2016年6月12日 星期日

week 17. final week

student presentation (Hertzian Tales) III

final report:
1000 字心得。
Deadline: June 22, 2016.

2016年5月3日 星期二

week 11. critical design & critical theory



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) productsthat 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 discussionabout 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.
Case Studies:
Next week, students present "Make It Critical" cases on:
  http://www.michaelstallings.me/content/MakeItCritical/MakeItCritical_Document.pdf
(from p. 39 ~)

2016年4月19日 星期二

week 9. humanistic HCI

Humanistic HCI in ACM Interaction

1. HCI reaches out.
"Key examples include the rise of aesthetics as an approach to user experience design [2]; the introduction of “reflective HCI” [3] to reposition the field with a more self-critical stance; as well as the use of feminist [4], queer [5], and postcolonial [6] approaches to emancipatory computing."

2. The humanities reach in.
" As alternatives, Winograd and Flores introduced Heideggerian phenomenology, biological accounts of cognition and language, and speech act theory to HCI. Offering an epistemological critique of the field as a whole and introducing an alternative epistemological stance are philosophical activities. It is easy to see that Winograd and Flores’s seminal work was in fact humanistic HCI, even if no one at that time was using the term."

3. What is Humanistic HCI?
". It is not the same as digital humanities, which is humanistic research supported by digital technologies, and which is by and large practiced by humanistic scholars (see, e.g., [9])."

"Humanistic HCI operates in the opposite direction: It is HCI research and practice that is supported by humanistic practices, theories, and methods."

4. History and tradition
"Many HCI systems are presented with little to no reference to their own historical genealogies, and the field itself has no significant histories beyond a generally shared sense that HCI has had three paradigms or waves [13,14]."

" Our expectation is that interaction design and/or HCI (whatever their relation is or will become, exactly) will develop much more of a historical sensibility in the coming decade."

5. Conceptual analysis
" During its rise in the 19th century, science began to displace philosophy as the knowledge discipline best able to account for the world. What was philosophy’s role in a scientific era? One answer was that philosophy ceased to provide doctrines and instead became an activity directed at the clarification of thoughts. As the early Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations” [15]. Philosophy was thus moving away from producing original systems and toward the disciplined analysis of the concepts we think with."

Summary:
" overall humanistic dispositions: the attempt to take on a situation or work that is in some sense confusing; to do so holistically (rather than analyzed and operationalized into well-defined parts); to bring clarity to it; and to do so in a way that orients itself toward emancipatory change (diversely defined)."

Humanistic HCI  Practices and Methods
1. Excursus: The expert subject.
2. Interaction criticism.
3. Critical discourse analysis.
   " HCI examples of such critiques include studies of cultural probes [25], affective computing [26], and sustainable making [27]."
4. Critical social science
5. Design futuring.
 "These strategies are commonly deployed in speculative design, critical design, design fictions, and science and utopian fiction"
6. Emancipatory HCI.



錯字不扣分,「沒想法」一定低分






2016年4月12日 星期二

week 8. the three paradigms of HCI


The Three Paradigms of HCI
1. 1st paradigm: engineering/human factors
2. 2nd paradigm: cognitive science
3. 3rd paradigm: phenomenological matrix:
       "...addressing issues that are bad fits to prior paradigms, ranging from embodiment to situated meaning to values and social issues."

"These include participatory
design, value-sensitive design, user experience
design, ethnomethodology, embodied interaction, interaction
analysis, and critical design." (p. 2)

"a third (“3rd”) paradigm, which treats interaction not as a
form of information processing but as a form of meaning
making in which the artifact and its context at all
levels are mutually defining and subject to multiple interpretations." (p. 2)

強行將舊的 paradigm 套用到 HCI 的後果:
 "when force-fitting new insights to old paradigms
CHI fails to capitalize on the full value of these approaches." (p. 3)

 沒有清楚的認識論, 會限制 HCI 的發展:
"(3) the lack of clarity about the
epistemological distinctions between paradigms is a
limiting factor in the development of the field,..." (p. 3)

Thomas Kuhn's theory of the structure of scientific revolutions:
"A paradigm shift, then, is accompanied by a shift
in the examples which are considered to be central to
the field." (p. 3)

"In particular, Agre argues, following a long line of research
in scientific metaphor, that technical fields tend
to be structured around particular metaphors which
suggest the questions that are interesting to ask and
methods for arriving at answers to them. So, for example,
the metaphor underlying cognitive science –
that human minds are like information processors –
suggests questions it could be interesting to ask - how
humans process their input, how they represent information
internally, how they access memory, etc. - and
also suggests methods for finding answers to those
questions, for example that we can effectively model
human mental activity using computational code and
validate these models by comparing computational and
human input and output."  (p. 4)

