week 5 + 6 design research & critical dialogue

Book: Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom

Author(s):

 Ilpo Koskinen, John Zimmerman, Thomas Binder, Johan Redstrom and Stephan Wensveen

Chapter 7 - How to Work with Theory

, Pages 109-123

Critical dialogue: interaction, experience and cultural theory

1. 

"This workshop will explore the 

ways in which HCI can benefit from a constructive 

dialogue between critical theory and experience in 

questions of design and evaluation."

2. 

"

HCI has broadened from usability to experience and 

from productivity to fun, affect, aesthetics, and ethics. 

Experience, culture, enjoyment, design, and other 

related terms are now much used but under-theorized 

concepts in HCI. Yet they are all associated with rich 

histories of scholarship in other domains, and they 

include their own epistemologies, approaches, and 

outputs. Leveraging these terms in HCI will require 

thoughtful engagement with these traditions, and in 

particular, critical theory"

3. 

critical theory...

"These include: semiotics (the study of

signs and symbols), hermeneutics (the study of 

interpretation and meaning), structuralism (the study 

of underlying structures of cultural artefacts), post 

structuralism (the denial of the existence of such 

structures), deconstruction (well this is getting

complicated now), psychoanalysis (yes and perhaps 

each of these deserves a paragraph on their own), 

feminism, Marxism, and postmodernism. "

4. "Since post-structuralist semiotics critiqued the notion
that there was a direct correspondence between a
cultural artifact and any single interpretation of it, ideas
based in critical traditions such as reader-response
theory have supplemented traditional semiotic readings
of how interaction takes place. These approaches argue
that meaning is emergent, constructed through a
“performance” of the text in a particular context.
Clearly this kind of theory is more difficult to implement
as a set of design guidelines and perhaps for this
reason hermeneutics has received less attention in HCI
(however, see for instance [12]). "

5.
  "When Winograd and Flores followed Heidegger in
rejecting the view that things are the bearer of
properties independent of interpretation [18],
phenomenology’s emphasis on both phenomena and
the consciousness experiencing them began to be
influential in HCI, e.g. [8][10]. When attention turned
from usability to user experience, connections to critical
theory became more frequent and complex. McCarthy 
and Wright’s [14] book Technology as Experience drew
extensively on the Russian literary critic and
philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin and his problematic
relationship with formal theory and preference for a
decentred dialogue grounded in the particularities and
uncertainties of lived experience."





Critical Practice as a method of inquiry?
How to make good critical practice ?  Critical Practice

Learning to Talk/Talking to Learn

Technology as experience

Reference:

1. 社會科學的理路 pp. 352-353, 365-366, 384-387

2. 反身性方法論: 質性研究的新視野, pp. 60-61

EX 3.

兩兩同學一組, 可以用中文,  為以下互動設計作品產生 批判對話.
互相輪流發言, 並針對方前一次的發言進行批判對話.
對話紀錄至少 400 字 (中英文皆可)

deadline: 2014/5/2

Week 3 + 4 difficult forms & slow technology

DIFFICULT FORMS:  
CRITICAL PRACTICES OF DESIGN AND RESEARCH by Ramia Mazé and Johan Redström, IASDR 2007

p1.

1. Rather than prescribing a practice on the basis of theoretical considerations, these critical practices seem to build an intellectual basis for design on the basis of its own modes of operation, a kind of theoretical development that happens through, and from within, design practice and not by means of external descriptions or analyses of its practices and products.

p 2.

2. This prompts John Thackara to argue, “Because product design is thoroughly integrated in capitalist production, it is bereft of an independent critical tradition on which to base an alternative” (Thackara, 1988: 21).

3. As Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby argue, “At its worst, product design simply reinforces global capitalist values. It helps to create and maintain desire for new
products, ensures obsolescence, encourages dissatisfaction with what we have and merely translates brand values into objects. Design… needs to establish an intellectual stance of its own, or the design profession is destined to loose all intellectual credibility and be viewed simply as an agent of capitalism” (Dunne and Raby,
2001: 59)

p. 3

4. This involved rethinking how to relate both to ‘operative criticism’, posed from inevitably biased positions within practice, and to ‘critical theories’, introduced from without (Hays, 1999).

