Have design education and design research failed to fire up the imagination in public discourse? I believe so and I believe the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) mantra has unbalanced thinking about education curricula in general. John Thackara’s recent Observers Room newsletter notes the same:

Last month, as the Dutch government expelled trouble-making artists from the state funding system, UK and US policymakers demanded a stronger focus by education on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — the STEM subjects. They claim a STEM workforce “determines a nation’s ability to sustain itself.”

No it does not. A too-sharp focus on STEM creates an innovation policy that is not fit for purpose. We need to diversify, not reduce, our ways of knowing and acting in the world. We need to emphasize the social dimension of innovation, not just technology. And we need to master systems thinking more than silo thinking. Experimental art and design can help us do all of the above — not as an alternative to science, but as its enrichment.

True innovators decline to remain locked in the STEM cell.

Last month I spoke at the Cumulus/Design Research Society Researching Design Education Symposium in Paris and argued a similar case. For a profession that claims imagination and divergent thinking to be among its key attributes, design research has failed to ignite public imagination. Despite efforts by the likes of John Maeda, the rhetoric of STEM dominates the media. Science writers expound in newspaper columns, entire TV channels are devoted to the wonders of science. Science is, of course, important, but this one-sided view of research has not been counter-balanced by an equivalent, passionate exploration of the boundaries of design in the public sphere. Yet the potential is there – arguably, a handful of TED Talks have done more to raise the awareness of the importance of design than several decades of design research publication. Although there are exceptions, design research has failed to imagine and communicate an integrated vision of design comparable to that of science.

The paper I wrote for the presentation argues that design has failed to integrate the nexus of theory, research and practice and is a call to arms for design researchers to bring their activities into a broader, public discourse. Despite the rhetoric of interdisciplinarity, design education research has become too convergent in its thinking and discipline specific. As practices such as service design engage in projects at the public policy level, it is essential for design to explicitly articulate the process of design synthesis in order to gain and maintain credibility, for such projects offers an opportunity to bring design’s value and activities on par with the sciences in public discourse.

You can download the full paper, Design Research – A Failure of Imagination? and the presentation slides (8.5MB PDF – lots of images). The full proceedings of the symposium are available on the conference website.

I would be very interested to hear any feedback or opinions from others on this subject.

Possibly related posts:

1. Talking Service Design at Parsons NYC On my way back from the (very good) Interaction ’11...

Some months ago I officially became Dr. Polaine (Andy Polaine, PhD. for you Americans) and have been planning to write a series of posts about the main themes of my thesis, Developing A Language Of Interactivity Through The Theory Of Play, for some time.

So to coincide with a post over at Core77 about the journey of doing a design PhD, this is the first installment to introduce the main themes and to provide a link to download the entire thesis (5.9MB).

The background to doing the PhD was largely everything I had learned since the early Antirom days when we were trying to discover and uncover the essence of interactive media and really trying to understand what makes it different from other media. At the same time I was getting more and more interested in storytelling and was fascinated by fact that great stories, regardless of their content and style, tended to adhere to clearly defined structures that had been honed over thousands of years.

These converging interests gave rise to some apparently simple questions: What makes one interactive experience more engaging than another? What makes an interactive experience engaging? Why are some simple interactions so satisfying and others so dull? Why do technological marvels sometimes fail to satisfy whilst a cardboard box can provide hours of entertainment?

They sound trivial, but turned out to be very difficult to answer in a rigorous way. The easy answer is, like love and pornography, “I know it when I see it,” but that doesn’t really help anyone develop a strategy to analyse or create new interactive works. New Media (to use an uncomfortable term) has had its fair share of academic attention, but most of it I have found pretty tedious and often distanced from my own experience of creating and using interactive media. So at the one end we have the media and cultural theorists and at the other we have the HCI folk. In the middle somewhere are the media art aficionados.

