Understanding the role of designers' personal experiences in interaction design practice

Using designers' personal experiences in interaction design practice is often questioned in a predominantly rationalist practice like HCI and professional interaction design. Perhaps for this reason, little work has been conducted to investigate how designers' personal experiences can contribute to technology design. Yet it's undeniable designers have applied their personal experiences to their design practice and also benefited from such experiences. This paper reports on a multiple case study that looks at how interaction designers worked with their personal experiences in three industrial interaction design projects, thus calling for the need to explicitly recognize the legitimacy of using and better support of the use of designers' personal experiences in interaction design practice. In this study, a designer's personal experiences refer to the collections of his/her individual experiences derived from his/her direct observation or past real-life events and activities, as well as his/her interaction with design artifacts and systems whether digital or not

Politics makes strange bedfellows: addressing the ‘messy’ power dynamics in design practice

The paper addresses the role of the designer in navigating through politics and power dynamics that can potentially hinder ways in which people have input into a design process. It acknowledges that such obstacles are common to design practices and much is already documented in organisational, business and management frameworks (Best, 2006, p. 97; Jones, 2003). However, the paper draws on the author’s doctoral research that explored how designers work within the complexities of politics and power dynamics and the agency they bring when working within such contexts. Firstly, the paper clarifies its use of the word politics by distinguishing between the Political choices that designers make, to the embedded politics of power dynamics and hidden agendas. It acknowledges how the Political content and intention of design is widely discussed in communication design literature where designers have created political content toward a purposeful political outcome. The paper therefore focuses more on another political aspect to communication design practice that relates to values, relationships and power dynamics. These human aspects of practice are complex, ‘messy’ and are often implicit. The power dynamics within projects can significantly influence the way stakeholders have input into the design process and subsequent project outcome. The politics of the individual, organisation, community or the society can often abruptly and unexpectedly surface through designing. Based on several interviews with a variety of communication design practitioners and project case studies from the author’s research, the paper highlights a role that designers can potentially play in addressing the ‘messy’ politics that can manifest through design projects. The research explored various design interventions to enable a variety of people with different values, opinions and viewpoints within a design project to collectively negotiate them through dialogue. It has discovered that such design interventions can be instrumental in facilitating the dialogic process amongst stakeholders to illuminate differences in values or hidden agendas. The paper proposes that the role of the designer, then, is to facilitate this dialogic process through design interventions to enrich the experience of dialogue and exchange amongst project stakeholders. Keywords: Human-Centred Design; Communication Design; Politics; Power-Dynamics; Design ‘Scaffolds’; Dialogue.</p

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

Include 2011 : The role of inclusive design in making social innovation happen.

Include is the biennial conference held at the RCA and hosted by the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. The event is directed by Jo-Anne Bichard and attracts an international delegation

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

Connecting practice to research (and back to practice): making the leap from design practice to design research

This paper explores two questions: what skills and knowledge can be derived from research and brought back into design practice; and how can we better prepare designers to undertake research? Its aim was to enable design practitioners wishing to pursue research to understand the process and anticipate the scope and level of work. Additionally, it addressed the questions of how design education can incorporate a research-based curriculum and how professional bodies can promote the value of research to practitioners? A complementary paper was co-written and presented at the CONNECTED 07 conference, Sydney. It explores the process of undertaking a PhD within the framework of the UK design education system by examining it from a design and business perspective (Yee, J.S.R, Michlewski, K. and Bohemia, E. (2007) 'Interrogating the Academic Research Process in UK Design Education from Design and Business Perspectives', ConnectED 2007 – International Conference on Design Education, Sydney, (http://www.designdictator.com/publications/connected07.pdf). Yee’s research bridges the gap between contemporary design practice, the growth of professional knowledge and pedagogy, via empirical study and theoretical discourse. Yee is currently 2nd supervisor for a PhD, entitled; ‘The Development of a Framework to Understand Potential Relationships Between Services and Their Users’ and is contributing to the development of the Professional Practice Doctorate in Design in the CfDR

Crazy ideas or creative probes?: presenting critical artefacts to stakeholders to develop innovative product ideas

A number of design practices derive from and develop the notion of critical theory. Notable developers of such “critical design practices” are Dunne &amp; Raby with “critical design”, Sengers and colleagues at Cornell University's Culturally Embedded Computing Group with “reflective design”, and Agre with “critical technical practice” within artificial intelligence research. And there are an increasing number of designers who, whilst not specifically explicating their theoretical ancestry, include critical elements in their products. The reflection afforded by the products of critical design is generally seen as its endpoint. However I have used this reflection instrumentally within human-centred design activities. “Critical artefacts” have proved more useful as tools than direct questioning techniques; in particular as a way of enabling stakeholders to engage with novel situations and consequently engage in creative thinking about future possibilities. This paper begins with a review of critical design practices. Two case studies are then detailed demonstrating my approach. A discussion of the commonalities and differences between critical design practices follows noting their relationship to critical social theory and the relationship of my work to them. Finally further research to develop generalisable methods is outlined.</p

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

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