthroughs were more immersive and provided most insights on the actual context with respect to spatial design qualities. The card sorting enabled exploring user experiences with respect to predetermined aspects. The experience curve mapping enabled understanding the temporal aspects of the user experience. The latter two methods were less immersive and less disruptive in the organisational context than the spatial walkthroughs. The flexibility of these methods allows for tailoring the application depending on the purpose of the workplace studies. We recommend using a combination of these methods to capture a more holistic understanding of user experiences and improving the workspace design to better fit the users. Originality: The outlined methods required user involvement and participation and provided insights for making evidence-based recommendations for designing or redesigning office environments that fit users\u27 needs and preferences

Layered evaluation of interactive adaptive systems : framework and formative methods

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