week 6. research through design

Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI

1.  p. 493

"Following a research through design approach, designers

produce novel integrations of HCI research in an attempt to

make the right thing: a product that transforms the world

from its current state to a preferred state."

2. 

 Christopher Frayling: research through design, 1993

3. What in RtD?

"What is unique to this approach to

interaction design research is that it stresses design artifacts

as outcomes that can transform the world from its current

state to a preferred state"

4. Why RtD?

"The artifacts produced in this type

of research become design exemplars, providing an

appropriate conduit for research findings to easily transfer

to the HCI research and practice communities."

5. How does RtD contribute?

"While we in no way intend for this to be the only type of research

contribution interaction designers can make, we view it as

an important contribution in that it allows designers to

employ their strongest skills in making a research

contribution and in that it fits well within the current

collaborative and interdisciplinary structure of HCI

research."

6. p. 495

"In adding to the research discussion of design methods,

Donald Schön introduced the idea of design as a reflective

practice where designers reflect back on the actions taken in

order to improve design methodology [22]. While this may

seem counter to the science of design, where the practice of

design is the focus of a scientific inquiry, several design

researchers have argued that reflective practice and a

science of design can co-exist in harmony"

7.
"...Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber proposed the concept of a
“Wicked Problem,” a problem that because of the
conflicting perspectives of the stakeholders cannot be
accurately modeled and cannot be addressed using the

reductionist approaches of science and engineering [21].
They argued that many problems can never be accurately
modeled, thus an engineering approach to addressing them
would fail."

8.

"Christopher Alexander’s work on Pattern Languages....

His work asks design researchers to
examine the context, system of forces, and solutions used to
address repeated design problems in order to extract a set
underlying “design patterns”, thereby producing a “pattern
language”...

The method
turns the work of many designers addressing the same
interaction problems into a discourse for the community,
allowing interaction designers to more clearly observe the
formation of conventions as the technology matures and is
reinterpreted by users."

9. p. 496

"Critical design presents a model of interaction/product
design making as a model of research [9]. Unlike design
practice, where the making focuses on making a
commercially successful product, design researchers
engaged in critical design create artifacts intended to be
carefully crafted questions. These artifacts stimulate
discourse around a topic by challenging the status quo and
by placing the design researcher in the role of a critic. The
Drift Table offers a well known example of critical design
in HCI, where the design of an interactive table that has no
intended task for users to perform raises the issue of the
community’s possibly too narrow focus on successful
completion of tasks as a core metric of evaluation and
product success"


http://designapproaches.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/bill-gaver/

10.
"Harold Nelson and
Erik Stolterman frame interaction design—and more
generally the practice of design—as a broad culture of
inquiry and action. They claim that rather than focusing on
problem solving to avoid undesirable states, designers work
to frame problems in terms of intentional actions that lead
to a desirable and appropriate state of reality."


11. p. 497

"It follows from Christopher Frayling’s
concept of conducting research through design where
design researchers focus on making the right thing; artifacts
intended to transform the world from the current state to a
preferred state."

12.
"Through an active process of ideating, iterating, and
critiquing potential solutions, design researchers continually
reframe the problem as they attempt to make the right
thing. The final output of this activity is a concrete problem
framing and articulation of the preferred state, and a series
of artifacts—models, prototypes, products, and
documentation of the design process."

reference: "epistemic artifacts"

13. p. 498

"Design artifacts are the currency of
design communication. In education they are the content
that teachers use to help design students understand what
design is and how the activity can be done."

14.
"These research artifacts provide
the catalyst and subject matter for discourse in the
community, with each new artifact continuing the
conversation."

15. p. 499

"We differentiate research artifacts from design practice
artifacts in two important ways. First, the intent going into
the research is to produce knowledge for the research and
practice communities, not to make a commercially viable
product. To this end, we expect research projects that take
this research through design approach will ignore or deemphasize perspectives in framing the problem, such as the
detailed economics associated with manufacturability and
distribution, the integration of the product into a product
line, the effect of the product on a company’s identity, etc.
In this way design researchers focus on making the right
things, while design practitioners focus on making
commercially successful things."

16.

