Existing Prototyping Perspectives: Considerations For Service Design,
2011
Design Research Society
Existing Prototyping Perspectives: Considerations For Service Design, Johan Blomkvist, Stefan Holmlid
Nordes Conference Series
With new design disciplines that challenge the borders of design practice and inquiry comes new possibilities for prototyping techniques and approaches. The basis for such an evolution is a firm understanding of the existing knowledge generated in design and the challenges posed by new design disciplines, such as service design. This study identifies a framework of perspectives for prototyping to reveal what the existing toolbox of prototyping contains based on a literature overview. Going through published literature from the early 1980s and onward, the framework is constructed using the following perspectives; purpose, fidelity, audience, position in the process, technique, and …
The Disruptive Aesthetics Of Design Activism: Enacting Design Between Art And Politics,
2011
Design Research Society
The Disruptive Aesthetics Of Design Activism: Enacting Design Between Art And Politics, Thomas Markussen
Nordes Conference Series
The aim of this article is above all to construct a new conceptual framework for understanding how and why design activism in public space matters. The article sets off by providing a literature review of some of the existing theoretical frameworks in design research for understanding design activism. In so doing, I will identify a theoretical ‘blind spot’ in the research literature, which has blocked our view of how design activism functions as an aesthetic practice and not only a socio-political one. To remedy this shortcoming, I then introduce some notions from Rancière (2004; 2010) that enable design research to …
Experiencing, Exploring And Experimenting In And With Co-Design Spaces,
2011
Design Research Society
Experiencing, Exploring And Experimenting In And With Co-Design Spaces, Elizabeth Sanders, Bo Westerlund
Nordes Conference Series
The concept of design space has been useful to designers in supporting the act of designing and for reflecting on the activity of designing. With the increase in cooperative design practices, it is time to consider the concept of co-design space. Co-design spaces differ from design spaces in that they tend to be situated in the early front end of the design process (also referred to as pre-design), they rely on the collective creativity of designers working together with non-designers, they deal with very complex challenges such as behavioural change and organizational transformation, and they often point to the embodiments …
Sustainable Innovation And The Issues Of Scale,
2011
Design Research Society
Sustainable Innovation And The Issues Of Scale, Pekka Murto
Nordes Conference Series
Sustainable innovation and eco-innovation have become priorities within the area of sustainable design. Focusing not only on production, also consumption and systemic changes have been addressed in order to handle increasingly substantial issues. Consequently, the focus of sustainable innovation has shifted from products to solutions and systems. However, as design has traditionally been a product-oriented profession, adopting operational models that require greater influence throughout the value chain is not necessarily easy. This article explores the issues that the scale of sustainable innovation poses on design and suggests that the concept of environmentally sustainable innovation should be approached more deeply also …
Slow Food Slow Homes: Expanding The Role Of Architecture In The North American Housing Industry,
2011
Design Research Society
Slow Food Slow Homes: Expanding The Role Of Architecture In The North American Housing Industry, John Brown
Nordes Conference Series
The North American city is dominated by suburban sprawl, that vast formless, center-less, fragmented urban structure that the Sierra Club calls the ‘Dark Side of the American Dream.’ These places are like fast food. On the surface they appear easy, cheap, and cheerful. However, this marketing veneer masks a world of thoughtless design, careless construction, and waste that is bad for both us and the environment. In the same way that fast food disrupts the historically rich cultural context of cooking; these fast homes replace the experientially deep potential of urban dwelling with a shallow standardized product.
