PARTICIPATORY METHODS FOR DESIGNING SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES
Currently I am completing my PhD on Design Research Methods for Social Technologies at the Interaction Design and Human Practice Lab, University of Technology Sydney. My supervisor is Dr Toni Roberston.
I am exploring how participation can be understood and facilitated in the design and use of social technologies. In particular I am interested in the evolution of generative and participatory design research activities into design activities and interventions that seed participation in different ways during the design process.
The sketch below captures the key aspects of my research: a practice-led exploration into participation, design and methods in the context of social technologies. The focus is on social technologies as tools for generative design research early in the design process. The results include key concepts and issues to be sensitive too when designing in this context and a set of maps and guidelines for (re-)thinking about early design research in the context of social technologies.
This is a latest incarnation of my research abstract as of July 2009, I anticipate a full new draft version in January 2010. Various snippets of thinking on my research are contained on this site.
Title: Designing with and for social technologies
Department: Interaction Design and Human Practice Lab (IDWOP), UTS
Principal Supervisor: A/Prof Toni Robertson, Faculty of IT, UTS
Co-Supervisor: Dr Lian Loke, Faculty of IT, UTS
Abstract
My research is concerned with participation in, and design of, social technologies which aim to support community participation in social and political activities. Social technologies are giving rise to new forms of participation. The ease with which we can now connect, communicate, produce, share, replicate, locate and distribute information has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on our social, cultural and technological practices. Digital technologies are integrated into our lives, crossing traditional boundaries of public and private, work and leisure. For designers, the dynamics of social technologies brings into focus the active relationship between design and use, designer and user and a blurring between the practices of “designing” and “using”. It raises questions about what it means to participate and what it means to participate in design.
As the context of design (and use) changes, so do the methods we use to engage with those design spaces. The focus of my research is on the use of social technologies as tools to support participation early in the design process, for example through digital self-reporting. My research is practice-led and took place in the context of a commercial design agency committed to social change. My empirical research included the development of a digital self-reporting method, Mobile Diaries, using blogs and mobile tools to support participant-led design research. I found that the use of social technologies to do research about social technologies opened up new potentials for participation in the early phases of design not accounted for in conventional models of design research.
- thinking about design, participation and methods in the context of social technologies
Using social technologies as tools for the design of social technologies blurs the boundaries between data and content, participant and community, and poses questions about ownership of the same. The interactions of the users with the online and mobiles tools, and the personal ‘data’ they generated during the design research project, didn’t just inform design, it also had the potential to seed content, connections and community for future projects; less like a research project and more like a living prototype. The use of contextual methods i.e using social technologies themselves as design materials in the emergent design of social technologies opens up new potential for participation in design. Roles and activities typically acted out in use, such as the development of user-generated content, can, move forward into the early design phase. Through such approaches the design of social technologies can become an emergent activity, co-evolved through community participation.
Such forms of participation are appropriate and valuable to the design of social technologies because of the tight coupling between design and use that constitutes their form. However the ability to seize the opportunities for supporting participation in design so important to community, social and civic settings, is dependent on the development of strategies that take into account the changing landscape of design and address new questions about ethics, privacy, ownership and sustainability. The opportunities and landscape for design and research that social technologies create lead us towards a different view of the design and research process and their respective boundaries, and towards a different kind of relationship with our participants.
