While I have to admit I am still making my way through each of the chapters, as far as I can tell to date they  have spent who knows how many hours with who knows how many fantastic volunteers putting together one of the most coherent, extensive and succinct resources on HCI (or Interaction Design) ever available. One of the things I appreciate most about it is that the range of chapters demonstrates the depth of the field and its many different aspects.

But most important is that each chapter is well written, uses accessible language and both text and video to convey key concepts, and is extensively referenced, by someone with serious academic and/or industry credentials. The creators have then ensured a well rounded representation and diverse perspectives on each topic by inviting other experts from both industry and academia as well as greater IXD community to comment and feedback on the chapters. This had led to some lively debate in the comments, and the capturing of further significant references.

Every time I visit the site I am impressed at what they have created. This resource goes a long way to representing the breadth of knowledge and research that exists on IXD & HCI, and connects popular topics with their academic roots, some which extend back more than 40 years. Most importantly it is of high quality and in an accessible format that is available, open and free to anyone with an internet connection. An inspirational example of knowledge sharing. Massive thanks and kudos to the team and all those involved.

References
Anderson, R., & Kolko, J. (2009). ‘On the relevance of theory to practitioners…’. interactions, 16(2), pp. 80-80.

Davis, M. (2008). ‘Why Do We Need Doctoral Study in Design?’. International Journal of Design, 2(3), pp. 71-79.

Hobbs, J., Fenn, T., & Resmini, A. (2010). ‘Maturing a Practice ‘. Journal of Information Architecture, 2(1), pp. 37-54.

Sevaldson, B. (2010). ‘Discussions & Movements in Design Research’. FORMakademisk, 3(1), pp. 8-35.

Yee, J. S. R. (2007). ‘Connecting Practice to Research (and back to Practice): Making the leap from design practice to design research ‘. Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal, 1(1), pp. 81-90.

They are the kinds of meet ups and distributed global conversations / productions that are only possible thanks to social technologies – but they pick up on a general spirit of sharing, openness, fun and collaboration that are inherent to people who like to create things together, and who recognise the possibilities of starting from nothing to build – who knows what.

The Service Jam runs (roughly)  5pm 24th February to 5pm 26th February

Find your local event on the Global Service Jam site, or

Register for the Hamilton event

Follow us via Twitter @GSJHamilton
or See more info on Our Facebook Page

[edit: the slides have been temporarily removed - back up as soon as possible! apologies]
The slides are up from our recent presentation at Ozchi in early December. “Developing ReachOut.com’s Future Strategy: A case study in user centred design methods to marry user led and public health program development approaches”. (I say “our” but Kitty and Mim did all the work pulling the pres together I think!). It presents a case study on how user-centred and participatory design methodologies helped bring young people and mental health professionals together to create the future service strategy of Inspires online youth mental health service, ReachOut.

One of the reasons I love working with Inspire is that their approach is inherently participatory and young people play an active and influential role in all aspects of the organisation from governance and hiring to service design, delivery and evaluation. Everything they do is user-led and co-designed, but it is also evidence-based. This means that all design decisions are based on extensive research, integrated with and driven by clinical and social objectives, research, theories and knowledge and the impacts of services and interventions are continually evaluated and iterated over-time. The level of rigour in this presents a lot of design challenges, but is also hugely exciting and rewarding!

Big props to Kitty Rahilly who did a really fantastic job of presenting and representing and making available this annotated slide deck.

Natalie Rowland and I have just published another article on UX Magazine Johnny Holland about Enabling Codesign. The article was inspired by a workshop on Codesign Methods I ran with Design Masters students at UTS earlier this year that shared some of the methods and facilitation work we do as designers to enable stakeholders to actively participate in the design process.

“The term co-design refers to a philosophical and political approach to design best applied throughout the design life cycle [1].  Codesign builds on the methods and principles of Participatory Design which assumes ‘users’ are the experts of their own domain and should be actively involved in the design process. This article explores some of the methodological tools we use to enable codesign. Specifically, we explore the rationale behind some common workshop techniques used early in the design process, which combine the activities of research and idea generation…” Read the rest of the article on Johnny Holland

The event was was chaired by Rachel Brown of the Sustainable Business Network (SBN) (@sustbusiness) and there was a stellar line up of speakers including Dr. Idil Gaziulusoy, Dr Stephen Knight-Lenihan, Chris Mulcare and Sir Tamati Reedy.