At Antirom we were playing with the affordances of the tools, playing with our understanding of narrative structure, playing games and, most importantly, playing at making interactive ‘things’. We were not terribly sure what one should call these ‘things’ that we were making. Sometimes it was tempting to refer to the medium itself, such as CD-ROMs, but this only described the storage format, not the interactive experiences. Partly because many of these interactive experiments were incomplete and partly because we felt they were experiments in play in both their creation and usage, we settled on calling them ‘toys’ for the most part. Sometimes we would take the code guts of one ‘toy’ and re-use or re-combine it with another and these guts we would call an ‘engine’.

Thus, within the same breath, we would use both non-industrial and industrial terminology for the same ‘thing’. It soon became clear to us that the “interactives” (as we now describe them) we were making a marked departure from the media forms that had gone before and that a language to describe them, think about them and create them also had to be invented. The media theory we had imbibed as students, that helped us deconstruct the complex layers of semiotics in traditional media, was rendered weak and impotent.

I couldn’t use HCI or common user-experience frameworks to examine an interactive artwork and at the same time I couldn’t view a commercial website or application design with a media arts lens. Yet I felt I could understand an interactive artwork with the same sensibility as a might analyse a piece of iPhone UI design, but there wasn’t a framework for me to articulate that understanding.

This is what became the subject of my PhD, which explores a still-developing discipline and thus borrows from a wide range of existing, established and not-so-established disciplines. Art and media historians and theorists may feel it does not draw upon enough cultural theory, nor does it draw on the often opaque language of those disciplines. HCI proponents will want more empirical and technical data. Behavioural psychologists may also have wished for more direct experimental data and linguists a deeper examination of the semiotics, semantics and syntax of interactivity.

The key to the whole exploration is play. Understanding how play and playfulness work, what constitutes play (still undefinable) and how much everyone like to engage in play when given the chance, is central to the thesis. But along the way it was necessary to draw upon a wide range of disciplines – from design, art, cognitive science, linguistics and more.

I argue that play is such a fundamental building block of culture, society, technology and cognition that it is the ideal lens through which to examine the interactive experience. It is versatile enough to cross boundaries and fundamental enough to be understood intuitively. Through an understanding of the intersection between movement, embodied cognition, metaphor and play, a set of principles of interactivity are developed that are flexible enough to analyse and be applied to a broad spectrum of interactive experiences, from interactive artworks to services to individual user interface elements.

The four main principles are a deconstruction of the interactive experience, which might last a second or several days. You can squash or stretch the timescale, but I have found the principles to hold true regardless of the context. I’ll post more detail on each one in coming weeks, but here they are for now:

1. The Invitation to Play
2. The Playing Field & the Rules
3. Challenge, Boredom and Anxiety
4. Triviality, Open-endedness, Promises

Writing a thesis like this is like painting a large bridge – once you get to the end, you have to start all over again. Naturally, in the six years it took me to write the thesis (part-time!), technology and culture moved on rapidly. The iPod was in its second generation when I started and the iPad was just about to be released when I finished. The latter was important because it confirmed my thoughts on “the disappearing interface” and the need for a deep understanding of metaphor when examining interactivity.

Social networks also exploded onto the scene as I was writing my PhD. The final section of the thesis is somewhat of a postscript and proposes that these principles provide a way to examine the phenomenal growth of social networks and the fundamental cultural shifts we are experiencing today as a result of the friction generated between emerging networked technologies and the industrial age structures they are dismantling.

In future posts I’ll go into more detail on the various sections, but in the meantime I’d welcome your feedback via the comments or Twitter.

Hi folks – can you help me find some interviewees?

I’m working on some initial research into Ambient Assisted Living with the iHome Lab here in Luzern. The project is about bringing a human-centred design approach to an area that, despite it’s name, is heavily driven by technological development rather than people’s actual needs. (The project is called Human Centred Design for Ambient Assisted Living or HAAL, hence the image above).

To get some initial insights, I want to do some qualitative research interviews with people aged between 55 – 75 (plus or minus a couple of years) to ask them about their current technology usage in the home as well as some thoughts about their plans for their older years.

