Inspirational Bits - Towards a Shared Understanding of the Digital Material

In any design process, a medium’s properties need to be considered. This is nothing new in design. Still we find that in HCI and interactive systems design the properties of a technology are often glossed over. That is, technologies are black-boxed without much thought given to how their distinctive properties open up design possibilities. In this paper we describe what we call inspirational bits as a way to become more familiar with the design material in HCI, the digital material. We describe inspirational bits as quick and dirty but fully working systems in both hardware and software built with the aim of exposing one or several of the dynamic properties of a digital material. We also show how they provide a means of sharing design knowledge across the members of a multi-disciplined design team

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Services as Materials: Using Mashups for Research

Using existing services as development and research materials can greatly reduce development burdens. However, using mashups and existing services has consequences that go beyond the technical realm. We present our ongoing experience with developing and promoting a mobile mash-up implemented in the mobile web browser: Spotisquare. Spotisquare is a mash-up of the location-based service foursquare and music streaming service Spotify. We discuss advantages and tradeoffs of using existing services and the mobile mash-up process, including interaction model choices, as well as validity and representational issues

Setting the stage – embodied and spatial dimensions in emerging programming practices.

In the design of interactive systems, developers sometimes need to engage in various ways of physical performance in order to communicate ideas and to test out properties of the system to be realised. External resources such as sketches, as well as bodily action, often play important parts in such processes, and several methods and tools that explicitly address such aspects of interaction design have recently been developed. This combined with the growing range of pervasive, ubiquitous, and tangible technologies add up to a complex web of physicality within the practice of designing interactive systems. We illustrate this dimension of systems development through three cases which in different ways address the design of systems where embodied performance is important. The first case shows how building a physical sport simulator emphasises a shift in activity between programming and debugging. The second case shows a build-once run-once scenario, where the fine-tuning and control of the run-time activity gets turned into an act of in situ performance by the programmers. The third example illustrates the explorative and experiential nature of programming and debugging systems for specialised and autonomous interaction devices. This multitude in approaches in existing programming settings reveals an expanded perspective of what practices of interaction design consist of, emphasising the interlinking between design, programming, and performance with the system that is being developed

Exploring participatory design for SNS-based AEH systems

The rapidly emerging and growing social networking sites (SNS) offer an opportunity to improve adaptive e-learning experience by introducing a social dimension, connecting users within the system. Making connections and providing communication tools can engage students in creating effective learning environment and enriching learning experiences. Researchers have been working on introducing SNS features into adaptive educational hypermedia systems. The next stage research is centered on how to enhance SNS facilities of AEH systems, in order to engage students’ participation in collaborative learning and generating and enriching learning materials. Students are the core participants in the adaptive e-learning process, so it is essential for the system designers to consider students’ opinions. This paper aims at exploring how to apply participatory design methodology in the early stage of the SNS-based AEH system design process

Making modality: transmodal composing in a digital media studio.

The multiple media that exist for communication have historically been theorized as possessing different available means for persuasion and meaning-making. The exigence of these means has been the object of theoretical debate that ranges from cultural studies, language studies, semiology, and philosophies of the mind. This dissertation contributes to such debates by sharing the results of an ethnographically informed study of multimedia composing in a digital media studio. Drawing from Cultural Historical Activity Theory and theories of enactive perception, I analyze the organizational and infrastructural design of a media studio as well as the activity of composer/designers working in said studio. Throughout this analysis I find that implicit in the organization and infrastructure of the media studio is an ethos of conceptualizing communication technology as a legitimizing force. Such an ethos is troubled by my analysis of composer/designers working in the studio, whose activities do not seek outside legitimization but instead contribute to the media milieu. Following these analyses, I conclude that media’s means for persuasion and meaning-making emerge from local practices of communication and design. Finally, I provide a framework for studying the emergence of such means

