week 5. student presentation

Student presentation: Figure 1. 13 examples of design research artifacts.

week 4. introducing "Design Research Artifacts"

1. Introduction to "Design Research Artifacts"

week 3. reading introduction (II)

 continue reading "introduction"

week 2. reading "introduction"

1. 修辭研究，動詞及同義詞整理 (以九宮格)

2. 結構分析:  B P M R C
 
    將 Introduction 放在中間，Background 摘句放在上方，Purpose 摘句放在右方， Method/Question 摘句放在下方， Result/Conclusion摘句放在左方。

3. 概念吸收與討論


Homework 1:
Deadline: 3/18
將 Introduction 重新改寫成 400 字以內的摘要。
使用 http://www.books.com.tw/products/0010479949 或  http://www.books.com.tw/products/0010323464 的範例句型。

week 1. introduction

Slow reading project:
"James Pierce. 2014. On the presentation and production of design research artifacts in HCI. InProceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 735-744."


好消息:  一學期只讀一篇論文。
壞消息:  一學期只讀一篇論文。

甚麼是徹底研究?
如何徹底研究?


靈感來源:

百歲老師的奇蹟教室：不用國文教科書，成為升學第一名校的秘密！

week 15. critical design

Critical design and critical theory: the challenge of designing for provocation

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2318001


1. p288
   Designers' judgement vs. analysis & reasoning activity


Over the past two decades, there has been increasing interest in design in human-computer interaction. Of particular
concern is constructive design research [27], also known as
research through design [16, 18, 33, 35], where design activity in the form of constructing artifacts becomes a central
research activity. In this work, design experience in the
form of designers’ judgments is equally important to the
analysis and reasoning activities that are common to all
kinds of research.

2.
   constructive design 可以從 “想像未來" 展開, 不一定要 fieldwork, theory...


Like other kinds of research, constructive 
design research may start from the result of fieldwork, theories of human behavior, or application of a particular design
approach, but often, it can start with just imagining future 
states, and in HCI, how technology can improve the current
state of human existence.

3. critical design 的定義, by Dunne:
  吸引 viewers 進入 the world of ideas 而非 objects.


producing conceptual electronic products that encourage
complex and meaningful reflection on inhabitation of a
ubiquitous, dematerializing, and intelligent environment: a
form of social research to integrate critical aesthetic experience with everyday life…. I hope in my approach I have
retained the popular appeal of industrial design while using
it to seduce the viewer into the world of ideas rather than
objects. Industrial design locates its object in a mental
space concerned with identity, desire, and fantasy and
shaped by media.... Again, I hope this remains intact but is
subverted to challenge the aesthetic values of both consumers and designers. (p. 147)

4. p. 289



In short, critical design
proposes an approach to provocation（挑釁), rather than design as
rearranging surface features according to the latest fashion
while obfuscating (使困惑) the norms and conventions inscribed in
the designs and their use.


5.


A new
book on constructive design research details three different
approaches: Lab, Field, and Showroom [27].

...

In the  Field examples, design researchers
employ lightweight versions of social science methods to
understand the current state, and then use methods from
design practice to create new things that express a preferred
state.





 Showroom, Koskinen et al.’s term for critical
design, is different. The description in the book talks about
the theoretical influences, but does provide a sketch of how
methods might be put together to complete a project.

6. In other words,
one might desire a description of critical design as an approach to account for both (a) products that generate dilemmas or confusions among users in such a way that users
are encouraged to expand their interpretative horizons or
rethink cultural norms; and (b) the sorts of design processes
that could lead to those kinds of products.

7.  p. 290

  4 種 整合 critical theory 和 design 的 困難:

(1) Critical theory offers little insight about how to make 
things.

  CT: a verbal tradition,  new theories, critiques, and insights
  D: an embodied making tradition,  design materials

(2) Critical theory tends to be anti-method.

