Enacting Design for the Workplace

International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 2003

The concept of design in the context of Human-Computer Interaction is discussed based on definitions from industrial design to the very practical problem of achieving usability in industrial projects in practice. Design is an important quality of a product that today has not been receiving enough attention when it comes to computerised artefacts. But design is also a process of creating the user's experience of a system and this paper focuses more on design as a creative process of communication than on a posteriori product quality aspects. The Scandinavian tradition has herein been very influential in stressing the importance of the users participating actively in a usercentred design process. The paper defines and discusses user-centred design in the light of the theories of communication as put by Herbert Clark. Communication is identified as one of the key issues that need to be addressed in order to achieve well functioning user-centred design. The paper discusses different terminology and gives examples from a theory on common ground. Finally, mock-ups, prototypes and video are discussed as tools for facilitating communication and construction of common ground.

2004

This paper explores the expertise in industrial (product) design and contribution of knowledge generated trough the design research. Within this approach the research is situated within the social structure that constitutes people, activity, context and culture where an artifact is seen to be a mediator for the generation of new knowledge and its application. The paper concludes about the importance of research and practice integration and points out that situating the research around the artifacts, as mediators of knowledge, is transferable to Human-Computer Interaction field and any other area of the design research Author

(Re) searching the Digital Bauhaus, 2009

In this essay I explore a view of design that emphasizes the multiplicity of relationships between designer, the community for whom the design is intended and the development of the design over time. Rather than focus on the design as produced, attention here is given to the network of design relationships that makes design possible and to how we enter into those relationships.

1995

This essay proposes new contours for design as a profession in a world whose industrial products have become more and more language-like and incommensurate discourses compete with one another for hegemony-the being merely one of many. It takes design to be constituted (that is, defined with)in processes of languaging. It calls on us to recognize and act in the awareness of how our discursive practices identify us as the experts we are, create the objects of our concerns, and provide us with a vocabulary to communicate or coordinate our actions relative to each other. design discourse The motivation for this essay stems from the far too common experience that whenever designers do work with their counterparts from the so-called 'harder' disciplines, professionals who can argue with statistics, with experimental findings, with calculations or from positions of administrative authority, they most often lose out. Examples are abound. I conclude from them that, first, designers often are preoccupied with products when what matters is how their ideas occur in talk, in clear presentations, in hard evidence, and in compelling arguments. It is communication that makes a difference and gets results. Second, design is foremost conceptual and creative of future conditions. Dwelling on existing facts often inhibits and is generally less important than the ability to bring a multiplicity of people to recognize the benefits of collaborating in the realization of new ideas. Designers are bound to fail when they do not act on the premise that their conceptualizations must make sense to those that matter. Third, the success of famous designers is based primarily on carefully nourished publicity, personal connections, or longtime working relationships with clients. The visual qualities and functionalities in terms of which designers justify their work are never obvious and mostly derivative of their social standing. Forth, facing increasingly sophisticated stakeholders in material culture, designers' claim of possessing superior visual sensibilities has lost much of its appeal and is easily countered even by entirely irrelevant but voluminous data, impressive calculations, predictions, or business arguments. In sum, current. I contend that this need not be so. design discourse has lost much of its rhetorical strength With this in mind, my essay explores what makes engineering (including ergonomic), sociological (including marketing), and economic (including business) discourse so compelling and what makes current industrial design discourse rather easily discountable, wherever they happen to meet. Against the emerging knowledge of how discourses behave, this essay then locates several weaknesses, I am inclined to say " ," inherent in design discourse, and ends up proposing ways of overcoming these. pathologies At the center of this proposal is an astonishingly simple , one that is at least as irrefutable as the axioms of other disciplines with whom designers typically need to collaborate. This axiom holds the promise of an indigenous vocabulary that could make design discourse compelling, gives rise to new research questions, even to a new science for design, suggests a unique identity for designers, and thus creates exciting possibilities heretofore unavailable.

In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Creativity and Innovation in Design (Desire’11), 2011

In recent years the design research community has been active in developing new methods for user involvement and collaboration in the design process. The new methods, often called innovative design methods, correspond more to designer's genuine ways of thinking and working than do traditional user-centered ones. The entire purpose of innovative method is to allow for designer's creativity in the design of method and reflective learning, instead of relying on predefined rules of method. For this reason, codification and scientific evaluation are often regarded very challenging, if meaningful at all. This leads us to raise a question; what could be relevant ways of framing and communicating innovative design methods to better capture their nature and value?