Each speaker on had only 7 minutes to deliver their message and this made for a really punchy format. They all put forward seriously meaty ideas – it’s impossible for me to do any of the speakers justice but here is a summary of some of the bits that I managed to grab below (apologies if I have misrepresented anything -  apparently the gallery recorded all of it so will add a link when it becomes available).

Dr. Idil Gaziulusoy presented from her research into system innovation for sustainability. She covered a lot in her 7 minutes but key take outs included the need for basing what we do on the science of sustainability, the need to take a systems approach rather than develop isolated solutions (this was a bit of a theme for the evening), the importance of design thinking and what it can offer sustainability and the need for codesign approaches where solutions are developed by the community themselves.

Dr Stephen Knight-Lenihan gave a great overview of the issues that face us in actual embedding any serious change into areas like infrastructure and transport  - explaining how an evidence-based approach isn’t really working. Even though we understand what we need to do to implement significant change (i.e., we have the evidence) recommendations to government on how to do this are diluted through the current process, and what comes out the other end is far from what was originally planned. Another example of the problem being how attempts to seriously cut emissions by 2020 (or whatever the target year is now…) are made redundant by the imperative (for example) to build more roads. All current moves towards sustainability are only marginal until we embed sustainability into our planning. According to Knight-Lenihan an important step is requiring that any new development improve current ecological conditions, not just maintain the status quo.

Chris Mulcare then blew us away a bit with digrams and info graphics pointing out some of the great things that are already happening in NZ with clean tech. Chris’s talk was very hopeful in terms of the opportunity to unlock the extensive potential that already exists in NZ for industrial symbiosis where the waste from one plant or farm becomes a raw material or power source for another. For example what is happening at the Kawerau Mill as well as things like the potential for NZ farms to produce and share their own power based on the waste they generate.

Sir Tamati Reedy (Ngāti Porou) then talked us through some of the key aspects of his research into sustainability as it relates to Maori (and therefore NZ fundamentally). Posing the question: why do some people want to sustain some things native to NZ such as flora and fauna but not sustain the natives themselves….? and (given that culture is always changing) who gets the right to decide what is sustained? In helping us to manage the transition Reedy drews upon Toffler’s Futureshock (1970) to highlight the significance of education (over guns or money) as a means to wield power and effect change as we orientate ourselves towards our new future.

As noted above one of the key themes to come out of the evening was the need for a systems approach – rather than attempting any kind of isolated fixes. This is a central point often overlooked in discussions about sustainability action in my experience. In the discussion that followed the presentation this was picked up in relation to the example of the electric car – while it is touted as step towards sustainable transport – such things are only useful in places where electricity is clean – and at the same time cars = roads & driving which in themselves are not sustainable options or activities. Of course this is just one example of the many complexities involved when you start unravelling what “sustainable” actually means. Importantly these speakers all had some positive suggestions for how to get things moving in the right direction within their presentations.

Apparently the organisers were not sure what the level of interest in the event would be, but it was standing room only so big props to all the speakers and the organisers. Having returned from 10 years away from Auckland and NZ this was a re-introduction to NZ’s design and sustainability scene for me and I was really impressed, looking forward to the next one.

I recently had the pleasure of teaching a workshop on co-design techniques at UTS as part of their new Design Masters program. The term co-design refers to a range of things and is a philosophical and political approach to design best applied throughout the design life cycle [1]. The focus of this particular session was on techniques that you might use at the fuzzy-front end of the design process and included hands-on examples of the kinds of activities we might do as part of a co-design workshop. This post is a summary of the key messages on co-design covered as part of the session. (A second post will summarise the day and some of the questions from the students). 

