Collective and cumulative - some strategies of everyday design-in-use

Collective and cumulative, some

strategies of every day design-in-use

Andrea Botero / Aalto University School of Art and Design / DOM

Design

"... design is not the creation of discrete, intrinsically meaningful

objects, but the cultural production of new forms of practice…"

Suchman, L; Blomber, J; Orr E; Randall, T (1999) Reconstructing Technologies as social practice in The American Behavioral Scientist,

Vol43 No 3, pp 392.

PROCESS - ACTIVITY

• Solution oriented: work through (in imagination) an intervention in the world

• Use representations of the world to assess the

ways in which the contemplated intervention would change the world and to negotiate a shared vision (stories, drawings, models, simulations, sketches, prototypes)

• Iterate the process, often numerous times, before the design settles into some form

• “look at the whole, pay attention to the

details” (EM)

In-use(2 POV)

• Studying people and use situations to inform design process

• Recognize that a variety of people, through their everyday activities, are already engaged in continuous

and dynamic processes related to

– learning,

– creative appropriation,

–domestication,

– shaping of technology, etc

That can be interesting from a design

pov

Initial questions

– Who is really designing with whom and with what resources is this been achieved? (UCD, PD, )

– What it is that is being designed? (or what is possible to design) (UX, IXD)

– How design work dynamically shifts and drifts from some actors to others -including the artefacts themselves. (Agency, Teams )

– How design decisions are allocated, delegated (or denied) amongst participants (Agency, collaboration, communication)

– (Relationship of all these to broader discussion on “innovation”)

– Who is really designing with whom and with what resources is this been achieved? (UCD, PD, )

– What it is that is being designed? (or what is possible to design) (UX, IXD)

– How design work dynamically shifts and drifts from some actors to others -including the artefacts themselves. (Teams, agency)

– How design decisions are allocated, delegated (or denied) amongst participants (Agency, collaboration, communication)

– (Relationship of all these to broader discussion on “innovation”)

social production, collective action, Life projects, etc (From design POV: logics, problems, possibilities?)

– Who is really designing with whom and with what resources is this been achieved? (UCD, PD, )

– What it is that is being designed? (or what is possible to design) (UX, IXD)

– How design work dynamically shifts and drifts from some actors to others -including the artefacts themselves. (Teams, agency)

– How design decisions are allocated, delegated (or denied) amongst participants (Agency, collaboration, communication)

– (Relationship of all these to broader discussion on “innovation”)

Different divisions of labour and its resulting consequences?

TRENDS/ FADS

• co-creation

• crowdsourcing

• open innovation

• user innovation

• (even) social innovation

CLAIMS: new configurations in productive/creative activities (democratization)

In design?• UCD, PD, co-design, etc have been

creating debates (and

interventions) about new designer/user relationships at least since

the 70’s

–Contributions to the understanding of the landscape available for current design practice are potentially relevant to many issues beyond;

However…

Design research has been mostly concentrating on:

1

• Who should take part, when?

ASSUMPTIONS:

–design work is carried out largely by teams, and it is organized around a project

– It is possible to find the perfect configuration for the team, you just need to try hard enough

2

• What roles suit everyone better, and which new ones should be tried? (specially designers)

ASSUMPTIONS:

– new roles are enough (change in attitude

and few new techniques)

– once we find the right method(s) exercising the right kind of role would be straightforward

3

• Product centric

ASSUMPTIONS:

– Innovation as technical endeavor

(practices?)

– “Firms” as legitimate articulators / locus

• To much focus on WHO we are (Designer? User? Producer?) and

less efforts in understanding WHAT is everybody doing and with what

resulting consequences.

• A lot of efforts concentrated in the fuzzy front end

• risk of turning efforts into an issue of mere commodification of user involvement

Engestr

öm

, Y.

(2008).

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nots

: Stu

die

s o

f Collabora

tion a

nd L

earn

ing a

t W

ork

(1st

ed.)

. Cam

bridge

Univ

ers

ity P

ress.

Need better understanding

• It is not enough to say that “everyone designs” but how? To what extent? What?

• Dynamics of collective and collaborative endeavors (from a design POV), in contemporary conditions (firms/organizations? solo/teams/something else?)

• The role and contribution of design activities (and not just of “designers” or “users”)

• Look before, after and to the sides of the concept design stage (fuzzy

front end)

• Take seriously design-in-use (identified as key component but

remains largely under supported and under developed)

2 cases

• Both are areas where some examples of “users” initiate

development (marginally)

• Picture is more complex than producer-user and designer-user

(government, civic sector, etc)

• New media as component in re-configuring the “sector”

1. A collective project of communal senior living based on neighborliness, self-help and open decision process (http://aktiviisetseniorit.fi).

(ADIK Project – Emerging Digital Practices of Communities. TEKES)

-Articulation between several “projects”

-Success of a failure

-Choices, material maters (e.g Limits of CMS, no place for relationships)

“seeding”

prototype

based on existing

component /

DW Beta

Scenarios

2. Emerging urban forms of civic participation (activists, government, average citizen, etc). Sharing knowledge about the city

(ICING Project Innovative cities for the next generation)

- role of digital technologies (location-based services) in facilitating citizen participation in issues related to the urban environment and in building new relationships to the city administration

- Issue reporting vs issue sharing

- Active citizenship? (different actors imagine new forms of citizenship)

A UM Point

documents

questionable decisions of

some fellow

citizens (UM

v1.0 - mobile

UI).

A UM Topic

gathering

contributions for new skating

park locations.

The UI features

a map view

populated by UM Points (UM

v 1.0)

• Interesting and crucial co-design opportunities happened in design-in-use (many opportunities for collaboration and collective action)

– Cumulative (Design Space)

– Collective (hybrid)

Design-in-use realities

• Ad-hoc/mundane: does not necessarily involve

reflection as sometimes it can be side project or a distraction from the real “project”

• Can easily settle down for some solution, sometimes the first one, which addresses the concern enough

• Full consideration of the consequences of design decisions, and the benefits that arise from exploring a design space more thoroughly are not by default present.

• Not straightforward to document for sharing and learning, for collaboration (explicitly)

Design space (fairly common term used – by different disciplines-rarely defined)

– the space of possibilities for realizing a design, which extends beyond the concept design stage into the design-in-use activities of people

• 1) a design space is always actively co-constructed and explored by multiple actors through their social interactions with and through technologies and

• 2) the participating actors, resources, conditions and supporting strategies frame the design space available

Design Space, some examples

In design-in-use

• Effectiveness/ quality / success of designs is highly dependant on the “design space” that a collective sees (imagine and/or available)

• Design interventions affect the design space (expand or contract it)

• Recognize mundane everyday designs and the opportunities for

collaboration that they entail

• Weaving together of project at design time and projects at use

time

KNOTWORKING

• In-between infras (rehearse collective and cumulative “rapid

prototyping”) this has implications for the capabilities of the actors

involved to initiate innovations and understand the broader design spaces that are available to them

• Negotiation, scaffolding and seeding strategies

Some implications for design (professionla9

• Better ways to make the “design space” more visible/accessible to

all involved

• Identifying (and increasing) design capabilities; not only identifying

needs (REF: SEN)

• If there are new roles perhaps midwifing could be good new

benchmark ;-)

gracias

Andrea Botero

andrea.botero@aalto.fi