Join us for Industry Day at PDC 2010 : supporting collaborations between research and practice in the area of participatory design.

As part of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference
Sydney, Australia
29 November – 3rd December 2010
University of Technology, Sydney
www.pdc2010.org @pdcSydney #pdcsyd

Participation by people in the design of the systems they use is integral to the way we do business, support civic engagement, collaborate and connect with clients, constituents and community. The Participatory Design Conference is an important venue for international discussion of the collaborative, social and political dimensions of technology innovation and use.

Join us for the first ever Industry Day at Participatory Design 2010 to support collaboration between research and practice in the participatory design of products, services and systems.

Participate:
Industry Day, held on the 2nd of December, will include a keynote address, case studies of the application of participatory design approaches within industry, a cross disciplinary panel, a “pitch fest” where ideas for innovative products and services will be presented to a panel of judges, and opportunities for informal discussion.

We are excited to invite submissions from industry practitioners across commercial, government and not-for-profit sectors to present as part of the special industry track. We also encourage practitioners who are working with participatory methods or interested in introducing such approaches to attend, learn, share and collaborate around the topic of participation and methods for co-designing where ‘users’ become active participants. Participants will have the opportunity to hear practitioners from various fields report on new research, methods and approaches.

We are now seeking submission for:

Case study presentations
- that report on the use of participatory design (PD) methods, tools, and/or practices within commercial, non-profit and governmental organisations.

The PDC Pitch Fest
- where representatives from not-for-profit and academic sectors “pitch” design ideas to ‘industry’ in a short, lively format.

Submissions Due: August 13 2010
Notifications Due: Mid September

Visit www.pdc2010.org/industry for more info and see
www.pdc2010.org/industry-day/industry-day-submissions/ for submission format and process.

Enquiries to industry (at) pdc2010.org

What is Participatory Design?
Participatory Design is a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies, tools, environments, businesses, services and social institutions more responsive to human needs. A central tenet of Participatory Design is the direct involvement of people in the co-design of things and technologies they use.

Participatory Design has its roots in the Scandinavian labour movement of the 70’s and over the years has broadened its impact to areas such as health care, international development, civic engagement, local government, education, communications, agile software development, new media, architecture, and the arts. Methods that are becoming common in industry today such as co-operative prototyping, future workshops and scenarios had their origins in early Participatory Design research.

The Participatory Design conference
PDC is an international conference for research on participatory design of systems, services and products. The conference has been held every two years since 1990 and it attracts over 300 researchers and practitioners from around the world. This year PDC is in the Southern Hemisphere for the first time and will be hosted by the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

A topic that floats to the surface on a regular basis in my work is the relationship between brand and UX; an interesting, evolving and somewhat contested territory.

One way to think about brand and experience is as representing  two different perspectives: the perspective of the business and the perspective of the people that use the service or product of that business or organisation. In the past they didn’t overlap as much as they do in the case of online service delivery (or service design generally), but as technologies and practices change some interesting tensions are coming into play [*]. There are two in particular that are recurrent for me at the present time.

The first is at the global organisation or company level, the territory of vision where things are strategic and frankly, largely abstract. The other is at local level, where you have the actual implementation of a specific, concrete project/touchpoint/service (it might be the implementation of one the strategies from the global above).

The battle at the top seems to centre around defining, or redefining a companies approach to business. Arguments laid out in books like Adaptive Path’s subject to change argue that companies need to move beyond brand, which is driven from an internal perspective, and instead think about experience. An experience strategy takes as its start point the perspective of the user. It understands and presents value from the outside in, not the inside out.

I completely agree with this argument, the bit I’m not sure about it how are people expecting the brand platform to integrate with the UX vision and strategy? Based on the conversations with peers from both branding and UX  people seem to think of one as a sub group of the other, depending on what their background is.

Well articulated brand strategies are important reference points for UX, they tells us important things about who the company wants to be and how they want to be portrayed.

Many of the things that @docbaty argues as central to an Experience Strategy such as vision and differentiation are already part of brand. The difference, he argues is perspective.  So do we throw out the brand platform? Or do we look to integrate them? Where is the overlap?  Is it just a matter of changing the brand vision from a company perspective to reflect a user experience perspective? There is no doubt that brand as we knew it before had its limitations in the landscape of interactive design. It wasn’t developed to account for the kinds of things its being asked to now. But does it die, evolve or become absorbed into UX, or something else?

