Designing for the experiential body

The goal of this panel is to reflect on the past and discuss the present and future of designing for an experiencing body in HCI. The motivation is to discuss the full range of rich body/movement-based experiences and how the CHI community can embrace and extend these perspectives on designing for the body. The panelists and audience will be asked to share their perspectives on what has most influenced thought in designing for the body, how new sensing technologies are crafting the HCI perspective, and where they see this line of research and design heading in the next ten years

Turtles and Ethics: Experiential Learning through Game-making

Experiential learning through games is becoming increasingly relevant as games exert an enormous influence on the imaginarium of newer generations. This paper details the use of a game-based learning process focusing on game-making in relation to ethical issues of digitalization for graduate education in digital service innovation. Within the context of a masters education, students from diverse knowledge backgrounds learned about and reflected upon ethical issues related to social media usage by playing, remixing and designing games using the Design Games Framework. This paper illustrates that game-making can enable non-designer students to work with ethical issues. There are good possibilities to explore ethics through designing tabletop games, and having diverse groups of participants can be advantageous. Using a qualitative approach based on observation and interviews, the paper contributes to the body of literature focusing on experiential learning through game-based approaches and to the consolidation of the Design Games Framework

Shifting the Focus: The Role of Presence in Reconceptualising the Design Process

In this paper the relationship between presence and imaging is examined with the view to establish how our understanding of imaging, and subsequently the design process, may be reconceptualised to give greater focus to its experiential potential. First, the paper outlines the research project contributing to the discussion. Then, it provides brief overviews of research on both imaging and presence in the process highlighting the narrow conceptions of imaging (and the recognition of the need for further research) compared to the more holistic and experiential understandings of presence. The paper concludes with an argument and proposed study for exploring the role of digital technology and presence in extending the potential of imaging and its role in the design process. As indicated in the DRS Conference Theme, this paper focuses “…on what people experience and the systems and actions that create those experiences.” Interface designers, information architects and interactive media artists understand the powerful influence of experience in design. ‘Experience design’ is a community of practice driven by individuals within digital based disciplines where the belief is that understanding people is essential to any successful design in any medium and that “…experience is the personal connection with the moment and… every aspect of living is an experience, whether we are the creators or simply chance participants” (Shedroff, 2001, p. 5). Keywords: Design, Design Process, Presence, Imaging, Grounded Theory</p

Experiential Role of Artefacts in Cooperative Design

The role of material artefacts in supporting distributed and co-located work practices has been well acknowledged within the HCI and CSCW research. In this paper, we show that in addition to their ecological, coordinative and organizational support, artefacts also play an ‘experiential’ role. In this case, artefacts not only improve efficiency or have a purely functional role (e.g. allowing people to complete tasks quickly), but the presence and manifestations of these artefacts bring quality and richness to people’s performance and help in making better sense of their everyday lives. In a domain like industrial design, such artefacts play an important role for supporting creativity and innovation. Based on our prolonged ethnographic fieldwork on understanding cooperative design practices of industrial design students and researchers, we describe several experiential practices that are supported by mundane artefacts like sketches, drawings, physical models and explorative prototypes – used and developed in designers’ everyday work. Our main intention to carry out this kind of research is to develop technologies to support designers’ everyday practices. We believe that with the emergence of ubiquitous computing, there is a growing need to focus on personal, emotional and social side of people’s everyday experiences. By focusing on the experiential practices of designers, we can provide a holistic view in the design of new interactive technologies

Sonic City: Prototyping a wearable experience

Sonic City is a project exploring mobile interaction and wearable technology for everyday music creation. A wearable system has been developed that creates electronic music in real-time based on sensing bodily and environmental factors - thus, a personal soundscape is co-produced by physical movement, local activity, and urban ambiance simply by walking through the city. Applying multi-disciplinary methods, we have developed the wearable from a scenario-driven, aesthetic and lifestyle perspective. A garment has been crafted for 'trying on' interaction and wearabilty options with users on-site in the city. With this prototype, we have been able to expore and rapidly iterate context and content, social and human factors of the wearable application

