Pre-invitation flyer

I finally finished the pre-invitation for our symposium today. Hopefully, it will be printed by tomorrow and I can start stuffing envelopes. After many delays and problems with graphic designers... in the end it's done and I even learned some photoshop tricks (rays of light) in making it. The globe and sun are not mine...Here it is:

The role of designers?

Awhile ago I joined a student initiated project, the Post Socialist Russia Project as a sort of webmaster and content developer. Alas, I am no longer involved in that project, but I am still interested in the themes we were developing and in the larger context of that project.

We were trying to investigate how designers could approach problems of social orgainzation from a grassroots level, and to address the problem of how people should live together. In an inspiring talk by Leslie Kavanaugh, she pushed us to not shy away from being “political” as designers, pointing out the whole spectrum between the two extremes of Hypercapitalism and Communism...

I am definitely not a moralist, and so I am automatically cautious and skeptical when confronted by causes and ideologies, especially empty ones. At the same time, as a pragmatist, I am deeply convinced that there is something wrong with business as usual, and with the way design is carried out. I am at once intrigued and repelled by words like "sustainability" and "user-centered." How much are lies and empty promises chipping away from the credibility of real issues? These words are extremely loaded and empty at the same time.

On this topic, I found a nice paragraph in an article expressing exactly what I mean about the problem of how "sustainability" is used in architecture:

There is a great deal of discussion in design, architecture, and construction circles on creating sustainable environments, and there are also widely varying opinions as to exactly how sustainability can be introduced and approached. Current debates indicate that the term encompasses more than the physical and economic aspects. It includes social, cultural, and behavioral dimensions. Observing contemporary architectural practices, however, reveals that there are two major missing dimensions. On the one hand, there is an emphasis on the physical aspects of sustainability, while socio-cultural and socio-behavioral dimensions are oversimplified. On the other hand, there is a heavy reliance on top-down policies and strategies with the aim of developing guidelines to be implemented for the betterment of environments. Strikingly, this takes place at the expense of other bottom-up strategies that aim at sensitizing users toward understanding the key issues underlying sustainability. These two missing dimensions socio-behavioural dimensions, and bottom-up strategies offer a rationale for the professional community everywhere in the world to use sustainability as a term in their daily discourse. Nevertheless, even while talking about it, they do not yet use sustainability or utilize it in their daily practices. This article presents a critical voice on the current developments and efforts in dealing with sustainability of built environments, by adopting an alternative comprehensive approach that places high value on "trans-disciplinarity"...

Even after months of research on this topic, I still do not know where I stand. The more I read, the larger the problems loom. Slowly I am becoming convinced that Leslie is correct. Designers should consider their personal stance within the greater society and the world; the how and to what extent is up to the individual. Introspection of fundamental philosophical questions are sorely lacking in our speed and technology obsessed culture.

Contextmapping Symposium

A contextmapping symposium was held yesterday in celebration of 5 years of contextmapping and the graduation of the first PhD ever in the field. The program lineup consisted of two talks by Liz Sanders (Make Tools) and by Jacob Burr (U. Southern Denmark) and ten Pecha Kucha style talks by recent graduates deploying contextmapping techniques in practice.

For the first time in my experience, the van Grintenzaal was totally packed. The whole ground floor of IDE was crammed full of curious and enthusiastic people. I found the symposium extremely inspiring and filled with positive energy. The most interesting part to me, however, came when former students of the faculty came up to express in four minutes their experiences with contextmapping; first as students and now as young professionals. It was inspiring to see the broad context in which contextmapping is now being applied. These fields range from business consultancy to social design to young startups to IT marketing.

Below is a short summary of "the highlights" of the lectures (in my opinion). The lectures should become available online at some point on collegarama.

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To begin the symposium, Prof. Pieter Jan Stappers gave a short introduction to contextmapping. For those unfamiliar with contextmapping, it is based on the credo: "users are the experts of their own experience." From this viewpoint, it is then up to designers to bring out the tacit knowledge and latent needs of users through a variety of mapping techniques involving users. With these techniques, the roles of users, designers, and researchers become mixed up, increasing the complexity of life, but in a positive way...

Next up was Liz Sanders speaking about exploring co-creation on a large scale and about her experiences with contextmapping at NBBJ, a large U.S. architecture firm. She didn't really say too much that I hadn't already heard before, but I was glad to hear that she is working on bringing a human centered approach to architecture and planning, two fields of design that are almost totally disconnected with people. She argued that it doesn't make sense that so much revenue goes into market research for products, such as shavers, that serve one person at a time, and not for buildings like hospitals that serve thousands of people at a time.

Liz then showed a two axis graph with "product" vs. experience on one axis and visualization for selling/telling/shifting vs. visualizing for making on the other. She explained that architectural tools fall mostly in the "product" and visualization for making (i.e. elevations, plans) quadrant. Shifting from "product" to experience and to visualization in the language for end users, is the domain of more user-centered design tools. A few examples of these are: experimental animatics, experience models, visioning workshops, experience timelines, and 2D and 3D participatory modeling. Unlike selling/telling/sharing tools of architects (renderings, fly throughs, 3-D models), the user-centered tools are not exclusively for use after the end of the design phase...

- Visioning workshops - collectively imagining future experiences, i.e. run two
sessions, one with designers and one with clients to get an overview of the
perspectives different parties.
- Experience timelines - imagine unfolding the experience through the lens of several years.
- 2D or 3D participatory modeling - i.e. Velcro modeling for the ideal patient room or a physical walkthrough of a scenario of live use.
- Personas & scenarios - puppets

She mentioned that during workshops, it is beneficial to give people a choice to either make stuff or tell a story. This choice lets people express themselves more confidently. Design is shifting from "designing for" to "designing with." She argues that through participatory design, clients and participants come to feel ownership over the results thus rendering "selling" unnecessary.

The second speaker was Prof. Jacob Buur on Ethnographic Provocation, whom I didn't find very provocative at all. However, he did make a brief distinction between lead user, design anthropology, and participatory design approaches. Within the framework of ethnographic provocation, he discussed two case studies and the (pretty obvious) benefits of ethnography. But anyways, here are some inspirational bullet points I copied from his slides:

- ethnography as shared material
- ethnography as embodied prototypes
- ethnography framing user engagement

anthropology for design/anthropology of design