5. By the 1990s, positions with respect to ‘critical architecture’ had polarized into two camps – one concerned with culture and the other preoccupied by form (Hays, 1984).

p. 4

6...post-critical proponents explore notions such as performativity, procedures, and
pragmatics (Allen, 2000; Baird, 2004/5). In such perspectives, theory and criticality are repositioned in relation to a constructive and projective attitude, capable both of ideological and operational engagement.


7. Practice is explicitly put forward as an approach to – through materials, form, 
and construction – framing questions and alternatives to the status quo with clients and the public.

8. The critique posed by anti-design is not of design or planning as such, but of design in instilling and enforcing ideology. That is to say, design ‘in service’ to any imposed ideology, whether political, technological, or cultural, determined in advance and from outside. ...


While engaging theoretically and politically, the activity of designing and
design objects in themselves were seen to offer possibilities for ‘active critical participation’ in larger ideological systems (Lang and Menking, 2003). The ‘products’ of anti-design were not, however, intended as finished or closed forms. While object-oriented, form was often applied provisionally, to open up for ideas, debate, and appropriation – as alternative forms not only of product but ideological consumption.

p. 5

9. Conceptual design draws on art to orient a subversion of design norms. With respect to conceptual art, focus is shifted from the producer and the thing to the concept, and making as setting up such a concept through material objects, scripted or improvised interventions, installations or other means.

Epitomizing such an approach since the 1990s, Droog design countered both Pop and analytic design, tendencies pervading the European design scene at the time.

10.


A more specific version of conceptual design is critical design, most associated in product and interaction design with Dunne & Raby.

They posit the designer as a critically and materially engaged practitioner – a sort of ‘applied conceptual artist’.

In addition to art, they state: “Critical design is related to haute couture, concept cars, design propaganda, and visions of the future, but its purpose is not to present the dreams of industry, attract new business, anticipate new trends or test the market.

Its purpose is to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the aesthetic quality of our electronically mediated existence”
(Dunne and Raby, 2001: 58).

Early works challenged mainstream design tenents (Dunne, 1998). Dunne’s post-optimal’ object, for example, critiques product semantics and the human factors preoccupation with the ergonomic and psychological ‘fit’.

Instead, strategies of defamiliarization and estrangement from modernist aesthetics, are applied as ‘user-unfriendliness’ and ‘para-functionality’ to discourage unthinking ideological assimilation and promote skepticism by increasing the poetic distance between people products.

p. 7

11. Not only for improving design as ‘problem-solving’, but in creating a
space for designers to reflect upon the ideas, theories, logics, and implications of design in and through practice. That is to say, the intervention of an intellectual basis for ‘problem-finding’.

12. Conceptual and critical design might be said to represent a shift in attention away from the spatial object in and of itself to the ideas behind form and emergent in formation.

Explicitly dealing with the materialization of concepts, such concepts become not only
external or retrospective descriptions of design objects, but an integral part of the design objects as such.

In this way, the concepts and theories embodied in an artifact might be differentiated from tacit or propositional knowledge (see, for example, Frayling, 1993/4).


This opens up for a design practice that is not only an operational, but also an intellectual basis, for design research.

p. 8

13. Indeed, certain conceptual frameworks within critical practice such as ‘object as discourse’ and ‘design as research’ provide an essential basis for thinking about how to combine intellectual and operational modalities for contesting and further developing design from within.

p. 9

14. n critical practice, the designed object might be understood as a sort of materialized form of discourse. In Dunne's case, “the electronic objects produced in the studio section of his doctorate are still 'design,' but in the sense of a 'material thesis' in which the object itself becomes a physical critique... research is interpreted as 'conceptual modeling' involving a critique of existing approaches to production/consumption communicated through highly considered artifacts” (Seago and Dunne, 1999: 16-17).

15. In questioning design as merely ‘in service’ to ideas and problems posed in advance and outside of design, design itself is understood to be inherently ideological.


16. Difficult forms might force a hermeneutic reading of the formal operations of its (de)construction – the architect quite literally situated as author, the inhabitant as reader. ...


As any range of postmodern and post-critical revisions suggest, architecture is not writing, nor are spatial practices discursive (Allen, 2000; Hatton, 2004).

p. 10

17. Schön describes a complex interplay of generative and propositional modalities in ongoing and situated practice, proposing that “When someone reflects-in-action, he becomes a researcher in the practice context”(Schön, 1983: 68).