(3) Critical theory emphasizes the meanings and effects of cultural artifacts over their creation.
(4) Critical theory generally tends not to focus on the author of  a work as an individual creative agent

critical theory 不關心 intention (of author)


But if design can be defined as intentional change [30],
critical theory’s disinterest in intention becomes a limitation
of its applicability to design.


8.
  我們已經習慣  不受限於 creators' intention


We, too, were trained to seek
to understand the effects of cultural artifacts without limiting our inquiry to what their creators intended. Likewise,
we can understand why Gaver, like Derrida before him,
rejects “method” as a description of his approach.


9.
What we seek, then, is a middle ground between critical
design as an elitist mystery, like art itself, and critical design as a step-wise cookbook description of design practice.
We recognize that the subjective expertise of the designer is
a crucial factor that no method, approach, set of practices,
etc., can capture or simulate.

THE CRITICAL DESIGN PROCESS
10.
  先找出 挑釁的點

Among
the most basic decisions in a critical design project is identifying which aspects of the present world we wish to provoke, a process that can be enriched through an engagement
with relevant critical theory literatures.


11.  2 cases of critical design

Significant Screwdriver (SS)


As  a starting point, it seemed to us that design could be used to  transgress rather then reinforce social norms.

Whispering Wall (WW)

Another place where we might transgress rather then reinforce social norms was in the space of a health club or gym.


12.


Breakdowns in operationalizing critical theory in design
often occur because whereas theory is often descriptive,
providing frameworks or models that serve as organizing
constructs [17], design itself is actionable, creating prototypes that suggest preferred future states. As in any design
activity, in making the leap from descriptive to generative,
the designer must make judgments about how to proceed.

13.

This breakdown exposes that
in critical design, the linkage between (verbally-based) theory and the embodied design practices of decision-making
and observations of use in deployment is problematic.
Overcoming this is not something that can be derived from
critical theory resources alone (i.e., in this case, feminist
theory only got us so far), due to the fact that design as critical resource  and  textual discourses about design  are different kinds of epistemological resources.

14. p.294

   輕微的  陌異化 是關鍵


As
Dunne and Raby write, “A slight strangeness is the key—
too weird and they are instantly dismissed, not strange
enough and they’re absorbed into everyday reality…” [15,
p.63].

輕微的  陌異化  可以考量跨越 conceptual, functional, material, aesthetic 等等層面.

Our experience suggests that achieving this “slight
strangeness” is anything but straightforward, as it plays out
across conceptual, functional, material, and aesthetic dimensions of design in complex ways. Often, designers rapidly generate and iterate on solutions as a way to reason
about a problem space; when the problem space itself is
transgression and provocation, some of our more familiar
strategies will undoubtedly come up short.


15.
  how design students do vs. engineering ones:


As designers, we have considerable experience evaluating
sketches, directions, and prototypes in the context of design
briefs and situations—even ill-defined ones—both in the
studio and in the field.

16.


Provocation can be socially uncomfortable, and subjects
may not expect to be provoked when consenting to participate in a study. Researchers need to be prepared for and be
ready to handle such discomfort.



17.

Indeed, it was through conversations in which he was initiated as a peer researcher, rather than research subject, that
this participant gradually began to buy into it.

18. p. 295


Both of these patterns suggest that in a critical design study,
not only does the research destabilize the topics of inquiry,
but it also destabilizes the relationship between researchers
and research participants.



19.

In short, design researchers deploying
critical designs need to be prepared for everything to be
challenged, negotiated, and subject to fundamental change.

20.

Critical design as a discursive methodology


Critical Design 中, 連 framing 也是 unknown:

In traditional user research, the research objective is to establish user needs and requirements. What is unknown are
relevant behaviors, attitudes, and functional needs of a target population. In critical design research, the framing itself 
is part of the unknown.



...

We were not out to discover folk theories of gender in
gyms and homes; the critical designs were meant to transgress them and provoke discussion about that.