While the majority of people I want to interview will be fairly average users of home technology, I am also after a few people at the extreme ends. So, people who hate in-home technology and battle with it or people who are totally kitted out with home automation. In those extreme cases, the age range is less relevant because they’ll all be old one day like the rest of us.

If possible, the interviews would be in their homes so they can show me the things they love and hate, but there is some flexibility there (I’m interested in people’s workspaces too).

Some people near me in Germany or in Luzern, Zurich, Bern or Basel in Switzerland would be ideal. Friends, relatives or friends of friends work well because they tend to open up more if there is a link to someone they know.

If anyone has any suggestions for interviewees, please get in touch.

(Image stolen from mediaunbound.com, in turn stolen from ??)

Don Norman has just posted a very provocative and thoughtful piece about the value of design research, or not.

“I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.”

You should read the full article, but he goes on to essentially argue that innovation is driven by technology not needs. This leads him to this: “Myth: Use ethnographic observational studies to discover hidden, unmet needs” and continues:

“But the real question is how much all this helps products? Very little. In fact, let me try to be even more provocative: although the deep and rich study of people’s lives is useful for incremental innovation, history shows that this is not how the brilliant, earth-shattering, revolutionary innovations come about.

“Major innovation comes from technologists who have little understanding of all this research stuff: they invent because they are inventors. They create for the same reason that people climb mountains: to demonstrate that they can do so. Most of these inventions fail, but the ones that succeed change our lives.

He then lists several examples, such as the airplane, the automobile, SMS messaging, etc. that arose from technology, not research. Obviously this touches a nerve for me, because it’s a large part of what I do and teach. I think it’s an important conversation to have, especially in academia, which can often be terribly navel-gazing and/or over-zealous about the importance of a certain avenue of research because it’s what is required to get grant funding. But I think Norman is both right and wrong and also viewing needs and technology from an engineering perspective (which has always been my criticism of him, despite his human centred design views). Here’s the clincher:

“Edison launched his first phonograph company within months of his invention: he never questioned the need. He had invented the paperless office, he announced, and launched his product.”

The thing is, Edison did question the need, he just got it wrong. He thought the need for his invention was the paperless office. It turned out it was to record and sell music. To me, this example just goes to show how important it is to have an insight into people’s lives and examine not what they say they want or need, but what they actually need by watching what they do.

It’s also particularly pertinent in service design because it isn’t necessarily product or technology led. Of course Twitter is a service and one that is both potent and that people never knew they had a need for, but Twitter’s technology isn’t complex. Twitter didn’t arise from an innovative idea to build a chat space, Twitter arose from the idea of modifying an existing paradigm for a certain need.

In some ways I’m arguing my way back into Norman’s final point, which is that real usefulness comes from slow, incremental changes – ‘innovation’ that, in his words, is “least interesting innovations to the university and company research community”. He sums this up as, “technology first, invention second, needs last”. Whilst I agree that iterative processes often create innovation, and I also think that the way society uses a technology for things completely left-field to what it was originally designed for (e.g. SMS) is where some great innovation happens, I still don’t see this as technology coming first. Technology is just a medium through which culture expresses itself and with which people communicate, ultimately.

Technology without any application is either an innovation waiting to happen or something useless sitting in the corner like an old Betamax video recorder. If the need isn’t there, no level of technology helps anyone. I would add that this is a particularly American approach to the role and value of technology in a determinist fashion. It also reminds me of Andy Cameron and Richard Barbrook’s essay, The Californian Ideology.

Steve Portigal and Frog Design’s Adam Richardson have also written thoughtful responses to Norman’s piece, which is how I came across it. Todd Zaki Warfel has also written a rebuttal. [UPDATE: Good post from Nicolas on this over at Pasta & Vinegar. The comments are valuable too.]

A selection of RFID tags from Timo’s Flickr set.

Touch is a research project examining Near Field Communication that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things.

You will have probably used some of them already in your daily life – Oyster cards, swipe cards, etc. (see above image). It’s an interesting cross-over of cultural and social practices and interaction, product and service design with a whole bowl of technology mixed in.