 "research contributions should be artifacts that

demonstrate significant invention."

17.

CRITERIA FOR EVALUATING INTERACTION DESIGN

RESEARCH WITHIN HCI

(1) Process

• In documenting their contributions, interaction design researchers must provide    enough detail that the process they employed can be reproduced.
• they must provide a rationale for their selection of the specific methods they employed.

(2) Invention

• Interaction design researchers must demonstrate that they have produced a novel integration of various subject matters to address a specific situation.
• In addition, in articulating the integration as invention, interaction designers must detail how advances in technology could result in a significant advancement. 
• It is in the articulation of the invention that the detail about the technical opportunities is communicated to the engineers in the HCI research community, providing them with guidance on what to build.

(3) Relevance

• This constitutes a shift from what is true (the focus of behavioral scientists) to what is real (the focus of anthropologists).
• However, in addition to framing the work within the real world, interaction design  researchers must also articulate the preferred state their design attempts to achieve and provide support for why the community should consider this state to be preferred.

(4) Extensibility

• Extensibility means that the design research has been described and documented in a way that the community can leverage the knowledge derived from the work.

EX 5. Short essay (400 words)

法國短篇小說販賣機

http://www.ettoday.net/dalemon/post/13022
http://short-edition.com/p/distributeurs-d-histoires-courtes

1. critically review this artifact

2. discourse on the above project with  4 criteria of research-through-design approach.

(You may need to critically introduce this artifact and then discourse on four criteria in evaluation)

Deadline: 2016/4/12

week 5. critical dialogue

Critical dialogue: interaction, experience and cultural theory

1. 

"This workshop will explore the 

ways in which HCI can benefit from a constructive 

dialogue between critical theory and experience in 

questions of design and evaluation."

2. 

"

HCI has broadened from usability to experience and 

from productivity to fun, affect, aesthetics, and ethics. 

Experience, culture, enjoyment, design, and other 

related terms are now much used but under-theorized 

concepts in HCI. Yet they are all associated with rich 

histories of scholarship in other domains, and they 

include their own epistemologies, approaches, and 

outputs. Leveraging these terms in HCI will require 

thoughtful engagement with these traditions, and in 

particular, critical theory"

3. 

critical theory...

"These include: semiotics (the study of

signs and symbols), hermeneutics (the study of 

interpretation and meaning), structuralism (the study 

of underlying structures of cultural artefacts), post 

structuralism (the denial of the existence of such 

structures), deconstruction (well this is getting

complicated now), psychoanalysis (yes and perhaps 

each of these deserves a paragraph on their own), 

feminism, Marxism, and postmodernism. "

4. "Since post-structuralist semiotics critiqued the notion
that there was a direct correspondence between a
cultural artifact and any single interpretation of it, ideas
based in critical traditions such as reader-response
theory have supplemented traditional semiotic readings
of how interaction takes place. These approaches argue
that meaning is emergent, constructed through a
“performance” of the text in a particular context.
Clearly this kind of theory is more difficult to implement
as a set of design guidelines and perhaps for this
reason hermeneutics has received less attention in HCI
(however, see for instance [12]). "

5.
  "When Winograd and Flores followed Heidegger in
rejecting the view that things are the bearer of
properties independent of interpretation [18],
phenomenology’s emphasis on both phenomena and
the consciousness experiencing them began to be
influential in HCI, e.g. [8][10]. When attention turned
from usability to user experience, connections to critical
theory became more frequent and complex. McCarthy 
and Wright’s [14] book Technology as Experience drew
extensively on the Russian literary critic and
philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin and his problematic
relationship with formal theory and preference for a
decentred dialogue grounded in the particularities and
uncertainties of lived experience."

critical practice

agenda:  例如媒體四大律、揭露與排除四個 stumbling blocks (1. Blinders of assumption 2. Fallacy of intuition 3. The “U.S.” problem 4. The rush to give advice)

Teaching critical dialogue

"By definition, critical dialogue is the ongoing “collective inquiry into the processes, assumptions, and certainties that comprise everyday life,” (Schein, 1993)."

注意避免 "Flaws in Thinking"

EX 4.