Matter Matters: Designing Material Encounters As Triggers Of Negotiation,
2011
Design Research Society
Matter Matters: Designing Material Encounters As Triggers Of Negotiation, Johan Liekens, Nel Janssens
Nordes Conference Series
This article ventures from a twofold interpretation of this conference’s theme: ‘Making Design Matter!’. An inseparable twin ‘Matter’ materializes. One twin, ‘Matter’ as to be of relevance, folds in a unity with the other, ‘Matter’ as in to become materialized: Matter Matters. This twin pair operates as a lens through which we explore how design operates in between relevance (ethics) and materiality. The lens focuses on the mediation between these two issues. Looking through the lens, the question arises what kind of attitude in designing we consider to be relevant and reviving for today’s people and world? And in addition, …
Recognizing Paradoxical Identities Of Design Managers,
2011
Design Research Society
Recognizing Paradoxical Identities Of Design Managers, Ulla Johansson, Jill Woodilla
Nordes Conference Series
There is a need for designers with knowledge in business as well as business people with knowledge in design. Master-level education programs for this “in between” area are growing all over the world. We argue that the knowledge and identity of being “in between” is essential but also problematic. There is a danger that, similar to relations between men and (wo)men, the business way of thinking becomes the common ground for (design) management, and the designerly characteristics become decoration, rather than another ground. In order not to suppress the one or the other, we argue for a paradoxical identity of …
Time Travel: A Method For Playful Future-Oriented User Research,
2011
Design Research Society
Time Travel: A Method For Playful Future-Oriented User Research, Theo Rooden, Paul Eg, Rianne Valkenburg
Nordes Conference Series
This article describes the development of a user research method called ‘Time Travel’. The aim of the method is to inform and inspire designers with imagined futures by consumers. The method should give answers to the following question: How do consumers imagine technological and social developments to have an impact on their personal lives (in a certain domain)? An engaging game concept was developed in a research through design process: generative activities alternated with evaluating mini-experiments. The metaphor of time traveling shaped the design vision by presenting elements such as the suitcase (anchoring the imaginations in the here and now), …
Visual Inquiry: A Tool For Presenting And Sharing Contextual Knowledge,
2011
Design Research Society
Visual Inquiry: A Tool For Presenting And Sharing Contextual Knowledge, Fredrik Sandberg
Nordes Conference Series
This article presents an inquiry method where the participants create a visual presentation of their experiential knowledge of working. As an example the article describes experiences from using the inquiry method together with small local food producers. The owners use the visual inquiry tool to present their small company's activities, the stakeholders involved, problems, strengths, changes and dreams for the future. Although the food producers never had described their knowledge as one picture before, they had no problem mapping out and visually presenting complex information about their production. The method uses sticky notes as mapping tools, which enables the participants …
Design For Co-Creation With Interactive Montage,
2011
Design Research Society
Design For Co-Creation With Interactive Montage, Birgitta Cappelen, Anders-Petter Andersson
Nordes Conference Series
Montage in cinema means to mount images and sounds from different sources, that are interpreted together and whose oppositions drive the story further. In this article we develop the montage concept further for co-creation in interactive, tactile, spatial cross-media. As case we use the design of the interactive, tangible, cross-media installation ORFI. ORFI is developed to facilitate collaboration and co-creation between children with severe disabilities and their care persons. In this article we focus on how we have designed for interactive montage. We present two main types of interactive montage, close and shifted in three dimensions (spatial, temporal and actorial). …
Reflections Of A Wireless Ruminant,
2011
Design Research Society
Reflections Of A Wireless Ruminant, Andrew Morrison
Nordes Conference Series
‘Design matters’ is interpreted in this exploratory article via a narrative pastiche that concerns recent developments in ubiquitous computing and their implications for emerging techno-material culture. The article has two research aims: 1) to connect discourses on ubicomp with ones on design fiction, and 2) to motivate design research to expand styles of playful, reflective and interpretative modes, and genres of research writing. A first person narrative perspective is located in bio-cultural contexts of design fiction future use, referring to WiFi, RFID and GPS technologies also of today. The narrative is a ‘tongue in cheek’ critique of hidden voices of …
Why Design Matters More Today Than Ever Before,
2011
Design Research Society
Why Design Matters More Today Than Ever Before, Håkan Edeholt
Nordes Conference Series
Sciences have certainly done their best to blow the whistle, warning for an escalating climate disaster. And today seemingly powerful leaders also start to talk boldly about the present need of profound and radical changes. Still, too little seems to change in the directions proposed and if it changes at all, these changes seem to be far too small, far too inconsistent and far too slow to meet the requirements specified by the scientific community. Why is this so? And what could design and design research possible do about it?