The interdisciplinary team led by Timo Arnell have been teaching at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

For anyone learning about or teaching interaction design and related disciplines, it’s a great resource and they have also put all their design briefs online.

Notes On Design invited Rick Bennett and I to talk about our experiences of long-distance and global online creative collaboration within the Omnium Research Group. We suggested that some of the more interesting conversations we have had have been over a couple of beers in informal settings, so we decided to have a public conversation and publish it online.

You can read the first part of The Conversation over at the Notes On Design blog. In it we talk a bit about our first experiences and thoughts about online collaboration from ten years ago (hard to believe it’s been that long) in the context of what now seems commonplace: social networks and online communities.

The second part, concerning emerging cultural trends and Omnium’s outreach projects follows soon – I’ll post an update here when it’s up.

UPDATE: The second part is now online.

There’s a well-balanced piece from Patrick Wintourin the Guardian today about parents being shown how to protect their children online.

It reports of a government initiative based on a review by Dr Tanya Byron (she works as a consultant in child and adolescent mental health and also presented quite a few programmes for the BBC on the subject).

I’ve only skim-read the main points of the report (which is available for download in full), but it makes interesting reading. The most important aspect is that she goes quite thoroughly through the pros and cons of the use of technologies – from social networks and general internet use to online videogames. It also draws upon a lot of evidence from children themselves.

It’s nice to see Byron is not pedalling the old ‘it rots young minds and they’re all being groomed by pedophiles’ line, by rather she looks at the complexities of the interactions between parents, children, society and technology:

“Ironically parents’ concerns about risk and safety of their children in the streets and outside has driven a generation of children indoors, where it could be argued they are being exposed to a whole new set of risks.”

It’s good to see some of the onus being put back on parents too. The use of these technologies is not inherently better or worse than what children used in previous generations and I’ve lost count of the amount of conversations I’ve had about videogames.

Arguably the use of these technologies are mostly beneficial, especially in the future that children will be growing into. The real problem is that many parents have no idea about how the internet functions, about social spaces online or the culture of videogames and that really needs to change.

It’s good to see this kind of research and well worth a read – it’s well-written too. (There are also quite a few annexed documents about the methodology and brain development research that background the report).

Photo: uncleboatshoes on Flickr

[tags]Tanya Byron, child development, videogames, parenting[/tags]

Chris O’ Shea recently completed Out of Bounds during his residency at the Design Museum. Chris also writes the very good Pixelsumo from which I frequently steal links draw inspiration and I’ve been a little remiss about blogging this earlier, but Chris promised to also put some video documentation up online (which helps explain the project) and also agreed to do a short interview.

Out of Bounds makes real the childhood fantasy of having superhero X-Ray vision to explore parts of the Design Museum that are normally not accessible to the public. It’s also an extremely playful piece that, as Chris puts it, encourages adults to “relinquish the learnt behaviour of adulthood and reconnect with the wonderment of youth.”

Click the read link for the interview….

AP: Congratulations on the Designers in Residence. What was the inspiration behind the idea for Out of Bounds and can you tell us a bit more about it?

COS: When I was first commissioned they wanted me to create a piece of work that responded to a certain space. My idea was to have a projection on the outside of the building, with an interface that would enable people to look into the museum when it was closed to see what was happening after hours. In the end this didn’t work out, as the projection would only work in the evening of course.

I wanted to create an interface that people would be familiar with every day, not some futuristic xray machine. A torch was an obvious choice.

AP: What has been the reaction to it so far? Is it what you imagined or different (interactive works often seem to take on a life of their own).

COS: I’ve watched people using it for a day. They give someone the torch and they don’t know where to point it. Because its infrared they can’t see the light. As soon as the light hits the wall they are very surprised. 80% of people think its some kind of magic and can’t figure it out. Big groups of school children are especially funny, as they try to block the light or make shapes. Some people have mentioned that its very soothing to use. I found that images taken from the same view point of the wall, rather than close ups or odd angles, work better in giving it a realistic feel. Many people think thats it looking through the actual wall to whats on the other side, until they see the room change when the pull the torch away and put it back again.