Rather than objective knowledge or abstract theory, conceived of as above or in advance of practice, such perspectives give primacy to subjective interpretation and practical experience.


18. . Jane Rendell considers ‘reflection in action’ in architectural research,...

She argues for design and research that do not just solve or analyze problems but may critically rethink the parameters of a problem, theory or institution.

Indeed, making in itself – particularly making experimental forms and conceptual artifacts – acts as a critique of the paradigms of knowledge held in the architectural profession and building industry.

p. 11

19. In such terms, neither design nor research may be about solving problems or reducing uncertainty, but opening up complexity and criticality.

20. As architect Stan Allen argues, “There is no theory, there is no practice. There are only practices, which consist in action and agencies. Practices unfold in time, and their repetitions are never identical” .


p. 12

21. A focus on temporal form and use as participation – central to interaction design (Redström 2001, Mazé and Redström, 2005; Mazé forthcoming 2007) – opens up new questions, such as how a critical design relates to reflective use, and, vice versa, how might ‘active critical participation’ somehow determine design.

We must ask how thinking and making in interaction design – as ‘problem-finding’ rather than ‘problem-solving’ – might enquire into ongoing relations between critical design and critical use.

p. 13.

22. Elsewhere, we discussed the use of design research programs as “provisional knowledge regimes” (Binder and Redström, 2006), as a structuring of experimentation, and its theoretical orientations, in ways that are not absolute.

23. As the program unfolds through collaborative and multi-disciplinary work over time, the meaning – or consequences – of this proposed view on the world evolve and materialize through design experiments.

24. n this way, the notion of the program might address the need for foundations that can be built upon or criticized, affirmed, or opposed in a critical design practice in a way that is still open for, and sensitive to, heterogeneity(異質性） and multiplicity.


EX2.

1. Survey STATIC! & Slow Technology
2. Select a project from these two programs, write a short critique (200 words) based on "difficult forms" framework.

Deadline: April 18, 2014.

week 1 + 2 paradigms & object discourse

1. 社會科學的理路。(圖 1-1 主要典範基本信念)

   互動設計派典是是什麼?

2. Guba, E.G., & Lincoln, Y.S., Competing Paradigms in Qualitative Research

3. Reading: "The object as discourse"

    outline of "the object as discourse"


EX1:
  Select 1 work by Dunne & Rabby,
  Write a short essay (200 words) on this work according to the above concerns.

  Deadline: March 21, 2014

批判互動設計作業06 / B9934001 林季樺

With the participation of Facebook and other modern social network, interpersonal relationship has nowadays become more and more complicated while itself is the least simple thing to understand. Many attempts has be made to simplify or just display or indicate what happens right in the relationship. InTouch is one of them, trying to show the intriguing mechanism of this abstract relationship.

With four square window-like light installed in a flat wooden box attached to wall, InTouch seeks to turn invisible yet never-the-easy-case relationship between man and man into visible and tangible. While its output is light and warmth, what makes it tricky is that these two outputs represent quite different thing. Each window-like unit represents a connected friend. Upon thinking of him or her, the user could poke the unit and created a realtime connection. Poking frequency would alter the colour of the unit from pale to bright, and on the other hand, Poked frequency, for that connected friend of user, would take control of the tangible temperature of the unit. Once the interaction pauses, the colour and the warmth will gradually decline from their high level (bright/warm) to low level (pale/cool).

Judging from 1st Paradigm, whose values, more often than not, inclines to be more physical and more about working cool, InTouch is quite okay with it touch-trigger mechanics and heating device hidden in the wooden box. InTouch has no intension to solve any specific problem taking place around and in our daily life. In terms of 2nd Paradigm, InTouch focus more on information processing.

With different information source collected as input, the incoherent relationship between LED light and warmth, seems to be the most interesting part. It breaks what beholders expect to perceive, the coherence between colour and warmth, which no doubt could be seen as an instinctive reaction of every single human being. And it is such quirky relationship that brings suspense and thus further thinking and reflections to people.