"Following Agre, we argue that central to each paradigm
in HCI is a different metaphor of interaction. Each such
metaphor introduces ‘centers’ and ‘margins’ that drive
choices about what methods are appropriate for studying
and designing interaction and for how knowledge
claims about interaction can be validated." (p. 4)

為何 usability study 對 non-task-oriented interaction 無效?
"A fourth set of issues arises out of the domain of nontask-
oriented computing. These approaches tend to
be bad fits to the 1st and 2nd paradigms, whose methods
tend to require problems to be formalized and expressed
in terms of tasks, goals and efficiency - precisely
what non-task-oriented approaches are intended
to question. It is difficult, for example, to apply usability
studies to ambient interfaces, since standard
evaluation techniques are ‘task-focused’ in the sense of
asking users to pay attention to and evaluate the interface,
precisely what the system is devised to avoid." (p. 4)

Embodiment 在三種 paradigms 的角色:
1. In human factors, attention is paid to such factors as the fit of a mouse to the human hand or the amenability of particular font sizes to be easily read.
2. Cognitively based work in HCI has laid out physical constraints that usefully inform interface
design such as the speed at which humans are able to react in various situations.
3. Embodiment in the 3rd paradigm is based on a different, central stance drawing on phenomenology: that the way in which we come to understand the world, ourselves, and interaction derives crucially from our location in a physical and social world as embodied actors.

"A focus on embodied interaction
moves from the 2nd paradigm idea that thinking is
cognitive, abstract, and information-based to one
where thinking is also achieved through doing things in
the world, for example expression through gestures,
learning through manipulation, or thinking through
building prototypes." (p. 7)

3rd paradigm 的 中心是 現象學觀點, 而非物理的體現性:
"Despite the centrality of embodied interaction to the 3rd
paradigm, it would be a mistake to take physical embodiment
– i.e. having a body - as its central, defining
characteristic. Rather, what is central is a phenomenological
viewpoint, in which all action, interaction, and

knowledge is seen as embodied in situated human actors.
This position leads to a number of intellectual
commitments that contrast with those taken by the first
two paradigms."  (p. 7)

意義在三種 paradigms 中的角色:
"meaning, ignoring it unless it causes a problem, while
the 2nd interprets meaning in terms of information
flows. The 3rd paradigm, in contrast, sees meaning and
meaning construction as a central focus. It adopts the
stance that meaning is constructed on the fly, often
collaboratively, by people in specific contexts and
situations, and therefore that interaction itself is an
essential element in meaning construction."

3rd paradigm 的 central metaphor:
" ...whose central metaphor is interaction
as phenomenologically situated." (p. 9)

1st paradigm: reduce error
2nd paradigm: more efficiently
3rd paradigm: situated meaning-making


Different Ways of Knowing


"The three issues described previously – limited and inappropriate measures of success, acceptable methods,
and recognition of innovation – can be traced to a lack of awareness of the epistemological distinctions between the paradigms,..."

see Table 2: Epistemological distinctions between the paradigms

Objective vs. Subjective Knowledge
Generalized vs. Situated Knowledge
Information vs. Interpretation
“Clean” vs. “Messy” Formalisms


所有的 paper 都應該交代 underlying paradigms:
"We would expect that calling out the underlying paradigm
will become a standard part of every publication
in our field." (p. 17)


參考:
互動設計派典浪潮
互動設計第三派典的角色與必要性

EX 6. short essay
Critically introduce "InTouch" project with three paradigms respectively. (including 1st, 2nd, 3rd paradigms, at least 500 words in total)

Reference:


Deadline 2016/4/27



2016年4月5日 星期二

2016年3月29日 星期二

week 6. research through design


Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI


1.  p. 493

"Following a research through design approach, designers
produce novel integrations of HCI research in an attempt to
make the right thing: a product that transforms the world
from its current state to a preferred state."

2. 
 Christopher Frayling: research through design, 1993

3. What in RtD?

"What is unique to this approach to
interaction design research is that it stresses design artifacts
as outcomes that can transform the world from its current
state to a preferred state"

4. Why RtD?

"The artifacts produced in this type
of research become design exemplars, providing an
appropriate conduit for research findings to easily transfer
to the HCI research and practice communities."

5. How does RtD contribute?

"While we in no way intend for this to be the only type of research
contribution interaction designers can make, we view it as
an important contribution in that it allows designers to
employ their strongest skills in making a research
contribution and in that it fits well within the current
collaborative and interdisciplinary structure of HCI
research."