兩兩同學一組, 可以用中文,  為以下互動設計作品產生 批判對話.
互相輪流發言, 並針對方前一次的發言進行批判對話.
對話紀錄至少 400 字 (中英文皆可)

deadline: 2016/4/6

week 4. slow technology

Slow Technology - Designing for Reflection, Hallnas & Redstrom

p. 201

1. As computers are increasingly woven into the fabric of everyday life, interaction design may have to change – from creating only
fast and efficient tools to be used during a limited time in specific situations, to creating technology that surrounds us and therefore is a part
of our activities for long periods of time. We present slow technology: a design agenda for technology aimed at reflection and moments of
mental rest rather than efficiency in performance. The aim of this paper is to develop a design philosophy for slow technology, to discuss
general design principles and to revisit some basic issues in interaction design from a more philosophical point of view. We discuss
examples of soniture and informative art as instances of slow technology and as examples of how the design principles can be applied in
practice.


2. When computers become increasingly ubiquitous, some of them will turn from being tools explicitly used in specific situations to being more or less continuously present as a part of a designed environment. One of the aspects of this transition is that the time perspective changes from simply encompassing the moment of explicit use to the longer periods of time associated with dwelling.

p. 202

3. Calm technology and ambient displays are designed to reside in the periphery of our
attention, continuously providing us with contextual information without demanding a conscious effort on our behalf. However, we believe that we do not only need to create calm technology, we also need actively to promote moments of reflection and mental rest in a more and more rapidly changing .

p. 203

4. The difference in aesthetics between the two doorbells is a difference in philosophy of design; the ‘‘slow’’ doorbell is not designed to be ‘‘just’’ an efficient signalling mechanism for nonreflective use, but rather an artefact that through its expression and slow appearance puts reflective ‘‘use’’ in focus.

5. ...– gourmet cuisine (美食烹飪) is slow food, in terms of both preparation and eating, which invites us to reflect on the art of cooking as well as the art of eating.

6. Accepting an invitation for reflection inherent in the design means on the other
hand that time will appear, i.e. we open up for time presence.

7. Slow technology can be technology where the aesthetics of functionality, i.e. the expression of functionality as such rather than its objectives, are in focus. It is design concerned with how we relate to the expression of technology itself as we use it to do certain things.

p. 204

8. However, slow technology differs in that it is not supposed to reduce cognitive load or make digital information and computational resources more readily available. Slow technology is not about making technology invisible, but about exposing technology in a way that encourages people to reflect and think about it.
...
...technology is not just solutions
to specific technical problems, but also provides
things with specific expressions situated in our
living environments.

9. ... we have distinguished three such aspects – reflective technology, time technology and amplified environments – each making up a specific design theme
in the programme.

10. This theme concerns the design of technology
that both invites reflection and at the same time
is reflective in its expression. The basic challenge
is to design technology that in its elementary
expression opens up for reflection and asks
questions about its being as a piece of technology.

11. Here, the call for slow technology is to use
slow design expression as an instrument to make
room for and invite reflection; to use a slow
presence of elementary technology as a tool for
making reflection inherent in design expression.

12. This theme concerns the design of technology
that through its expression amplifies the presence
– not the absence – of time.

p. 205

13. If you
master the art of playing the violin, a good violin
is a piece of technology that through its
expression in use, for example in playing a
partita by Bach, certainly amplifies the presence
of time. In these themes, the call for slow
technology is to design technology that in true
use reveals a slow expression of present time.

14. The call for slow technology is
to use slow design expression to amplify given
environments in time.

p. 208

15. At first, the
appearance of the ChatterBox will seem as a
rather ordinary random text-generator but, over
time, one will be able to recognise parts of
sentences, words and sentence structures. Over
time, one will slowly form an understanding of
the underlying material and finally even an
understanding of the rules according to which
the sentences are generated.

p. 209

16. A basic principle of slow technology is to amplify the presence of things to make them into something more than just a silent tool for fast access to something else.

17. It is the expression of the Matisse painting itself – or probably a reproduction – hanging on the wall that is important. The function of a thing designed to invite and make room for reflection is inherent in the precise meaning of reflecting that is given by the total expression of the given thing; function is inherent in design expression.