Facilitating Service Co-Production: A Dramaturgical Perspective,
2011
Design Research Society
Facilitating Service Co-Production: A Dramaturgical Perspective, Zagros Hatami
Nordes Conference Series
Unlike products, the production and consumption of service occurs simultaneously with service users acting as co-producers of service. This role is significant as the quantity, quality and experience of service is often reliant on the quality of user efforts. Thus, service designers need to consider the co-productive roles various service actors are required to play at the time of service consumption. This awareness allows designers to facilitate this role taking process by setting the stage for users as well as other service actors to successfully play their part in the production of service. As service interactions are dyadic social interactions, …
Missing Link: Designing For Dependency,
2011
Design Research Society
Missing Link: Designing For Dependency, Eva Eriksson, Peter Ljungstrand, Andreas Lykke-Olesen, David Cuartielles
Nordes Conference Series
In this article, we investigate aspects of interaction design related to the appearance and context of dual-natured design objects, meaning artefacts with physical form and digital behaviour. In interaction design of today there is a focus on isolated artefacts/objects, but does not involve the context in the sense that it is a vital part of its design and expression. We argue for interaction designers to take respect to the dependency of computational design objects to their context in greater extent. We would like to ask interaction designers to look at their work as part of a whole, where their creations …
Integrating Sustainability With A Regional Design Sector,
2011
Design Research Society
Integrating Sustainability With A Regional Design Sector, Simon O'Rafferty
Nordes Conference Series
Recent developments in European design policy are strengthening the links between design and sustainable development. Therefore, it increasingly important to understand evolving perspectives on sustainability and develop new approaches to building competencies amongst designers so they are in a position to respond and remain relevant. The potential mix of competencies is diverse and is challenging traditional perspectives on the role of the designer. This article discusses interventions to build sustainable competencies in the design sector. It does this by presenting some insights from the early stages of developing a knowledge exchange programme in a region that has no existing programmes …
Some Notes On Programme-Experiment Dialectics,
2011
Design Research Society
Some Notes On Programme-Experiment Dialectics, Johan Redström
Nordes Conference Series
Searching for ways of conducting practice-based design research, we have explored an approach based on the formulation of design programmes as a foundation and framework for carrying out design experiments. Over the years, we have presented a number of such programmes along with experiments that explore and express their potential. There are, however, some methodological issues in this way of working that are rarely addressed. One such set of issues pertains to what we might refer to as a programme–experiment dialectics, that is, how the research process unfolds over time as programme and experiments influence, challenge and transform each other. …
Designing For Utilization: Putting Design Principles Into Practice,
2011
Design Research Society
Designing For Utilization: Putting Design Principles Into Practice, Paula Kassenaar, Katharina Bredies, Elise Van Den Hoven
Nordes Conference Series
Designers do not only create usable products for a predefined purpose, but also to explore new materials and technologies. In doing so, they should not restrict themselves to existing conventions, but develop new ones out of the medium at hand. These new interface forms should encourage users to appropriate an object for their own purposes – i.e. utilize it. In this article, we will describe the development of a fabric interface prototype that should exploit the material properties and encourage utilization of the artefact. First we present how our theoretical perspective was translated into a concrete design. Starting from rather …
Design At The Front,
2011
Design Research Society
Design At The Front, Otto Von Busch
Nordes Conference Series
Over the last year, fierce discussion have raged about the trend of socially engaged design, where such projects have been scolded as new forms of “design imperialism” (cf. Nussbaum 2010; Pilloton 2010; Sinclair 2010). Resonating with this discussion, the latest US Army Field Manual has included “design” as a central feature in the core battle doctrine. Are we seeing the birth of a “social design doctrine” employed to wage war? It is tempting to draw parallels between design and the developments of military thinking to reflect some of the issues at stake as design turns to address social, cultural and …
Research And Design Practice: An Exploratory Update Of Donald Schön,
2011
Design Research Society
Research And Design Practice: An Exploratory Update Of Donald Schön, Peter Ullmark
Nordes Conference Series
The Reflective Practitioner and Educating the Reflective Practitioner, the two most influential books by Donald Schön from 1983 and 1987, have so far been regarded as a self-evident platform for design research. The ideas put forward have been much discussed but not basically questioned. However, during the last years the conditions for design practice has changed fundamentally. To find out if the understanding of Schön can be developed to match the new situation or if other approaches are necessary, a new critical discussion is necessary. This article is a first and explorative attempt to identify important issues for such an …
The Absorption Of Design Management Capabilities In Smes With Little Or No Prior Design Experience,
2011
Design Research Society
The Absorption Of Design Management Capabilities In Smes With Little Or No Prior Design Experience, Claudia Acklin
Nordes Conference Series
In the past, design support programmes for companies with little or no design experience have focused on match-making between designers and SMEs. In addition, it has been recognised that design support should be about the business and leadership role of design and about promoting design tools as well as design management methods. However, a sustainable introduction of new design knowledge involves a process of organisational learning on the side of the SME. How exactly companies absorb new design knowledge has been underinvestigated. There is also a lack of a tool to analyse or guide such a learning process. Based on …
