Download - Critical Design :: Restoring a sense of wonder to Interaction Design

Critical Design :: Restoring a sense of wonder to Interaction Design

Michael Smyth & Ingi HelgasonCentre for Interaction DesignEdinburgh Napier University, UK@michael_smyth

Saturday, 4 February 12

Digital Blur, Libri Publishing (2010).


Create10 Conference and Showcase, Edinburgh.


We live in a world where everything seems possible and as a consequence have lost the sense of wonder.

Branko Lukic, NonObject, MIT Press (2011)


Where do these moments of design inspiration come from?


Interaction Design takes a more ‘designerly’ approach than HCI and considers both the problem and solution in a more fluid and intertwined manner.


One method favoured by Interaction Designers is ethnography.

Observation that aims to provide insight into work, culture and behavioural practices.


Ethnography uncovers meaning, it does not identify problems or solutions.


A tension between the pressure of solution-focused design practice and ethnography’s concern with meanings and culture.


Where is the WOW in ethnography?


Critical Design acts as a catalyst or provocation for thought (Anthony Dunne, 1999).


Critical Design challenges our assumptions and preconceptions about the role that products and services play in everyday life.


Street Art (Tom Welsh, 2009).


Video as a way of understanding the design space.

Layers of meaning.


This Pervasive Day, Edinburgh (2011).


A Design Fiction exploring the surreptitious capture of personal data.


Fictitious personal data matched with your image.


Aim was to encourage people to question whether this was a desirable future?


digitalAntique :: Split Interactions, Croatia (2011).


Exploring the connections between past and present.


Articulating the values of the present and getting people to reflect on them.


The universality of values.


Preckam Most :: Crossing the Bridge, Interaction Design Workshop, Magdalena Festival, Slovenia (2009).


An intervention that sought to slow down people’s journeys, to view the mundane and familiar in fresh ways.


Crossing the bridge became a different experience.


The act of taking photographs altered perspectives on everyday routines.


Informing the Design of the Future Urban Landscape, DIS 2010, Aarhus, Denmark.


bleed points.

Intersections & crossing points between the physical & digital worlds.


Building on scrapbooks, sketches & moodboards.


Inspiring conceptual connections between tangible objects & imagined behaviours.


The coupling of gathering and reflecting and what that process reveals.


Ethnography :: minutiae of the now (discovery).

Critical Design :: how things could be (exploration).


No-one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No-one cares about what you do, unless you think about what you do.

Jack Schulze, BERG London


www.michael-smyth.co.ukwww.complexpleasures.wordpress.comwww.create-conference.orgwww.urbanixd.org


http://www.michael-smyth.co.uk

http://www.michael-smyth.co.uk

http://www.complexpleasure.wordpress.com

http://www.complexpleasure.wordpress.com

http://www.create-conference.org

http://www.create-conference.org

http://www.urbanixd.org

http://www.urbanixd.org