18. One of the implications of designing for ‘‘presence’’ instead of ‘‘use’’ is that evaluations will have to change as well.

19. In the case of ‘‘tools’’ it can be
argued that the basic of a tool is understanding
how it is used – a tool is always something that is
used for something.
...

One cannot explain what a
symphony by Beethoven is, as a piece of art, by
empirical studies of a collection of concert
visitors.

p. 210

20. One of the basic ideas behind the examples of slow technology is to use simplicity in material in combination with complexity of form.

21. Simplicity in material invites people to reflect when there is an obvious complexity in form.

22.

we propose two basic guidelines for slow technology:
. focus on slowness of appearance (materialisation, manifestation) and presence – the slow materialisation and design presence of form (F)

. focus on aesthetics of material and use simple basic tools of modern technology – the clear and simple design presence of matetial (M).

23. The design should give time for reflection
through its slow form-presence and invite us to
reflect through its clear, distinct and simple
material-expression. It is a combination of
simplicity in material with a subtle complexity
in form focusing on time as a basic element of
composition. Technology should bring forth the
material, not hide it.

24. This is interaction design in the
sense that we design structures within which we
express presence and build our ‘‘work-worlds’’
and ‘‘life-worlds’’ through interaction with the
environment.

p. 211

25. We believe that the transition from, or rather
complement to, the perspective on technology as
‘‘tool’’ to a perspective on information technology as being a part of a complex designed and
inhabited environment will be important to
future design methodologies [38].

26. One such possibility is a
technology, such as slow technology, that is
not ‘‘used’’ at all but nevertheless is a part of the
environment, adding to its ambience and
supporting various activities taking place in it.


EX3.

1. Make a critique on "Photobox  (Photobox: on the design of a slow technology) (http://markmakedo.co.uk/portfolio/photobox/) according to "slow technology" philosophy

2. If a design team decides to create an artifact like "little printer" (by Burgcloud) to print photos as follows:

make a critical reflection on this artifact in contrast to Photobox as well as other image practices using  frameworks similar to "Slow Technology: Critical Reflection and Future Directions" (p. 817)

(1+2 = totally 250-300 words)

Deadline: 2016/3/30

week 3. difficult forms

DIFFICULT FORMS:  
CRITICAL PRACTICES OF DESIGN AND RESEARCH by Ramia Mazé and Johan Redström, IASDR 2007

p1.

1. Rather than prescribing a practice on the basis of theoretical considerations, these critical practices seem to build an intellectual basis for design on the basis of its own modes of operation, a kind of theoretical development that happens through, and from within, design practice and not by means of external descriptions or analyses of its practices and products.

p 2.

2. This prompts John Thackara to argue, “Because product design is thoroughly integrated in capitalist production, it is bereft of an independent critical tradition on which to base an alternative” (Thackara, 1988: 21).

3. As Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby argue, “At its worst, product design simply reinforces global capitalist values. It helps to create and maintain desire for new
products, ensures obsolescence, encourages dissatisfaction with what we have and merely translates brand values into objects. Design… needs to establish an intellectual stance of its own, or the design profession is destined to loose all intellectual credibility and be viewed simply as an agent of capitalism” (Dunne and Raby,
2001: 59)

p. 3

4. This involved rethinking how to relate both to ‘operative criticism’, posed from inevitably biased positions within practice, and to ‘critical theories’, introduced from without (Hays, 1999).

5. By the 1990s, positions with respect to ‘critical architecture’ had polarized into two camps – one concerned with culture and the other preoccupied by form (Hays, 1984).

p. 4

6...post-critical proponents explore notions such as performativity, procedures, and
pragmatics (Allen, 2000; Baird, 2004/5). In such perspectives, theory and criticality are repositioned in relation to a constructive and projective attitude, capable both of ideological and operational engagement.


7. Practice is explicitly put forward as an approach to – through materials, form, 
and construction – framing questions and alternatives to the status quo with clients and the public.

8. The critique posed by anti-design is not of design or planning as such, but of design in instilling and enforcing ideology. That is to say, design ‘in service’ to any imposed ideology, whether political, technological, or cultural, determined in advance and from outside. ...