The premise:

Design lives in the world. It is social and situated, people use our designs as part of their everyday lives. This means we have a responsibility with regards to how and what we design. For me, an aspect of this responsibility is supporting the active involvement and participation of ‘users’ (people/stakeholders/those impacted by the design) in the design process. ‘Users’ are the experts of their own domain. As designers it is our role to facilitate their involvement. That is, to support participants to imagine, express and access their experiences and expectations so that they can actively and effectively participate in the design process. That people have the right to influence their own lives and therefore should be involved in the design process is a fundamental premise of Participatory Design. Co-design methods (which build on the methods and principles of early Participatory Design) are a way to do this.

Some principles & theory

At the beginning of the design process our goal is to:

• Understand the design situation
• Gain insights and explore possibilities
• Understand what any proposed design project would mean for the people impacted…what are the opportunities and challenges?

When taking a co-design approach all of this happens with users. They become partners in the design process helping us to shape the definition and direction of the design project.

Importantly, this goes well beyond “asking users what they want”. [2]

In this kind of early design research we look beyond the product being designed. E.g., it’s not just about how the person might respond to a new mobile phone app. It’s how the app, and the phone might be appropriated into the persons existing ecology, what is the broader context in which any new design might sit, how might any new designs be taken up and used?

We want to explore, and co-discover with our participants, things like:

But…people are not explicit sources of information…(Greenbaum and Madsen 1993).

It’s not possible to just extract this kind of knowledge from people….because:

• We are limited in what we can express, people can only talk in the language that they know
• Many of our experiences and knowledge is tacit or embedded in the everyday. Our habits, rituals, dreams and attitudes are not (necessarily) things that we have on tap to describe to design researchers, we may not even be aware of them ourselves.

Instead we can use co-design methods, also known as ‘generative’ design research methods, to help make things that are normally unobservable available  as resources for design.

Sleeswijk Visser suggests that while methods such as interviews and observations give us access to the explicit and observable, generative methods allow us to access the tacit and implicit aspects of people’s lives.

Generative methods are designed to, “allow us to gain access to a hidden world of user experience” (Sleeswijk Visser, 2009)

Some practice…

So…how do we make people’s everyday experiences available for discussion? How do we get people to remember and share things that are so ingrained? [3]

We use methods that are:

• Visual, creative, expressive

There is an emphasis on visual materials, making things and use of imagery as a way for people to make associations and communicate.

• Physical and tangible

Physically making things helps people to explore, verbalise, remember and imagine (Sanders in particular emphasis the “make” aspect of generative methods).

• Based on story telling

We naturally tell stories, actual stories and examples help put things into context, they are also a central way of sharing, communicating and visioning. Creating and telling stories (real or imagined) can be visual, verbal or include role play, they help to prompt, remind, and brings things that are normally tacit out into the foreground.

• Playful, fun and embrace ambiguity

Fun is a deeply important aspect of participation, it is central to developing platforms for sharing, trust building, confidence and helping people open up. It is also part of keeping people’s energy levels up, if people are tired and the activities too serious, people will lose interest. Co-design sessions should be fun and enjoyable as well as ‘productive’. (They are also key relationship building activities). Ambiguity is important for allowing creative and unusual connections to be made and leaves space for people to apply and explore their own interpretations of things.

• Reflective, personal, subjective

Interventions that support reflection and introspection help to make things that are otherwise embedded into our ‘everyday’ accessible and sharable.  For this reason it is very common to do reflection or ‘primer’ exercises before workshops, such as diaries or cultural probes. Asking people to observe their own behaviours for a period of time, brings things to the surface before an interview or workshop [4].

The outcomes:

Co-design sessions:

• Allow us to create a shared understanding and shared language between participants and the designers.

They enable immersion, dialogue and empathy, we start to understand the design from the point of view of the participants. The outputs are sources of both inspiration and information for designers and participants to work with in visioning future designs. They are information gathering and design generating activities, blurring the boundaries of research and design (Sanders 2008).