The metaphor of this incoherent relationship is undoubtedly of the 3rd Paradigm. Possibilities of coherence or incoherence of concord and discord calmly assesses a statement at the conflicted state of the relationship. These values hidden behind all the mechanism and usability concerns are the least things that will be overlooked in this paradigm. The complex interwoven state of interpersonal relationship is vividly described through the interaction. Once the never-even state being visualised through technology, stepping outside of the virtual world, where internet takes place, intruding in the physical world, it’s exaggerated to some extent that announce its existence loudly as a means of showing-off. Doing more than just a medium, InTouch, like no other even as such similar action as Facebook “Poke” function, becomes more aggressive and intrusive.

批判互動設計作業05 / B9934001 林季樺

Coworking space has now become a fashion. There’s no wonder why so many of which spring up in cities around the world. Despite the prosperous scene of coworking spaces, there’s still some problems faced and needed to be carefully tackled.
For all kinds of people crowding in coworking space, it’s far from easy to find an efficient way to arouse and to accelerate cross- pollination of skills and creativity. But with Gelatine, a system which combines check-in function by use of RFID technology and a trigger to facilitate more social interaction taking place around, things seem much easier. Upon checking in, one random user profile will be presented as a ticket by a thermal printer, and the Gelatine screen will then display some basic information like skills, areas of interests, and needs of a collection of currently co-present users sorted by collaboration opportunities. With the aid of these two, in accordance to the study mentioned on the project page, Gelatine does work. It amplifies awareness of each other among users, and thus facilitates their collaboration.

Process
As information provided by the researchers of Gelatine is detailed enough that other interaction design researchers could follow all the process and thus reproduce.

Invention
Despite no huge invention taking place in this project, the resulted integration of existing technology does lead to a significant advancement. This prototype provides a guidance on how to communicate between space and peers, and peer to peer in coworking space.

Relevance
The preferred state Gelatine aims to achieve is to amplify the relationship between peers and between peer and space to accelerate interdisciplinary collaboration and creativity. This is no doubt relevant to the property of coworking space, whose shared values, to sum up, is collaboration and inspiration.

Extensibility
The shared values of coworking space could be applied to a bunch of different places for these values are shared even outside the coworking space. Thus, it’s no deny that the extensibility of Gelatine, to some extent, is never the case of narrow border. Such device could be also applied to places as enterprises of all kinds, and schools.

批判互動設計期末報告 / M10210118 王柏皓

1888年 Hertz 證實電磁波存在之後，人類生活空間的距離便開始擴展開來，對於這種物理現象的深入研究，打開了各式各樣對於人類生活型態的改變，如同二次世界大戰中，德國的閃電戰也因無線電技術而能實現，而近年的發展和研究更讓無線電波的各個區段 - 無線電、微波、紅外線、紫外線...等 - 有更多元的應用。不過對於技術的思維方面，普羅大眾的認知還是局限在點對點的傳輸，對於無線電波的技術想像往往只是單方發射 - 單方接收的思維。

Dunne 觀察到這樣的現象，並嘗試著用各種設計物去探索更多可能性，可以說是提供了一種不同的技術想像，比方說車用收音機：普遍只是認為這個裝置就是收聽廣播，而忽略了它作為探針的一種可能性。所以 Dunne 在 "Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design" 這本書，其中包含了很多這樣的例子，提出了赫茲空間與電子氣象的概念：在科技發展的同時，電磁波其實可以被視為一種氣象狀態，是散布在我們周圍的空間，而人們可以透過各種科技裝置去感應電子氣象的存在。這樣的技術想像，其實應該透過設計師的實體設計物做一種批判式的設計：在使用的過程中促進人們不斷去思考赫茲空間的存在。而藉由這種思維的下放，建構出一種對於無線電波的新認知，進而提供不同的視野發展未來的運用。

因此，Dunne 其實賦予了設計師一個新的角色，藉由實體設計物的陳述與質問，使用者在操作設計物的過程其實是一種意義建構的過程，如同課堂裡 ” the three paradigms of HCI “ 中所說的，設計師已經不再滿足於單純的解決問題( 1st paradigms )，或是針對科技與人之間的優化 ( 2nd paradigms )，而是提供一種情境，促使人們去反思，就和科幻小說或電影一樣，試著建構與表達出各種不同的世界，在這些情境之下科技的能耐已然不是重點，而是它與生活交織的樣貌如何被描述、被接受 ( 抑或質疑 ) 。