Becoming with Clothes : Activating wearer-worn engagements through design

Frequently associated with the superficial and the frivolous, fashion has been treated as a subject of lowly relevance in both practice and research. Not exclusive to fashion, this overvaluation of the superficial and the visual has deemed the relationships between individuals and designed artefacts as weak and unengaged. In order to shift this state of affairs, this research asks about paths towards more active engagements between wearer and worn. More specifically, it is interested in understanding how fashion designers can support this change through practice. In order to answer this question, the experiences between wearer and worn and the ways these two entities interact become a central matter of concern. The realm of experience has been marginalised in the considerations of fashion studies as they have privileged investigations on fashion as a system of signification. Through a literature review, this research confirms that the few considerations on the experience between wearer and worn are articulated at a theoretical level with little applications to practice. This doctoral research is situated between the fields of fashion, design and philosophy, and unfolds as two iterative experiments in fashion design, developed under a research through design approach. Within the experiments, the design process is exposed and its outcomes are investigated through the experiences of the participants. Against the lack of previously developed methods to investigate experience between individuals and their clothes, the research engages in crafting a methodology able to embrace this study subject. Named ‘wardrobe interventions’, this method inspired by Cultural Probes collects data longitudinally on long-term relationships via deployed kits containing a garment and a diary. In the project, the importance of the interaction between wearer and worn is made visible in the theoretical framework, as it prioritises experience and agency over culture and visuality. Here, the data collected is interpreted under the light of a revised phenomenological approach, strongly grounded on theories of material agency. The first experiment, Dress(v.), explores dress in an active form and asks about ways to enhance the wearer’s reflectiveness on wearing practices. The findings from this first experiment suggest care, wardrobe novelty and time as spaces to be explored further towards more engaged relationships. The second experiment, Wear \Wear, builds on these findings. It explores answers to the question of time as a space for design and proposes surprise as a catalyst to active engagements between people and clothes. The results reveal that open-endedness can be used as a tool to motivate stronger engagements and make visible the agency of clothes. The findings expose how knowledge on clothing is constructed through embodied experiences and mutual affects — or in other words, through becomings. Once open to such becomings, wearers are aware of clothing’s ability to act, and more engaged relationships may emerge. This doctoral dissertation expects to share with its readers an urgent need to make visible the agency of clothes. It contributes to previous fashion studies by broadening understanding of the ways humans and clothing interact and presents a methodology to support this endeavour. In the field of practice, the investigation suggests ways of entangling research and practice, highlighting the relevance of wearing as a matter of great concern to designers in the field of fashion

Crafting Digital Transparency : Implementing Legal Values into Algorithmic Design

Peer reviewe

Community participatory design in the information systems development process in Africa: a systemic literature review

Participatory design (PO) pertains to the different ways of incorporating ideas and acts of organisational members in designing, developing and evaluating an Information Systems (IS) artefact. The context of this study is community organisations in African settings participating in the designing and developing of an IS artefact. The study traces and synthesises findings from 95 articles on community PO in Information Systems Development in Africa. It argues that community PO consists of vast diverse constructs and implementations. This produced and reproduced concept is formulated in five major themes of: conceptualisations; ethics; standards; checks and balances and approaches; and perspectives and methodologies of PD. The themes constitute the possible ways of classifying PO research and practice in African settings. The results demonstrate that there is a wide belief that participation is one of the vital ingredients necessary for successful designing of IS artefacts for human development. However, the different elements involved in PO involve much discussion on what is known and needs to be known about PO and how to achieve the desired results by PD. The study uses Critical Research philosophy to pay special attention to the behavioural and attitudinal arguments of the different PO practices on community organisations. The researcher found Design Science (OS) principles that centre on devising an artefact as appropriate to frame this work. In sum, through the use of Critical Research and a OS lens, the researcher found that community participation is important in designing a useful IS artefact, but treacherous if misunderstood and inappropriately implemented

Contingent proletarianization of creative labor: Deskilling in the Xianyou classical furniture cluster

Champions of creative economy maintain that, unlike labor in manufacturing, labor in the creative industries is independent and innovative. They also claim that we are witnessing a linear transition from a manual to a creative labor-based economy. We argue against this idea of a sweeping, historical transition and instead posit that the labor process can easily switch from one to the other, depending on market conditions. We illustrate this theoretical point through an empirical study of the classic furniture industry cluster in Xianyou, China. Until around 2005, the region housed a typical low-skill, low-value added manufacturing cluster of small size. Since then it quickly transformed into a creative industry cluster where a small number of craftsmen performed both creative and manual work. However, the recent growth in the demand for classic furniture has enabled firms to mechanize the production process thereby creating new divisions of labor and turning the majority of the workforce into simple manual workers. At the same time, those who specialize in what remains creative in the production process are now liberated from manual work and enjoy greater creative freedom and higher status. Based on these findings, we conclude that, the transformation between creative and non-creative labor is reversible, industry-specific, and contingent upon the market rather than irreversible and economy-wide