21.
  重點不是收集使用者所說的話, 而是 協同思索與推思索與推論

we
didn’t just collect what they said but engaged with them
intellectually—the result was a practice of collaborative 
speculative reasoning grounded on a critical design that was
itself informed by a combination of cultural theories and
folk theories.

22.
   3 lessons from critical designs:

(1) Provocativeness
(2) Deep relationship

When using critical design in the future, we will design the
prototypes and interactions with participants with the goal
of developing a deeper relationship. We allow for repeated
and rich encounters in order to explore how participants’
insights and behaviors change as they use the design to
probe the research team’s intentions. 

(3) Fluidity of research plan

..., it seems that critical design
might best use theory to sensitize designers and to inspire
the intention of the provocations, but that we cannot and
should not force that theory to delimit the trajectory of the
work once it has been placed into the world. We raise this
as a concern for others who may wish to use critical design
as a way of operationalizing a theoretical framework.

week 14. designing for homo ludens, still

Gaver, design for homo ludens. still


1. p. 2


The real revolution is that
computing is leaving the confines of task-oriented, focused, rational work, and
joining us in our homes, on the street, at parties, on lonely mountaintops –
everywhere, in short, where we leave work behind to do the things we really
want to do.

2.

As computing has emerged
from the office and laboratory, it seems to have brought along values of the
workplace: concerns for clarity, efficiency and productivity; a preoccupation (全神貫注)
with finding solutions to problems. It is as if they mirror only the ethnographic
view that ordinary life requires work to achieve, and neglect the joyful, poetic,
and spiritually rewarding nature of the lives we might find.

3.

The idea of Homo Ludens – humans defined as playful creatures (Huizinga, J.,
1950) – is an antidote (解毒劑) to assumptions that technology should provide clear,
efficient solutions to practical problems.

4. p. 3

An aimless walk in the city centre, a moment of awe, a short-lived
obsession, a joke – all are defining and valuable facets of our humanity, as
worthy of respect as planning, logic or study.
...

Play goes well beyond
entertainment: it’s a serious business.


PLAY vs. GAMING

5.
GAMING:  

Taking sides, victory, and defeat, all irrelevant in
play, are the chief requisites of game. In play one is carefree; in a game one is
anxious about winning.
(Kaprow, 2003, p. 122)


PLAYING:

Play, of the sort that might provide a relief from our obsession with work, is
not the same as games or pre-programmed entertainment. Not only are these
forms of ‘play’ fundamentally goal-oriented, but in striving for a defined
outcome they impose rules about the right and wrong ways to go about things.

PLAY vs. ENTERTAINMENT
6. p. 4
ENTERTAINMENT:


Entertainments themselves are designed
with the same concern for efficiently and predictably producing a result – an
‘experience’ – as any online marketing site is for producing a sale.
...

On the contrary, it co-opts (將...選為新成員) play into the same singleminded, results-oriented, problem-fixated mindset that we have inherited
from the workplace.



PLAY:


In order to truly leave work behind, we need to embrace an open-ended, selfmotivated form of play. This is an engagement that has no fixed path or end,
but instead involves a wide-ranging conversation with the circumstances and
situations that give it rise.


7. p. 8

ludic design 較少談 value, 而較多 interaction concept


More recent examples of ludic design focus less on the novelty of the values
they support and more on exploring a different conception of interaction
itself. They let go of the idea of desirable goals or outcomes to the point that
one can say they aren’t ‘for’ anything at all. Instead, they create situations
that people can explore and interpret for a variety of reasons and from
diverse frames of reference. As goals are relinquished (放棄), so are notions of
problems to be solved or preferred courses of interaction to be encouraged.
Instead, designs are better thought of as offering resources to people to make
use of as they see fit.


8. p. 10
...we expected them to orient to the Tracker
around issues of noise and disruption. Instead, they engaged with it in many
different ways: as a window onto places they had been or wanted to go, as a
spur to wanderlust or an uneasy reminder of the environmental effects of air
travel, as a puzzle to be solved, an aesthetic object and an alternative to
television.
...