AP: Do you have any other projects planned for the Design Museum?

COS: No, the residency was just this one commission. Who knows in the future.

AP: I noticed you coded it in C++ and using OpenCV and also openFrameworks -which is still fairly new and in beta – rather than Processing or Director. How has that process been?

COS: Coming from a background in Director and Processing, I was getting frustrated with my options for computer vision, and knew that I would need to learn C++ to do this properly. openFrameworks (OFW) is a set of libraries and a framework wrapped in one package. Like Processing for Java, OFW provides an easier entry point into programming with C++ for these kinds of projects.

I used version 0.01 at a workshop at Ars Electronica. For Out of Bounds I was using 0.02 and a lot had changed. The process has been enjoyable, as its not too hard to get started. The biggest hurdle is changing the mindset from Lingo to C++. The code is completely open source, and I’ve made lots of changes to the core libraries to suit my project, something I’ll tidy up and release later. Although the community is small, Zach & Theo (the founders) are doing a good job of supporting users on the forum and are working hard on the 0.03 release. I’m using OFW on all of my projects at the moment.

AP: How does Out Of Bounds work technically?

COS: The infrared light is invisible to us, but not to a camera that works in low light. So the camera looks at the wall, using a lens filter to block out the projection. Where there is light, it pushes through a depth map to reveal the room. The virtual space is 1024×768 in size with a depth of 255. As you show pixels at different depths, you get the wall, two layers of brick and then the room itself.

AP: Finally, what did you learn from the project?

Infrared torches are very difficult to find because the US has banned import & exports of illuminator products under counter terrorism. Most torches aren’t robust enough if people drop them and they aren’t designed to be running for 9 hours a day. I’d like to get my own infrared torches built one day.

AP: Thank you.

You can view more images of Out of Bounds on Chris’s website as well as a video of it in action (and, yes, it does look like magic).

[tags]pixelsumo, chris o’shea, design museum, interactivity, installation[/tags]

Brilliant clip of Dan Saffer doing the start of his How To Lie With Design Research talk at the 2007 Design Research conference.

If you’ve ever been to pretty much any conference (but especially design education ones) and heard someone just spout nonsense for half an hour, you’ll enjoy Dan pointing out the elephant in the room. It’s worrying how convincing he is in that first minute…

(The video is by David Armano over at Logic+Design).

[tags]interactivity, dan saffer, conference, research[/tags]

There’s a great post on Data Visualization: Modern Approaches over at Smashing Magazine.

Some of them are pretty well-known, like Newsmap and (one of my favourites) We Feel Fine, but there are some newer and more unusual ones in there too as well as some good links in the comments.

There seems to me to be two distinct schools of thought about data visualisation – one is about taking a data set and then creating (usually) static images from them. This I find kind of interesting in that it often displays relationships that you wouldn’t see in a spreadsheet of numbers, etc. The data often seem to be used as the raw material for some kind of Processing-esque algorithm that spits out an image (like the Madonna track image from Shape of Song that I’ve used above).

The second, and in my opinion far more interesting, are data visualisations that are interactive in some way. Now, of course I’m going to say that, but I think there is a great deal to be said for being able to play around with the relationships in data and explore. I think it makes what can often be pretty, but pretty boring, interesting instead. It’s one of the reasons I like We Feel Fine so much – it’s a really playful interface with interaction design that relates to the content perfectly.

Musiclens and Diggstack are pretty nice too. Diggstack – a bit like We Feel Fine – I find fascinating for the ‘Internet in real-time’ aspect of it, rather like Twittervision or the more interesting (content-wise) Flickrvision.

What all of them demonstrate is that core principle of interaction design which is about plugging one thing into another and seeing what happens. It seems to me that everything else is built off of that foundation.

(Via Yacco)