但設計師也不是全然的否定以往的思維，如同人類在社會科學中的發展一樣。從實證主義、後實證主義、結構主義、詮釋學、批判理論的發展來看，不斷的會有不同的思惟崛起，去質疑之前的觀點和缺漏，如同 Hegel 在辯證法 ( Dialectics ) 中的核心觀念，各種正反意見的相互激盪最後會形成一種超越，接近事物的本貌；因此，批判理論並無法全然的否定建構主義，只是長年在建構理論之下的設計思維，的確需要一些刺激，並逐步完整其本體論、認識論與方法論。

批判設計的價值在於其設計物所產生的論述空間，相較於純粹哲學的理論 跟 理性主義的 " 問題 - 解決方法"而言，設計師是當下有能力跨足兩者，透過設計去營造情境、傳遞不同的價值觀，甚至是不提出價值，讓使用者自己探索與思考 ( The drift table, William W. Gaver)。實體設計物在此時成為了一種論述上的優勢，是讓使用者進入情境的最直接方法。

最後，回歸到人類的社會發展本身，21世紀資本主義加速了世界的扁平化，同時也逐漸塑造了一些較為偏頗的價值觀，人們開始以物質標準作為價值判斷的依歸；如同 Lars Hallnas and Johan Redstorm 所提到的，設計師應該要幫助人們回歸心靈的平靜，以及促進對於生活片段的反思；在現在高速發展的科技之上打個大問號，迫使人們去檢視這個問號，並逐漸的建構出生活的意義，從批判設計走向建構，創造以真實意義帶領的世界、更加美好的世界。

批判互動設計作業06/M10210306/劉宥佳

Intouch

The plenty area of people have participated in the Interactive Design with its development by time. It’s not only about the improvement of technique, but the combination of different elements and function to make more interactivity between electronic products and people. The discussion of Interactive Products  is no longer the simply breakthrough of science technology and efficiency of human and machine, it commences to input the life situation of human  beings and bring the value of electronic products. Here we use Intouch as a discussed topic.

What is that feeling when the temperature can be delivered through electronic products? Intouch planted temperature into the Interactive Design, hoping to deliver the memories and emotions to others via the delivering of the temperature. When Intouch is touched by people, it will change its color including red, pale red, white, pale blue and blue. These colors  would corresponding to five feeling of the temperature: hot, warm, normal, cool and cold. Intouch use four plain white cloths of square shape as touching area, the overall appearance is a block of wood material boxes.

1) Intouch doesn’t solve the specific problems and even not clearly define the question which should be answered. Temperature is the physical expression of the concept of hot and cold, Intouch can’t accurately deliver it from human beings and from environment of receiving party. It planted the Thermoelectric Cooling Module inside but not function as refrigerated or heated objects. It functions as the feedback of color when the receiving party touch it. Intouch has connected to the internet but can’t deliver pictures, functions and other messages.

2) The purpose of the communication of intouch with the receiving party is temperature. There is no clear indication of the button so the users are unsure where can be touched. And it can’t directly deliver the temperature without continuously pressed. In terms of interaction, when intouch being touched so to the other side temperature rise, but the receiving party has no clue to understand it is the state of elevated temperature. The failure of delivery could cause the inefficiency of interaction. The temperature of Intouch would drops if it has be touched over ten minutes, but the product itself could be influence by temperature surrounding. So Intouch would possibly cooling to normal temperature and make the users unknown it has been touched.

3) Intouch is composed by square box and fabric which is the material close to the people and to bring the comfort. Especially the fabric which has the characteristics of softness and flexibility. Intouch can produce plenty ways of interaction in different situation, and provide a random and a chance encounter condition. The both part of temperate and color would be rise and change and the other side will synchronously feel the temperature and receiving the emotions and cares when Intouch touched by two parties. The temperature would be cold if the other party doesn’t touch it for a long time, the sign of the coldness is about someone’s leaving (without touching) or someone’s shifting (shift to touching other part). The users can be aware of the rise of temperature by colors instead of numbers. Intouch represent the connection of relationships by color and temperature without defaulting the users situation and usage behavior which give the users more space to interact. The interaction is diversity in real world, the temperature make the electronic products no longer visual and flat. It adds the tactile sensation in the part of interactive design to make more possibility of interactive products.