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"

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

Collaborative Practices that Support Creativity in Design

Design is a ubiquitous, collaborative and highly material activity. Because of the embodied nature of the design profession, designers apply certain collaborative practices to enhance creativity in their everyday work. Within the domain of industrial design, we studied two educational design departments over a period of eight months. Using examples from our fieldwork, we develop our results around three broad themes related to collaborative practices that support the creativity of design professionals: 1) externalization, 2) use of physical space, and 3) use of bodies. We believe that these themes of collaborative practices could provide new insights into designing technologies for supporting a varied set of design activities. We describe two conceptual collaborative systems derived from the results of our study

The Digital Cultural Atlas Project: Design Research and Cultural Narratives. An Experiential Approach for Design Education.

This paper outlines an approach developed for teaching research methods in a graphic design program, working in an interdisciplinary context with cultural researchers. Initially, the Digital Cultural Atlas (DCA) is introduced, as a 'work-in-progress' web site, which locates a diversity of geographic and place-based cultural resources across Greater Western Sydney. The initial information architecture consists of ‘bird’s eye view’ cartographic maps and cultural project resources. Through a teaching project in design research, students consider ways in which experiential ‘on the ground’ visual stories can be included. Initial student research identifies a diversity of observed cultural community contexts and situations. This is followed by a second smaller scale study of fewer sites, using an understanding of participatory design research. In this stage, each student researches an individual community context using two 'voices' of the self - as participant, and as observer. These engagements with the self as 'actor' are recorded in a journal format across a specific time period, with reference to reflections prior to, during, and after 'action'. These provide the basis for the new visual stories in the DCA. This paper describes and critiques this approach to teaching design research in visual communication, based on the DCA. In so doing, it links design research with human experiences of community and culture to engage with wider debates about the design of digital mapping spaces as information systems. The paper concludes with some reflections about the project's possible future as an ongoing participatory community resource which engages with both geographic and experiential web content and form. Keywords: Design Education; Participatory Design; Visual Narrative; Digital Mapping Systems; Community Identity; Designer As Actor</p

Disciplining the body? Reflections on the cross disciplinary import of ‘embodied meaning’ into interaction design

The aim of this paper is above all critically to examine and clarify some of the negative implications that the idea of ‘embodied meaning’ has for the emergent field of interaction design research. Originally, the term ‘embodied meaning’ has been brought into HCI research from phenomenology and cognitive semantics in order to better understand how user’s experience of new technological systems relies to an increasing extent on full-body interaction. Embodied approaches to technology design could thus be found in Winograd & Flores (1986), Dourish (2001), Lund (2003), Klemmer, Hartman & Takayama (2006), Hornecker & Buur (2006), Hurtienne & Israel (2007) among others. However, fertile as this cross-disciplinary import may be, design research can generally be criticised for being ‘undisciplined’, because of its tendency merely to take over reductionist ideas of embodied meaning from those neighbouring disciplines without questioning the inherent limitations it thereby subscribe to. In this paper I focus on this reductionism and what it means for interaction design research. I start out by introducing the field of interaction design and two central research questions that it raises. This will serve as a prerequisite for understanding the overall intention of bringing the notion of ‘embodied meaning’ from cognitive semantics into design research. Narrowing my account down to the concepts of ‘image schemas’ and their ‘metaphorical extension’, I then explain in more detail what is reductionistic about the notion of embodied meaning. Having done so, I shed light on the consequences this reductionism might have for design research by examining a recently developed framework for intuitive user interaction along with two case examples. In so doing I sketch an alternative view of embodied meaning for interaction design research. Keywords: Interaction Design, Embodied Meaning, Tangible User Interaction, Design Theory, Cognitive Semiotics</p