And they are:

• Designerly

The outputs from these kinds of methods differ significantly from interviews, surveys or observations. They generate rich visual, subjective and tangible material to work with.  Designers benefit from working with concrete things they can see and feel and the immediacy and accessibility of this kind of material makes it a natural resource for designers, quite different to that of a report. Imagery for example can be quickly scanned and absorbed (Mattelmäki & Battarbee, 2002). For designers this kind of material can be much more accesible than traditional research outputs. To understand the significance of designerly methods – I recommend checking out Sanders map of design research methods. In it Sanders talks about older more established styles of research which rely on systematic data analysis. Newer, design driven forms of research focus on tools for expression, reflection and sharing (and they are subjective).

[1] The term codesign is now widely used within product, UX and Service design fields. My own interpretation of co-design is based on the principles of Participatory Design and is best represented by the extensive work of Liz Sanders. Check out Sanders extensive selection of papers on her website for more about the different types of generative activities she’s been developing and evolving for the last 20 years.

[2] In a couple of recent presentations I got some people’s backs up for ‘pissing all over the quote by Ford’.

The quote in question goes something like: “If I had asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses“. I’ve seen this quote used (more than once) at nearly every design/UX/technology conference I have attended in the last few years and my frustration over its use is because frankly I think it’s a bit of a cop-out. Invariably it gets hauled out and used as a excuse or justification not to involve or ‘ask’ users – clearly they can’t come up with innovations! The flaw here of course – (recognised by most people in UX that I know of) is that there is rarely a good justification for simply “asking users what they want”. As @voirol astutely put it, if that was the answer then you asked the wrong question. In fact such direct questioning (e.g., what features would you like) are unlikely to be a part of any serious design research process. Our questions and techniques have to be much more sophisticated than this, co-design and participatory design methods are examples of a very different approach to involving users in the design process.

[3] For example see Sanders comments on primes in the paper Design Research in 2006. Also the article Not to Prime is a crime by Jodie Moule on Johnny Holland. More about the reflective nature of diaries can be found on the Mobile Diaries article also on Johnny Holland.

Further references include:

Gaver, W., Beaver, J., & Benford, S. (2003). ‘Ambiguity as a Resource for Design’. CHI, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. ACM,  pp.

Gaver, W., Boucher, A., Pennington, S., & Walker, B. (2004). ‘Cultural Probes and the value of uncertainty’. Interactions, Volume XI(5), pp. 53-56.

Gaver, B., Dunne, T., & Pacenti, E. (1999). ‘Design: Cultural Probes’. Interactions, pp. 21-29.

Greenbaum, J., & Madsen, K. H. (1993). PD a personal statement. Communications of the ACM. Special issue on graphical user interfaces: the next generation, 36(6), pp.

Halskov, K., & Dalsgård, P. (2006). ‘Inspiration Card Workshops’. DIS, University Park, PA, USA. ACM

Mattelmäki, T. (2005). ‘Applying probes – from inspirational notes to collaborative insights’. CoDesign, 1(2), pp. 83-102.

Mattelmäki, T. (2008). ‘Probing for co-exploring’. CoDesign, 4(1), pp. 65 – 78.

Mattelmäki, T., & Battarbee, K. (2002). ‘Empathy Probes’.  PDC’02. Malmö, Sweden, CPSR.

Sanders, E. B.-N. (2006). Design Research in 2006. Design Research Quarterly, 1.

Sanders, L. (2008). An Evolving Map of Design Practice and Design Research Interactions (November – December), pp. 13-17.

Sanders, L. (2001). Collective Creativity. LOOP: AIGA Journal of Interaction Design Education 7(June ). Retrieved from

Sanders, E. B.-N., Brandt, E., & Binder, T. A framework for organizing the tools and techniques of participatory design.  Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference. Sydney, Australia, ACM.

Sanders, E., & Stappers, P. J. (2008). Co-creation and the New Landscapes of Design. CoDesign, 4(1), pp. 5-18.

Sleeswijk Visser, F. (2009). Bringing the everyday life of people into design. PhD Thesis Technische Universiteit Delft, Delft.

Sleeswijk Visser, F., Stappers, P. J., Lugt, R. V. D., & Sanders, E. B.-N. (2005). Contextmapping: experiences from practice. CoDesign, 1(2), pp. 119-140.

