Using Stop Motion Animation to Sketch in Architecture: A practical approach

Widely acknowledged as an archetypal design activity, sketching is typically carried out using little more than pen and paper. Today’s designed artifacts however, are often given qualities that are hard to capture with traditional means of sketching. While pen and paper sketching catches the character of a building, it may not equally well capture how that building changes with the seasons, how people pass through it, how the light moves in between its rooms from sunrise to dawn, and how its façade subtly decays over centuries. Yet, it is often exactly these dynamic and interactive aspects that are emphasised in contemporary design work. So is there a way for designers to be able to sketch also these dynamic processes? Over several years and in different design disciplines, we have been exploring the potential of stop motion animation (SMA) to serve this purpose. SMA is a basic form of animation typically applied to make physical objects appear to be alive. The animator moves objects in small increments between individually photographed frames. When the photographs are combined and played back in continuous sequence, the illusion of movement is created. Although SMA has a long history in filmmaking, the animation technique has received scarce attention in most design fields including product design, architecture, and interaction design. This paper brings SMA into the area of sketching in architecture by reporting on the planning, conduct, result, and evaluation of a workshop course carried out with a group of 50 students at Umeå School of Architecture, Umeå University, Sweden

Mediated Reality through Glasses or Binoculars? Exploring Use Models of Wearable Computing in the Context of Aircraft Maintenance

this article, aircraft maintenance is used to explore the potentialities of different use models of wearable computing (i.e., the way the system is designed, used, and understood, and which should also make sense in other environments). The use models are (a) a vertical model addressed by a binoculars-analogy, where the system is designed and used for a specific purpose; and (b) a horizontal model, approached by perceiving wearable computers as eyeglasses, where the system is used throughout the day for a number of activities. Problems with both models suggest an alternative use model, which is presented as the embodied use model, drawing on the notion of embodiment introduced by Ihde (1990

Design-oriented Human-Computer Interaction

We argue that HCI has emerged as a design-oriented field of research, directed at large towards innovation, design, and construction of new kinds of information and interaction technology. But the understanding of such an attitude to research in terms of philosophical, theoretical, and methodological underpinnings seems however relatively poor within the field. This paper intends to specifically address what design `is' and how it is related to HCI. First, three candidate accounts from design theory of what design `is' are introduced; the conservative, the romantic, and the pragmatic. By examining the role of sketching in design, it is found that the designer becomes involved in a necessary dialogue, from which the design problem and its solution are worked out simultaneously as a closely coupled pair. In conclusion, it is proposed that we need to acknowledge, first, the role of design in HCI conduct, and second, the difference between the knowledge-generating Design-oriented Research and the artifact-generating conduct of Research-oriented Design

General Terms

In this paper, we will reflect on a particular methodological technique—namely our use of in-situ experience prototyping; what we call xProbes—that has evolved in our collaboration with a large industrial company and that we believe to be potentially useful for interaction design, as xProbing can come to complement rather than replace the use field-studies using ethnographic techniques, workshops, brainstorming, scenariobuilding, and low-fi prototyping