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June 01, 2005
design research and design rant
Just spent a few days in Copenhagen for the 1st Nordic Design Research Conference.
An aside: I still find Copenhagen baffling, especially in terms of public transport. There's almost no interconnect between transport modes, I haven't managed to find somewhere to buy a klippenkarte on any visit, there really needs to be a few more bridges built in strategic places, and bus stops closer together, and, when defeated, I resorted to a taxi, they turn out not to know where anywhere is - and refuse to use their onboard navigation system. No wonder everyone cycles.
Another aside: the food was fantastic. Admittedly I was rather louche, and I'm slightly embarrassed by my gastronomy. See more here and here for the full slightly gory details.
Later I'll pull out a few things I saw which inspired me at the conference, but first you'll have to endure yet another rant about design, designers, and academics.
I was hoping to get an idea of what design research is - it's always been a bit nebulous to me, and it's pretty much at the opposite end of design to my background (engineer, self taught design). Certainly the design research at the conference tended towards qualitative, whereas HCI tends towards quantitative.
My biggest beef, as with pretty much all academic conferences, was that it was design researchers talking to design researchers. There were 2 or 3 commercial designers at the conference, a few more design undergraduates, but mainly academics. I try and go to these conferences to burst the membrane between academics and practitioners - and there are certainly a few people and ideas that I am glad to have seen and are directly useful to my work. But there remains a general distain in academia to sully their work with commercial concerns, especially when it opposes their viewpoint, research subject or methodology.
Let me note that there were far more useful projects at NDRC than many academic conferences I've been to. Rapid prototyping and manufacturing is H-O-T-T, and may be somewhere where academic research is still outpacing commercial reality. I particularly liked Tavs Jørgensen's binary tools project, exploring the role of newer media in pottery. There was also a paper (PDF) exploring a bit how people responded to being part of a product customisation process. On an embodied interaction and tangible computing tip, this paper (PDF) on inspirational patterns for embodied interaction may be good - need to read it more carefully (and, can we stop referring to Alexander's A Pattern Language - it's not highly regarded in urban planning circles, especially due to its incredible cultural situatedness). This (PDF) is a great paper looking at laban movement notation and tangible working, and how the movements in between actions may be more important than the actions themselves. Per Kristav's work (PDF) on culture probes for Ikea was also very interesting.
Malcolm McCullogh rocked, as normal. His work pushes design forward, as I think design research should do, rather than just analysing the outcome. No hints about a new book, though.
The proceedings of the conference are here. Still need to digest the parallel sessions I missed.
I have a plea for people to stop thinking "what is this design thing, anyway?". There were many discussions of where design sits between art and crafts - even between artist and usability tester - with little consideration that a designer, well, designs. Within constraints. To brief. Maybe with user testing, maybe without. People I spoke to generally didn't see this - a designer at college is normally far more of an artist than an engineer. There was also general consensus that things like engineering and programming weren't creative endeavours, which is just wrong. It's just easier to test the output (if still opaque as to whether it is well designed and constructed or not).
It's also pretty obvious that traditional interaction design has been consumed by other design practices - especially product design and architecture, not that they've necessarily learnt from more pure interaction design practice and HCI. Interaction design often has harder intangibility problems than, say, product design. I like the term experience design, even if I don't believe you can design complete holistic experiences in most aspects of life (theatre, cinema, restaurants and theme parks excluded).
Maybe I'll break my own rule and elucidate more later.
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Comments
commenting on plsj.org - check that if you like
- BTW if you think the busses are weird in Copenhagen you should try them i Aarhus. They are just plain stupid :)
Posted by: martin at June 7, 2005 03:38 AM