6. p. 495

"In adding to the research discussion of design methods,
Donald Schön introduced the idea of design as a reflective
practice where designers reflect back on the actions taken in
order to improve design methodology [22]. While this may
seem counter to the science of design, where the practice of
design is the focus of a scientific inquiry, several design
researchers have argued that reflective practice and a
science of design can co-exist in harmony"

7.
"...Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber proposed the concept of a
Wicked Problem,” a problem that because of the
conflicting perspectives of the stakeholders cannot be
accurately modeled and cannot be addressed using the

reductionist approaches of science and engineering [21].
They argued that many problems can never be accurately
modeled, thus an engineering approach to addressing them
would fail."

8.

"Christopher Alexander’s work on Pattern Languages....

His work asks design researchers to
examine the context, system of forces, and solutions used to
address repeated design problems in order to extract a set
underlying “design patterns”, thereby producing a “pattern
language”...

The method
turns the work of many designers addressing the same
interaction problems into a discourse for the community,
allowing interaction designers to more clearly observe the
formation of conventions as the technology matures and is
reinterpreted by users."

9. p. 496

"Critical design presents a model of interaction/product
design making as a model of research [9]. Unlike design
practice, where the making focuses on making a
commercially successful product, design researchers
engaged in critical design create artifacts intended to be
carefully crafted questions. These artifacts stimulate
discourse around a topic by challenging the status quo and
by placing the design researcher in the role of a critic. The
Drift Table offers a well known example of critical design
in HCI, where the design of an interactive table that has no
intended task for users to perform raises the issue of the
community’s possibly too narrow focus on successful
completion of tasks as a core metric of evaluation and
product success"


http://designapproaches.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/bill-gaver/



10.
"Harold Nelson and
Erik Stolterman frame interaction design—and more
generally the practice of design—as a broad culture of
inquiry and action. They claim that rather than focusing on
problem solving to avoid undesirable states, designers work
to frame problems in terms of intentional actions that lead
to a desirable and appropriate state of reality."


11. p. 497

"It follows from Christopher Frayling’s
concept of conducting research through design where
design researchers focus on making the right thingartifacts
intended to transform the world from the current state to a
preferred state."

12.
"Through an active process of ideating, iterating, and
critiquing potential solutions, design researchers continually
reframe the problem as they attempt to make the right
thingThe final output of this activity is a concrete problem
framing and articulation of the preferred state, and a series
of artifacts—models, prototypes, products, and
documentation of the design process."

reference: "epistemic artifacts"

13. p. 498

"Design artifacts are the currency of
design communication. In education they are the content
that teachers use to help design students understand what
design is and how the activity can be done."

14.
"These research artifacts provide
the catalyst and subject matter for discourse in the
community, with each new artifact continuing the
conversation."
15. p. 499

"We differentiate research artifacts from design practice
artifacts in two important ways. First, the intent going into
the research is to produce knowledge for the research and
practice communities, not to make a commercially viable
product. To this end, we expect research projects that take
this research through design approach will ignore or deemphasize perspectives in framing the problem, such as the
detailed economics associated with manufacturability and
distribution, the integration of the product into a product
line, the effect of the product on a company’s identity, etc.
In this way design researchers focus on making the right
things, while design practitioners focus on making
commercially successful things."


16.
 "research contributions should be artifacts that
demonstrate significant invention."

17.

CRITERIA FOR EVALUATING INTERACTION DESIGN
RESEARCH WITHIN HCI

(1) Process

  • In documenting their contributions, interaction design researchers must provide    enough detail that the process they employed can be reproduced.
  • they must provide a rationale for their selection of the specific methods they employed.

(2) Invention
  • Interaction design researchers must demonstrate that they have produced a novel integration of various subject matters to address a specific situation.
  • In addition, in articulating the integration as invention, interaction designers must detail how advances in technology could result in a significant advancement
  • It is in the articulation of the invention that the detail about the technical opportunities is communicated to the engineers in the HCI research community, providing them with guidance on what to build.


(3) Relevance

  • This constitutes a shift from what is true (the focus of behavioral scientists) to what is real (the focus of anthropologists).
  • However, in addition to framing the work within the real world, interaction design  researchers must also articulate the preferred state their design attempts to achieve and provide support for why the community should consider this state to be preferred.

(4) Extensibility

  • Extensibility means that the design research has been described and documented in a way that the community can leverage the knowledge derived from the work.

EX 5. Short essay (400 words)


法國短篇小說販賣機



1. critically review this artifact
2. discourse on the above project with  4 criteria of research-through-design approach.

(You may need to critically introduce this artifact and then discourse on four criteria in evaluation)

Deadline: 2016/4/12