While engaging theoretically and politically, the activity of designing and
design objects in themselves were seen to offer possibilities for ‘active critical participation’ in larger ideological systems (Lang and Menking, 2003). The ‘products’ of anti-design were not, however, intended as finished or closed forms. While object-oriented, form was often applied provisionally, to open up for ideas, debate, and appropriation – as alternative forms not only of product but ideological consumption.

p. 5

9. Conceptual design draws on art to orient a subversion of design norms. With respect to conceptual art, focus is shifted from the producer and the thing to the concept, and making as setting up such a concept through material objects, scripted or improvised interventions, installations or other means.

Epitomizing such an approach since the 1990s, Droog design countered both Pop and analytic design, tendencies pervading the European design scene at the time.

10.


A more specific version of conceptual design is critical design, most associated in product and interaction design with Dunne & Raby.

They posit the designer as a critically and materially engaged practitioner – a sort of ‘applied conceptual artist’.

In addition to art, they state: “Critical design is related to haute couture, concept cars, design propaganda, and visions of the future, but its purpose is not to present the dreams of industry, attract new business, anticipate new trends or test the market.

Its purpose is to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the aesthetic quality of our electronically mediated existence”
(Dunne and Raby, 2001: 58).

Early works challenged mainstream design tenents (Dunne, 1998). Dunne’s post-optimal’ object, for example, critiques product semantics and the human factors preoccupation with the ergonomic and psychological ‘fit’.

Instead, strategies of defamiliarization and estrangement from modernist aesthetics, are applied as ‘user-unfriendliness’ and ‘para-functionality’ to discourage unthinking ideological assimilation and promote skepticism by increasing the poetic distance between people products.

p. 7

11. Not only for improving design as ‘problem-solving’, but in creating a
space for designers to reflect upon the ideas, theories, logics, and implications of design in and through practice. That is to say, the intervention of an intellectual basis for ‘problem-finding’.

12. Conceptual and critical design might be said to represent a shift in attention away from the spatial object in and of itself to the ideas behind form and emergent in formation.

Explicitly dealing with the materialization of concepts, such concepts become not only
external or retrospective descriptions of design objects, but an integral part of the design objects as such.

In this way, the concepts and theories embodied in an artifact might be differentiated from tacit or propositional knowledge (see, for example, Frayling, 1993/4).


This opens up for a design practice that is not only an operational, but also an intellectual basis, for design research.

p. 8

13. Indeed, certain conceptual frameworks within critical practice such as ‘object as discourse’ and ‘design as research’ provide an essential basis for thinking about how to combine intellectual and operational modalities for contesting and further developing design from within.

p. 9

14. n critical practice, the designed object might be understood as a sort of materialized form of discourse. In Dunne's case, “the electronic objects produced in the studio section of his doctorate are still 'design,' but in the sense of a 'material thesis' in which the object itself becomes a physical critique... research is interpreted as 'conceptual modeling' involving a critique of existing approaches to production/consumption communicated through highly considered artifacts” (Seago and Dunne, 1999: 16-17).

15. In questioning design as merely ‘in service’ to ideas and problems posed in advance and outside of design, design itself is understood to be inherently ideological.


16. Difficult forms might force a hermeneutic reading of the formal operations of its (de)construction – the architect quite literally situated as author, the inhabitant as reader. ...


As any range of postmodern and post-critical revisions suggest, architecture is not writing, nor are spatial practices discursive (Allen, 2000; Hatton, 2004).

p. 10

17. Schön describes a complex interplay of generative and propositional modalities in ongoing and situated practice, proposing that “When someone reflects-in-action, he becomes a researcher in the practice context”(Schön, 1983: 68).

Rather than objective knowledge or abstract theory, conceived of as above or in advance of practice, such perspectives give primacy to subjective interpretation and practical experience.


18. . Jane Rendell considers ‘reflection in action’ in architectural research,...

She argues for design and research that do not just solve or analyze problems but may critically rethink the parameters of a problem, theory or institution.

Indeed, making in itself – particularly making experimental forms and conceptual artifacts – acts as a critique of the paradigms of knowledge held in the architectural profession and building industry.

p. 11

19. In such terms, neither design nor research may be about solving problems or reducing uncertainty, but opening up complexity and criticality.