It simply created a situation that people could explore
conceptually, finding their own meanings and significances over time.


9. p. 11


They raise these issues, but
don’t provide answers. Instead, they offer avenues for people to experience
life from new perspectives, and to consider hypotheses about who we might be
or what we might care about. They hint at possibilities for technologies that
we could use in our everyday life, not to accomplish well-defined tasks, but to
expand in undefined directions.


IMPLY FOR METHODOLOGIES:

10.

First, scientific approaches to design need to be complemented by more
personal, idiosyncratic ones.
...

Instead, designers need to use their personal experiences as
sounding boards for the systems they create.


P. 12


At their most prosaic, Probe materials can resemble stylised
questionnaires (see Boehner et al.. 2007), but more uncompromising (不妥協的) versions
thwart (反對) easy interpretation, disrupting stereotyped roles and requiring active
sense-making both from researchers and the researched. The returns from
such materials are neither clear nor definitive, but they are evocative,


11.

Second, designing for Homo Ludens means allowing room for people to
appropriate technologies.


Playing involves pursuing one’s inner narratives in
safe situations, through projective interpretation and action. If computational
devices channel people’s activities and perceptions too closely, then people
have to live out somebody else’s story, not their own (c.f. Wejchert, 2001).




12.  詮釋的調適,  之策略:


We have explored two primary tactics for encouraging interpretative
appropriation.

The first, embodied by the Drift Table and Plane Tracker
described earlier, involves creating situations that suggest topics for
consideration based on the resources they provide, while standing back from
offering clear recommendations about how such situations should be
construed. (self-effacing, 自我消音)



a second strategy is to exaggerate the content and authority of
interpretations offered by systems. This may serve as a provocation for people
to assert their own understandings as a correction.



13. p. 14

Whether employing under- or over-statement, both these strategies rely on
ambiguity to encourage appropriation. The first says too little, obliging users
to fill in the rest, while the second says too much, compelling them to correct
it.
...

ambiguity gives space for
people to intermesh their own stories with those hinted at by technologies.

14.

When systems are designed to be ambiguous, avoiding clear interpretation
and normative paths of action, it is impossible in principle to predict how
people will engage with them. In a very real sense, such designs are completed
by their users. Sometimes this can be left as a thought experiment, as the
Alternatives proposals were, for instance when implementation is difficult or
the ideas too simple to warrant the effort. But usually it is more satisfactory to
deploy such designs as prototypes to witness their completion through use.

15.


Here again, the approach to studying designs in use benefits from a divergent,
personal approach rather than the convergent, objective one advocated by
traditional scientific perspectives.

After all, designs are not hypotheses to be
tested simply as true or false, successful or unsuccessful. They may be
approached at multiple levels, ranging from the aesthetic to the conceptual
and the personal to the cultural.




16. 愉悅先於理解:


Last, and most important, pleasure comes before understanding, and
engagement before clarity.

Designing for Homo Ludens requires a new focus
that seeks intrigue and delight at all levels of design, from the aesthetics of
form and interaction, to functionality, to conceptual implications at
psychological, social and cultural levels.
This implies that designers cannot
stand back, pronouncing as experts on situations they do not engage with
personally.Instead, they need to seek a kind of empathy
...

17.
設計不能只強化已知的愉悅, 必須提出新的.


For
technologies should not only reinforce pleasures that people know, but they
should suggest new ones as well. Designers cannot simply efface themselves
while seeking to fulfil people’s articulated desires.

...

理論只能有限度地使用


And this implies that theories, those attempts to
analyse and abstract from the messy complexity of lived experience, will have
limited purchase and provide limited support. In the end, designers
themselves need to be Homo Ludens. We need to recognise that we are playful
creatures, and that our work depends on our play.



18.

Now itseems we are over the brink and well into a transformation of research
methods, concepts, and practices: a ‘new paradigm’ (see Harrison et al., 2007)
for understanding technology. If we are lucky, this new paradigm won’t work –
it will play.