smallfire: design strategy, research & methods to support participation

Archived entries for design research

Enabling Codesign

sketches for designing workshop activities

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

Design Assembly & CreativeMornings AKL

 

As part of (re)acquainting myself with the Auckland design scene I was glad to catch both the Design Assembly’s Spring 2011 Conversations and the launch of Auckland’s CreativeMornings series last week.

The Design Assembly event (organised by Louise Kellerman) was an evening event hosted at AUT and included three quite different speakers (deets on all three here).  The highlight for me was @LewisBostock’s talk on Cosmic Panda – we owed the talk to the fact that YouTube changed Lewis’s life. They promoted his video on the home page resulting in 35,000+ views.  I was quite taken with Lewis’s description of Youtube as “the most visceral form of social media” this is probably true – video does have something to offer us in terms of expression, experience and accessibility that can’t be gained through word or image alone. In addition to this are the very upfront aspects of the community that you see through the comments, ratings and related videos that also give an very clear impression of the larger YouTube experience – and more importantly – all the other people who use it along side us. Continue reading…

Sustain/Create

Last night I attended the first Sustain/Create event at AUT. Sustain/Create is a series of public discussions co-presented by the School of Art + Design and the ST PAUL St Gallery which aim to investigate the role of design in sustainability.

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).

Continue reading…

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