20. As architect Stan Allen argues, “There is no theory, there is no practice. There are only practices, which consist in action and agencies. Practices unfold in time, and their repetitions are never identical” .


p. 12

21. A focus on temporal form and use as participation – central to interaction design (Redström 2001, Mazé and Redström, 2005; Mazé forthcoming 2007) – opens up new questions, such as how a critical design relates to reflective use, and, vice versa, how might ‘active critical participation’ somehow determine design.

We must ask how thinking and making in interaction design – as ‘problem-finding’ rather than ‘problem-solving’ – might enquire into ongoing relations between critical design and critical use.

p. 13.

22. Elsewhere, we discussed the use of design research programs as “provisional knowledge regimes” (Binder and Redström, 2006), as a structuring of experimentation, and its theoretical orientations, in ways that are not absolute.

23. As the program unfolds through collaborative and multi-disciplinary work over time, the meaning – or consequences – of this proposed view on the world evolve and materialize through design experiments.

24. n this way, the notion of the program might address the need for foundations that can be built upon or criticized, affirmed, or opposed in a critical design practice in a way that is still open for, and sensitive to, heterogeneity(異質性） and multiplicity.


EX2.

1. Survey STATIC! & Slow Technology
2. Select a project from these two programs, write a short critique (200 words) based on "difficult forms" framework.

Deadline: March 23, 2016

week 2. the object as discourse

discussing participatory paradigm (week 1.)
action research vs. co-operative inquiry

p1.

1. In short, as a result of what might be termed 'methodological intimidation' (方法論上的恐嚇), research work carried out in colleges of art and design stands a very real risk of losing those qualities of originality, iconoclasm (破除偶像), energy, style and wit which have characterised the best of art school culture since the 1950s.

p. 3

2. Rejecting the electronic product designer's traditional role as semiotician, he attempts to map a new conceptual territory on which to explore the electronic as 'post-optimal object', turning his attention away the familiar attempt to achieve 'optimum performance levels' and towards more fundamental philosophical issues.

3...., Dunne's research focuses on the relationship between electronic objects and the realms of poetry and aesthetics.

4. Design is seen as a form of socio-aesthetic research towards the integration of aesthetic experience and everyday life through the development of conceptual products rather than working prototypes of models which attempt to simulate a final product designed for mass production.

5. As a PhD by project, Dunne's work uses research through the design process to explore the development of an approach that allows the development of critical responses and a sceptical sensibility towards the ideological nature of design with the purpose of stimulating original aesthetic possibilities for new kinds of electronic object.

7. The ultimate aim of the research project is the development of electronic products which by'making strange' (陌異化) or 'poeticising the distance' (詩意化距離) between ourselves and our artefactual environment, facilitate sociological awareness, reflective and critical involvement with the electronic object rather than its passive consumption and unthinking acceptance.

8. Rather than aiming for transparency, as would a conventional applied researcher/product designer, his (Dunne's) attempt to enhance the critical distance between the electronic object and the human subject through the introduction of 'poetic' techniques of aesthetic 'estrangement' is reminiscent of the writing of Frankfurt School theorists such as Walter Benjamin or the methods of avant-garde theorist/performers such as John Cage,...

p. 4

9.... his idea of using the process of invention as a mode of discourse (以發明過程為論述), a poetic invention (詩意的發明) that, by stretching established conventions, whether physical, social or political, rather than simply affirming them, takes on a radical critical function, a material critical theory of what Dunne terms a 'parafunctionality.'

10. To this extent Dunne's work offers a positive and radical model of the action researcher in design as a critical interpreter of design processes and their relationship to culture and society rather than a skilled applied technician preoccupied by the minutiae (細節) of industrial production or a slick butintellectually shallow semiotician.

11. In Dunne's case the electronic object produced as the studio section of the doctorate is still 'design' but in the sense of a 'material thesis' (實體論文) in which the object itself becomes aphysical critique (實體批判).



EX1:
  Select 1 work by Dunne & Rabby,
  Write a short essay (200 words) on this work according to the above concerns.

  Deadline: March 16, 2016