In this chapter we offer a framework for thinking about the design of technology. Our approach draws on critical perspectives from both social theory and science and technology studies (STS). We understand design to be the process of consciously shaping an artifact to adapt it to specific goals and environments. Our framework conceptualizes design as a process whereby technical and social considerations converge to produce concrete devices that fit specific contexts. How this happens – and the possibility that it might happen differently – is a crucial point for philosophers and other students of technology to consider. To date, design studies have been focused predominantly on the work of what we might call proximate designers, while work in the field of STS has focused on the role of non-designers such as clients, stakeholders, and other socially relevant groups. However, little attention has been paid to ways in which historical choices and cultural assumptions about technology shape the design process. Our goal is to address this oversight. We begin by posing a seemingly simple question: is design intentional? A review of the literature draws our attention to at least three possible levels of analysis: that of proximate designers, the immediate design environment, and broader society. We then present a critical theory of technology that provides a non-deterministic, non-essentialist approach to the study of technology. We argue that critical theory, with its emphasis on examining taken-for-granted assumptions, offers a theoretical space for thinking differently about design. Finally, we discuss the possibilities opened up by critical theory and some of the obstacles that stand in the way of realizing a richer world of design.

Design Issues, 2020

To resolve the problem of design marginalization in organizations, we introduce the concept of institution and an Aristotelian framework for human activity to identify an action-based approach for design in complex systems. When design is positioned solely as an activity of production—despite the success of human-centered products—it misses an opportunity to influence institutions, or the human-side of organizations. When repositioned as a practice of shaping action, design engages in the ordering, modifying and reordering of social structures, environments and culture. In short, a theory of institution provides a human-centered approach to systems design and organizational transformation.

Designing progresses through continuous refinement of models. In today's design practice, these models get created and refined by multi-cultural, multidisciplinary teams that speak different languages, whether these languages are spoken language, disciplinary, or organizational language. When these people come together, they create, negotiate, evolve, and manage a nascent language with which they communicate the meaning of the product they design. The nascent language is a pidgin articulated through cognitive artifacts. Thus their role is essential to designing and their management is critical to successful completion of the process. In contrast, their mismanagement quickly presents itself as design failures, sometimes catastrophic. Given their role, it is critical to understand what cognitive artifacts are, how they are constructed, and how they should be managed. This marks a shift from focusing on the artifact to the process of designing as a social, negotiated process. Such a view results in conceiving designing as a complex and emergent process with implications for design research, practice and pedagogy.

Design Philosophy Papers, 2013

A range of alternative formulations of design, such as ‘social’, ‘activist’, ‘critical’, ‘relational’, ‘humanitarian’ design, are amassing.[1] Instead of focusing on form and function, such formulations typically focus on what design produces. At stake in the social turn within design is reconsideration of what design is about – not in terms of its objects but, and perhaps even more fundamentally, its subjects. Further, contemporary design oriented toward the public realm in multiple contexts involves a diversity of possible subjects and political subjectivities. ‘Participation’ has been an approach to addressing social questions in design. Participation has been linked, for example, to “a mindset and attitude about people” [2] and a kind of ‘design humanism’ aimed at reducing domination,[3] which meets the human ideal of mutual support for altruism, a ‘collective instinct of humanity’.[4] In a range of associated projects and practices in recent years, methodologies have been applied to involve more or different people directly in product development processes. Indeed, participation may itself be seen as the objective of design processes.[5] Concern, however, often tends towards methods for improving design objects, with certain questions about its subjects left under-examined or posed in overly general and loaded terms that might be further interrogated. In this paper, we query participation in design in order to discuss some of the problematics of relating to ‘others’ in practices of design and design research. We argue, as do other design thinkers, for practices involving “micro-political participation in the production of space”,[6] in which design frames and stages the (re)production of social as well as spatial relations. We argue for increased reflexivity about how others participate in design and the political implications. Here, ‘the political’ refers to the issue of who is identified and represented as a subject in studies and practices of design. Concerned with the social organization of everyday life, the design role is always engaged with “confrontation of power relations and influence by the identification of new terms and themes for contestation and new trajectories for action”.[7]

Proceedings of Design and Complexity, DRS conference, 2010

This paper introduces an analytical framework for understanding the collaborative nature and distributed structure of what is often referred to as design space. We propose that the design space should be conceptualized as the space of possibilities for realizing a design, which extends beyond the concept design stage into the design-in-use activities of people. By locating different activities and mapping participants' possibilities in a continuum from consumption to active creation, we develop a framework for understanding and locating design research interventions and a tool for mapping design activities. We argue that: 1) a design space is always actively coconstructed 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. In doing this, we bring forth relationships between an expanded view of the design space, contemporary discussions on the nature of innovation and the imperative to support explicit collaborative and participatory design activities.