(See http://studiolab.io.tudelft.nl/sleeswijkvisser/publications to access papers by Sleeswijk Visser)

The Changing Nature of Participation in Design: A practice-based study of social technologies in early design research

Penny Hagen
A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computing Sciences
1st April 2011
Interaction Design and Human Practice Laboratory
School of Software, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology
University of Technology, Sydney

I can not express how pleased I am to have finally submitted my PhD thesis for examination. There are so many friends, family members, colleagues, participants, clients, researchers, tweeps, acquaintances and strangers whose words, thoughts, support and understanding were critical in the development (and most importantly the completion) of the thesis. To all of you, thank you so much. It really is finished this time.

I’ll be posting a link to the full Pdf shortly. [Edit - here is the link to download the thesis] Please find the in brief version (abstract) below.

ABSTRACT

Social technologies put a new emphasis on participation. This thesis investigates the impact of social technologies on how we enable, conceive and manage participation in early design. The research questions in this thesis address how, and in what ways, using social technologies as design tools can support participation in the early stages of design, and how using such tools creates new opportunities for participation in early design when social technologies themselves are the subject of design. It develops and presents concepts and strategies that account for the sharable, social and participatory nature of social technologies and encourages designers to reconsider how notions of participation are currently embedded and framed within existing design methods and models.

The questions are explored through a practice-based investigation into the use of social technologies as self-reporting tools. Over the course of two field studies a self-reporting method, Mobile Diaries, was iteratively designed, evaluated and implemented in a specific commercial design context. The analysis demonstrated that using social technologies as design tools enhances the capacity for self-reporting to enable participants to contribute to design from the context of their own lives. This greater integration between the activities of research and everyday life blurs some traditional design research boundaries, with ethical and methodological implications for which we are only beginning to account. In addition, when social technologies are the subject of design, using social technologies as design tools creates an experiential connection between the activities of researching, designing and using. This creates new opportunities for participation through use early in the design process that blur traditional boundaries between the activities of research, design and use. Barriers to embracing these opportunities in commercial contexts include the assumption that the activities of design and use progress consecutively and the value of early participation in design is largely embodied in the tangible outputs of design research.

This research extends existing knowledge about the nature of participation in design, and how participation can be supported, through three main contributions:
1. The development of Mobile Diaries, a specific self-reporting method beneficial to early design research and suited to commercial use

2. Conceptual tools that reflect the impact of social technologies on self-reporting and draw attention to the new ethical and methodological implications they introduce

3. Strategies to articulate and support experiences and outcomes important to the early design of social technologies in community settings, through the use of social technologies themselves.

This thesis also makes a fourth contribution that is methodological:
4. It is an example of how practice-based design research can be conducted in a commercial context in ways valuable to both practice and research domains.

FYI: some of this research is already available through published papers and articles.

Sketchnotes by @bencrothers

I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to present some aspects of my Phd research at this weeks Design Thinking Drinks in Sydney. Above is one of the  awesome sketchnotes that @bencrothers did of my talk, it also captures some of the questions and discussion.  I’ll put up the slides shortly, hopefully with notes. In the meantime, enjoy  @bencrothers ‘ take on it – sketchnoting is cool for lots of reasons, but as a presenter you get a real sense for what stood out which is fantastic, and how people interpreted what you are saying. I think all researchers should seek out some one like Ben to sketchnote their talks, – gives a completely different perspective on your #phd and research to a standard conference review – So big thanks @bencrothers !

The presentation shared some of the highlights and questions from my research into social technologies, participation and design. I shared the bill with Dave Gravina (@deskimo) and the awesome team at Digital Eskimo who hosted the event and put on an amazing interactive night showcasing their case studies throughout their eco-designed studio. (Check out the photos on Flickr). As I mentioned on the night it’s pretty rare as a “PhD student” to get the opportunity to share your work at industry events and I really appreciated the opportunity to get people’s questions, thoughts and feedback and see where the discussion lead – especially as my research is intended as practice-led research that has value to industry as well as academia. So good to test that out! Big thanks to all the people who came, listened and contributed to the questions and discussion, and especially to Deborah Kneeshaw, Opher Yom-Tov and Diana Adrono for organisating and DE for hosting.