In one of the presentations from IDEO there was a phrase about brand (and moving with the times) that captures some of this nicely “enable your brand through participation” (I’ll need to find the link), this kind of evolutionary approach sums it up well – I’m still interested in what that actually means for the documents and reference points we work with/develop on  daily project basis though…”guidelines” etc.

I’ve developed a few scenario based techniques to explore how brand and UX intersect – i.e how do you embody brand values in the service (I mean of course brand way beyond colour and logo etc) which I’ll write up and share as a follow up post.

[*]

Why is this (more of an) an issue now?

I’ll explain what I mean by this comment through a necessary over-simplification of the issues. In the olden days of communications design from where many interactive agencies stem, design was about communicating a message. The materials we designed were predominately marketing, promotion, information or advertising material. For example it might be advertising the services of a bank, of your local council, a suicide hotline or of a charity. That could come in the form of print, tv or website etc. What we were designing was largely controlled and static. Even though you might be able to click on the website, the content was informational. We could apply the brand guidelines to these various implementations, (to be honest brand never really caught up to the web but…).Matters of design were (mostly) matters of communicating and promoting the service, not matters of delivering the service. The majority of the actual core services of those organisations on the other hand were delivered face to face or over the phone by humans. The people that worried about the delivery of the services and the people who governed the form and nature of how information about those services was shaped and communicated (brand & marketing) potentially had little to do with each other.

This has changed as the channels through which we deliver core services have started to merge with the platforms through which we used to use to communicate about that service. (i.e core services  are being delivered through web services and web applications). Suddenly branding people are involved (or more deeply involved) in conversations about how the service will look and operate.  The user experience and UI and so need to be “on  brand”.  This is not so bad for organisations like banks, or task orientated software were there are few variables for interaction and no user generated content. But when the service relies on participation and engagement by users (like peer support services or community consultation) more often than not there are clashes about control. Specifically people worry about looking bad from the comments of others, or that some form of brand abuse will result from relinquishing control.

People who have worked in community service delivery and consultation completely get that you need to give ownership to participants in order for such things to be successful, for many (though absolutely not all) brand and marketing this a relatively new lesson. I have often had clients come and say we want to be more participatory, but then have brand representatives really struggle with letting go control. It is relatively recent that brand and core service delivery have played so closely together (for service organisations).

You simply can’t apply brand rules, or control brand in the same way to core service delivery (where participation is a central factor) as you could when it being used to shape information and communication collateral. These relationships are being further disrupted by shifts towards co-creation, open innovation and service design.

I’ve pasted the slidecast to my own presentation below, but I hope also to get a chance to do a summary of take-aways from the conference shortly.

The discipline of design is in a constant state of change. As noted in the previous post one of the most significant trends currently impacting on design practice is the opening up of the design process. Design is moving out from the studio and into the wild, taking place where people live [1].  Users are being re-cast as co-designers, co-creators and co-developers. Trends such as ‘open design’, ‘crowdsourcing’, designing for design in use, post-release iterations and ‘emergent design’ provide new ways for people to participate in the design process,  and challenge some of our traditional models of design.

The paper Dissolving boundaries: social technologies and participation in design [Preprint_Pdf] being presented at OZCHI this November is an attempt to provide a ‘lay of the land’.  We look at key trends and opportunities for supporting participation in design from across industry and research and point to some of questions about roles and responsibilities they raise for design practitioners. The paper, and the proposed discussion at Interaction10 (submission pasted below for prosperity), are an attempt to promote and contribute to ongoing discussion on how these shifts are changing design practice.

The sketches (scribbles) in this post were fundamental for thinking through, conceptualising and communicating the various ways design is being reshaped, and for starting to think about models of participation. I recently also came across these (much more refined!) sketches that also visualise emerging co-creation and codesign models.

Discussion Proposal submitted to IXD10.

Design in the wild: the practitioners new playground

Design is moving into the wild, propelled in part by the participatory nature of social technologies. Trends such as ‘open design’ which supports mass participation in the design process, ‘crowdsourcing’ of design ideas and skills from the public, ‘design after design’ or ‘design in use’ where design is iterated post-release and ‘emergent design’ where seed prototypes are shaped through use, challenge some of our traditional models of design.

In this shifting design landscape boundaries between design and use, and designer and user begin to blur. Not for the first time, but for the first time on this scale, design is moving out of the studio and taking place in more public forums. These shifts in design practice and process are generating questions about roles, responsibilities and appropriate frameworks for participation and decision-making.

