collective and cumulative - some strategies of everyday design-in-use
DESCRIPTION
Inuse project seminar 16.05.2011TRANSCRIPT
Collective and cumulative, some
strategies of every day design-in-use
Andrea Botero / Aalto University School of Art and Design / DOM
Design
"... design is not the creation of discrete, intrinsically meaningful
objects, but the cultural production of new forms of practice…"
Suchman, L; Blomber, J; Orr E; Randall, T (1999) Reconstructing Technologies as social practice in The American Behavioral Scientist,
Vol43 No 3, pp 392.
PROCESS - ACTIVITY
• Solution oriented: work through (in imagination) an intervention in the world
• Use representations of the world to assess the
ways in which the contemplated intervention would change the world and to negotiate a shared vision (stories, drawings, models, simulations, sketches, prototypes)
• Iterate the process, often numerous times, before the design settles into some form
• “look at the whole, pay attention to the
details” (EM)
In-use(2 POV)
• Studying people and use situations to inform design process
• Recognize that a variety of people, through their everyday activities, are already engaged in continuous
and dynamic processes related to
– learning,
– creative appropriation,
–domestication,
– shaping of technology, etc
That can be interesting from a design
pov
Initial questions
– Who is really designing with whom and with what resources is this been achieved? (UCD, PD, )
– What it is that is being designed? (or what is possible to design) (UX, IXD)
– How design work dynamically shifts and drifts from some actors to others -including the artefacts themselves. (Agency, Teams )
– How design decisions are allocated, delegated (or denied) amongst participants (Agency, collaboration, communication)
– (Relationship of all these to broader discussion on “innovation”)
– Who is really designing with whom and with what resources is this been achieved? (UCD, PD, )
– What it is that is being designed? (or what is possible to design) (UX, IXD)
– How design work dynamically shifts and drifts from some actors to others -including the artefacts themselves. (Teams, agency)
– How design decisions are allocated, delegated (or denied) amongst participants (Agency, collaboration, communication)
– (Relationship of all these to broader discussion on “innovation”)
social production, collective action, Life projects, etc (From design POV: logics, problems, possibilities?)
– Who is really designing with whom and with what resources is this been achieved? (UCD, PD, )
– What it is that is being designed? (or what is possible to design) (UX, IXD)
– How design work dynamically shifts and drifts from some actors to others -including the artefacts themselves. (Teams, agency)
– How design decisions are allocated, delegated (or denied) amongst participants (Agency, collaboration, communication)
– (Relationship of all these to broader discussion on “innovation”)
Different divisions of labour and its resulting consequences?
TRENDS/ FADS
• co-creation
• crowdsourcing
• open innovation
• user innovation
• (even) social innovation
CLAIMS: new configurations in productive/creative activities (democratization)
In design?• UCD, PD, co-design, etc have been
creating debates (and
interventions) about new designer/user relationships at least since
the 70’s
–Contributions to the understanding of the landscape available for current design practice are potentially relevant to many issues beyond;
However…
Design research has been mostly concentrating on:
1
• Who should take part, when?
ASSUMPTIONS:
–design work is carried out largely by teams, and it is organized around a project
– It is possible to find the perfect configuration for the team, you just need to try hard enough
2
• What roles suit everyone better, and which new ones should be tried? (specially designers)
ASSUMPTIONS:
– new roles are enough (change in attitude
and few new techniques)
– once we find the right method(s) exercising the right kind of role would be straightforward
3
• Product centric
ASSUMPTIONS:
– Innovation as technical endeavor
(practices?)
– “Firms” as legitimate articulators / locus
• To much focus on WHO we are (Designer? User? Producer?) and
less efforts in understanding WHAT is everybody doing and with what
resulting consequences.
• A lot of efforts concentrated in the fuzzy front end
• risk of turning efforts into an issue of mere commodification of user involvement
Engestr
öm
, Y.
(2008).
Fro
m T
eam
s t
o K
nots
: Stu
die
s o
f Collabora
tion a
nd L
earn
ing a
t W
ork
(1st
ed.)
. Cam
bridge
Univ
ers
ity P
ress.
Need better understanding
• It is not enough to say that “everyone designs” but how? To what extent? What?
• Dynamics of collective and collaborative endeavors (from a design POV), in contemporary conditions (firms/organizations? solo/teams/something else?)
• The role and contribution of design activities (and not just of “designers” or “users”)
• Look before, after and to the sides of the concept design stage (fuzzy
front end)
• Take seriously design-in-use (identified as key component but
remains largely under supported and under developed)
2 cases
• Both are areas where some examples of “users” initiate
development (marginally)
• Picture is more complex than producer-user and designer-user
(government, civic sector, etc)
• New media as component in re-configuring the “sector”
1. A collective project of communal senior living based on neighborliness, self-help and open decision process (http://aktiviisetseniorit.fi).
(ADIK Project – Emerging Digital Practices of Communities. TEKES)
-Articulation between several “projects”
-Success of a failure
-Choices, material maters (e.g Limits of CMS, no place for relationships)
“seeding”
prototype
based on existing
component /
DW Beta
Scenarios
2. Emerging urban forms of civic participation (activists, government, average citizen, etc). Sharing knowledge about the city
(ICING Project Innovative cities for the next generation)
- role of digital technologies (location-based services) in facilitating citizen participation in issues related to the urban environment and in building new relationships to the city administration
- Issue reporting vs issue sharing
- Active citizenship? (different actors imagine new forms of citizenship)
A UM Point
documents
questionable decisions of
some fellow
citizens (UM
v1.0 - mobile
UI).
A UM Topic
gathering
contributions for new skating
park locations.
The UI features
a map view
populated by UM Points (UM
v 1.0)
• Interesting and crucial co-design opportunities happened in design-in-use (many opportunities for collaboration and collective action)
– Cumulative (Design Space)
– Collective (hybrid)
Design-in-use realities
• Ad-hoc/mundane: does not necessarily involve
reflection as sometimes it can be side project or a distraction from the real “project”
• Can easily settle down for some solution, sometimes the first one, which addresses the concern enough
• Full consideration of the consequences of design decisions, and the benefits that arise from exploring a design space more thoroughly are not by default present.
• Not straightforward to document for sharing and learning, for collaboration (explicitly)
Design space (fairly common term used – by different disciplines-rarely defined)
– the space of possibilities for realizing a design, which extends beyond the concept design stage into the design-in-use activities of people
• 1) a design space is always actively co-constructed and explored by multiple actors through their social interactions with and through technologies and
• 2) the participating actors, resources, conditions and supporting strategies frame the design space available
Design Space, some examples
In design-in-use
• Effectiveness/ quality / success of designs is highly dependant on the “design space” that a collective sees (imagine and/or available)
• Design interventions affect the design space (expand or contract it)
• Recognize mundane everyday designs and the opportunities for
collaboration that they entail
• Weaving together of project at design time and projects at use
time
KNOTWORKING
• In-between infras (rehearse collective and cumulative “rapid
prototyping”) this has implications for the capabilities of the actors
involved to initiate innovations and understand the broader design spaces that are available to them
• Negotiation, scaffolding and seeding strategies
Some implications for design (professionla9
• Better ways to make the “design space” more visible/accessible to
all involved
• Identifying (and increasing) design capabilities; not only identifying
needs (REF: SEN)
• If there are new roles perhaps midwifing could be good new
benchmark ;-)