In this session we’ll sketch out some of the challenges and opportunities currently facing us as practitioners. The discussion will be framed around the following topics:

- The suitability of existing methods to cater to this emerging design space
- The directions of emerging methods
- Potential frameworks for supporting participation and decision-making
- The impact these changes are having to our roles, responsibilities and skill-sets as design practitioners.

This session will be an opportunity for practitioners to share their ideas, concerns and thoughts, as well as explore what shifts are already happening, or may be necessary, to support these emerging forms of participation and collaboration in design.

References

1. Lee, Y., ‘Design participation tactics: the challenges and new roles for designers in the co-design process’, CoDesign, vol. 4, no. 1, (2008) pp. 31 – 50.

q. 1 How do our methods need to be extended or adapted to support design in the wild?

q. 2 How do we position our own practice in relation to this dynamic and changing design space?

These are two questions I posed at the end of a recent presentation I was invited to give at UTS to Masters students from the School of Design, Architecture and Building (edited slidedeck above). While the focus was an introduction to Personas and Scenarios (new to many of the students from outside the field of Interaction Design) the presentation also highlighted new trends or “strong currents” currently influencing design.

The aim of the presentation was to introduce some of the methods or “tools” we already have that support us in thinking about design in relation to use, as well as point to ways in which the relations between design and use are becoming more dynamic and intertwined.

This is an opportunity for us as practitioners to reflect on our practice, and think through how our existing tools are being, or may need to be, extended or augmented as we shift into new areas.

In particular we discussed a (conceptual and literal) shift from designing products to designing services and the impact trends such as crowdsourcing, DIY design and social media are having on professional design practice. Traditional boundaries between design and use are blurring as design activities become more public and relate to a larger more complex ‘eco systems’: design (and designing!) is escaping into the wild.

The closing questions above are also the subject of a paper I’ll be presenting at Ozchi in Melbourne later in the year, and I hope to be facilitating a discussion on the topic of Design in the Wild: The practitioners new playground next year at IXD10 (submission currently being reviewed).

UX Australia was a fantastic conference, thanks again to the organisers!

I’m giving a talk tomorrow as part of the UTS Design Masters -  Future Design Strategies lecture series. While it covers course material (this time Personas and Scenarios) it’s also open to the public. Feel free to come along.

Nudies (personas freestyle)

Title: Design and Use: Tools and Trends in Design

When:  Thursday, 10th September
Time:  6pm – 7pm
Venue: DAB Building, Rm 716  (That’s on the 7th Floor)

Design and use are inherently entwined. Questions about how people will be able to use and appropriate our designs sit at the centre of a human focused design process. This lecture will introduce Personas and Scenarios, two design methods that help connect us to the context of use during the design phase, and to the people who will use, wear, or live in our designs. Such tools help us to think through and communicate about design with users, clients and team members and this lecture will show examples of Personas and Scenarios being adapted to various contexts. Design tools that support collaborative exploration and communication between stakeholders are becoming more and more important as the nature  of design changes and traditional boundaries between design and use, and designer and user shift. This lecture will also touch on some of these emerging design spaces into which our existing tools are being adapted and extended.

“social software is about a movement, not simply a category of technologies… it’s certainly not complete and as a category, it’s difficult to make sense of its boundaries.” (boyd 2007b)

Like the quote by boyd above suggests, I prefer a looser definition. I see social technologies…social media…social software, whatever you want to call it, to be about both tools and practices. This makes it inherent messy and difficult to capture and describe.

According to boyd (2007a) the phenomenon of social technologies can be characterised by greater social participation in mediated contexts (boyd 2007a). Terms like user generated content, crowdsourcing and citizen media all refer to emerging forms of social participation supported by social technologies. These activities are made possible thanks to the ease with which we can now connect, communicate, produce, share, replicate, locate and distribute information. These new capabilities have had, and continue to have, a profound impact on our social, cultural and technological practices (boyd 2009; Shirky 2008). This transformation has been made possible by the wide availability and accessibility of technology. Most importantly this has included the shift in technology ownership from organisations and companies, to everyday people (Battarbee 2003; Shirky 2008).

Another definition of social media, this time provided by the Finnish research institute VTT, refers to social media as both a set of tools and a modus operandi (Heinonen & Halonen 2007). This definition also re-enforces the dual emphasis on technologies and social practices. For me the terms social technologies, social software, social media, and at times Web 2.0 can all  be used interchangeably. That there are so many different acceptable terms also emphasises the legitimate variations, definitions and potential for interpretation that exists.

In my own work I use the term social technologies because it makes clear reference to the socio-technical  nature of the phenomenon which we are attempting to describe. In addition, it can encompass combinations of mobile and/or online technologies, potentially indicating something broader than a single piece of software. This framing or definition is deliberately vague in order to indicate the inadequacy of any single term to describe its complexity and fluidity.

For designers, social technologies become a tool with which we design, the subject of our design and the context within which we design. It’s messy and it’s disruptive. Hence, I guess, the stumped silence at #SMCSyd #1.

References

Battarbee, K.:(2003) Co-experience: the social user experience. CHI. ACM, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA

boyd, d.:(2009) Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics Information Management and Systems, Vol. PhD. University of California, Berkeley

boyd, d.: (2007a) Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What? :

boyd, d.: (2007b) The Significance of Social Software. In: Schmidt, T.N.B.a.J. (ed.): BlogTalks Reloaded: Social Software Research & Cases Norderstedt  15-30 2.

Heinonen, S., Halonen, M.: (2007) Making Sense of Social Media Interviews and Narratives In: 2, S.F.R. (ed.

Shirky, C.: (2008) Here comes everybody. Penguin Press

Last week @michellegilmore and I got our first article up on Johnny Holland: User Stories: a strategic design tool. It was slightly chaotic trying to co-ordinate from Olso’s various internet cafes (and some loitering around unprotected wifi at apartment blocks) but we got there!  Big thanks to all those that helped shape and edit the article  :especially @semanticwill @docbaty @deskimo and Chris Gaul on the graphics!

Recently I sat down with the marvelous chris gaul for a co-sketching session, the aim was to work through visually some of the key concepts in my research into participatory methods and social technologies. I’d worked closely with cg before and knew he had a great talent for taking ideas, concepts and my random scribbles and translating in them into a visual language. In doing so he would identify key aspects that had been missing from the existing representations, but were central to the telling of the story.

In under two hours and in less than 2 beers, we had developed 3 draft concept sketches that conveyed the main points of my thesis well beyond my initial sketches. The catalyst to the breakthrough was Chris immediately introducing the concept of time, exactly the type of shift I hoped to make through a collaborative sketching session.

All of these sketches are start points, their role was to make available, capture and reveal key aspects of the concepts being discussed. I’ll be drawing on these to develop the concepts as well as guide how they are articulated in my thesis. (Thanks Chris!). I share here some our  cafe sketches and very briefly outline the points they were capturing.

Designing a design research method

This image denotes the steps we go through in designing a design research study. My empirical research focus has been on the design and evaluation of digital self-reporting studies, and this sketch provided a background and context to the indepth investigation in my thesis on the  “devise a methodology” step (longer post to come). Importantly it put my work in a bigger context/process and showed how I would need to break out certain bits and support some aspects with more detail.

Seeding social technologies early in design

Figuratively, to seed something is to cause something to begin to develop or grow.  This image captured the important aspect of time in the seeding process, the connection between the tools we use early in the design process,  where they are located (real world/abstract design space) and their connection to the ‘final design’.  Early design methods like interviews and observation are generic.  Social technologies as early design tools (e.g through digital self-reporting) create a different and potentially more continuous connection between the activities of design research, design and use. Our design research methods (social technologies) have a contextual relationship the subject of your design (social technologies). We were trying to work out how to convey that greater connection between the initial seed and later use, as well as indicate that the ‘in context’ nature of self-reporting as a method importantly locates the “design research” in the real world.

Oscillating transitions of “ownership”

The metaphor of a ‘seed’ or seeding gives us a way to describe and strategise about engaging and moving between the abstract space of design and the concrete places where people live (Lee 2008). Seeding in the context of designing social technologies can describe a strategy for transitioning the project state from “abstract” to “concrete”; to transferring ownership from the designer to user community; to ingratiating the project with potential users; and to creating conditions and hooks for participation. This sketch was just trying to capture the way in which the transition of “ownership” doesn’t occur at one point in time, but rather oscillates back and forth at different times; though the ultimate goal in social and community projects is usually a complete handover eventually. You can see we had a few goes at this to get the emphasis right, and in one of them I’m going over chris’s big arrow with lots more little ones to emphasis that “handover” is never clean and continuous, rather there can be lots of stops and starts.

1.    Lee, Y.: Design participation tactics: the challenges and new roles for designers in the co-design process. CoDesign 4 (2008) 31 – 50