JellevanDijk.org

via Edward een mooie site met veel mensen: Young Me Now Me

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… is not just fiddling around,

…but in fact a recent species of the tools used in concept design.

Some designers are good at sketching with a pencil on paper (Sketching is a necessary part of design, like ‘writing field notes’ is for anthropologists). When interaction design started to mature (a bit, the field is about 40 years old according to some people), the paper prototype, the Wizard of Ozz trick and the ‘enacted video’ became popular, trying to capture more of the ‘look-and-feel’ of the form of the *interaction* with the product (the dynamics, i.e., seeing how what you do effects what you perceive, and so on) instead of just the physical form of the product itself.

But a paper prototype is just as much not moving as is a paper sketch. And a WoO you can do only once: your team-member can’t forever hide under the table with that laptop. And the enacted video is a video of other people interacting, so you cannot do it yourself to experience what you would experience while doing it.

High times have thus arisen for the true techies. You may come out of under your stones, where you have been hiding ever since people started shouting that design and user-studies are more important than hard-core programming. Because if you are capable of it (I’m not, but my respect is all for those who are) you might do concept design of interactive products by a new kind of sketching, using a new kind of pencil, that is, creating sketches using interactive hardware itself.

This, in fact, amounts to using a sort-of fully working prototype *as a sketch*. The prototype is therefore no longer the end product, it is part of the sketching process.

It is called: Sketching in hardware. And there’s an annual conference. See this comprehensive blogposting

So if you are a student that gets complaints by teachers (me?) that you are not *thinking* and only *fiddling around with hardware*, you can now say: I am not fiddling around at all, I am sketching in hardware. (Beware if you are not *thinking* about what you are doing at the same time, though).

Slightly off-topic: Compare this to the practices of my anthropologist friends: imagine you would be able, using great skill and the right sort of tools, to create full-blown ethnographies (that is, the books one used to be creating  *after* returing from field study) including all the theoretical linkages and deep philosophical reflections, but this time on the fly, right there in Papua New Guinney, and let these ethnographies have a function not as being the end-result, but simply as a new kind of ‘field notes’, open to further reflection?

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Video of lecture by Gillian Crampton-Smith // Convivio // IUAV

I just found out that design research used to be a term for the people who wanted to study, in a rational scientific way, the way designers design, such as to be able to put all that into an artificially intelligent system and then be able to let the computer do designs automatically.Well, you’d guess I think that would have never been possible for several reasons. Gillian Cramption-Smith agrees, but she is still struggling with finding ways of telling ‘just design’ and ‘research in/or/through/about design projects’ apart from one another, if only because she’s in the council that has to fund money for projects only if they can be called ‘research’. Interesting talk and some nice design examples as well.

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Video of lecture by Anthony Dunne (and Fiona Raby who’s not there), the ‘Critical Design’ guru’s. Didn’t know much about critical design, but I met a nice guy called Tau, a Danish designer who was into that. Dunne and Raby’re supposed to be the persons that started it all with this book The Herzian Tales

At least that is what ‘the internet‘ tells me. It now exists ten years so let’s celebrate.

The basic idea is to create working prototypes of (often futuristic) new technological products, not because you would want to produce them, nor because you would want to predict a future in which these kinds of products may be possible, or whatever ‘naive positive’ goal that you would normally be after in design. Instead, you create the product because you would want to provoke discussion with the general public, precisely because in most cases the public only gets to have a say about their future life once it is too late, once it is no longer future, but simply now. So critical designers make products that for example they would find totally un-ethical if they’d really existed, in order to be able to actually have that discussion in the open space of society. (Dunne in the video above mentiones the idea that, given the possibility of growing eatable meat from stam-cells, you’d be able to grow meat-food from your own bodycells and then organize ‘eat-me’ BBQ-parties with your friends.)

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Here’s Tim Ingold (and myself) going up to Bennachie hill with our course group on Design Anthropology. Based on a long history of research and reflection, Tim’s got interesting ideas about what ‘design’ is (or should be) from an anthropological/ philosophical perspective. Tim tries to break lose from the idea that design is goal-directed, towards a fixed ‘end-state’. Instead, he wonders what design would be if you take it to be something directed at ‘carrying on’, something to sustain an ongoing process itself. Design is often a matter of improvisation, of ‘following the waves of the world as they open up’. Interaction with the material (not the object) is very important. “Moving along with the materials”, which you can see a carpenter doing that learns to follow ‘the grain of the wood’ as he carves with his axe. Design, in this sense, is more about intervening in a proces that is already carrying on. I like this way of speaking because it matches nicely with what Pim Haselager and Iris van Rooij and Roel Kerkhofs and I have in mind when we speak about the brain as being more of a traffic-facilitator, intervening (sometimes) in coupling processes between the body and the world that are always already ‘going on’. So if a designer is doing precisely that as the essence of the designing, this shows that a designer is indeed an embodied embedded cognitive system (which s/he should be, given that s/he is a human being).I also liked his comparison of a ‘workmanship of certainty’, which is a rather modern practice, with the older, but still existing, ‘workmanship of risk’. The workmanship of certainty amounts to putting all handles and buttons in their right positions before pressing ‘execute’ on the machine. The machine will then carry out, with complete certainty, following a predefined procedure, some task. (It is a bit like putting a ruler on paper and then drawing a straight line by using the ruler). Instead, the ‘workmanship of risk’ relies not on external machine-like hardware but on ones skill, ones craft, which one has gained through long apprenticeship, training and experience. One walks into the situation, and immediately sees what must be done. One adapts quickly to unforeseen circumstances. And one makes do with what’s available. One is able to live with all sorts of uncertainty in any give situation because one knows that one will come out of it eventually, trusting ones skills.

With Tim on our side, I had complete confidence in not getting lost on Bennachie Hill even if there were no trails at all …

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(Nederlandse tekst, zie onder)

Today we climbed Bennachie Hill in thick fog. It was chilly, especially on the stony top, almost blown over by a serious Scottish wind. Together with 30- something other Phd students we are currently in the middle of a course on Design Anthropology. Most of the discussion centers around the question of what Design Anthropology actually is. Nobody’s quite sure. Some think it is (1) about the study, by antropologists, of ‘design’, as it is carried out for instance by industrial designers or landscape architects in their daily practice. Others think (2) it is the study, by antropologists, of the ‘design’ that is present in all human conduct, on the basis of the assumption that design simply is an elementary defining characteristic of what it means to be human. There seems to be a special focus on skill and the role of the body in that, which I like. (Reflecting on it now while making the English translation of this blog I do think that Herbert Simon, with his ‘Sciences of the Artificial’, was undertaking exactly the same project, but from a cognitivistic point of view, which specifically did not include the body, or situated practice, as a part of what ‘design in human conduct’ was about). Others, mainly design-researchers, think this new field defines (3) the application of principles from anthropology to studying ones own ‘design process’. Yet others think it is about (4) applying principles and methods from antropoolology (boy.. this word will definitely have to evolve to something simpler soon if designers need to use it on a daily basis. Let’s just make it Anpy - please note the ironic of me wanting to make things simpler instead of more complex) to doing user research: research people’s culture, rituals, ways of doing things, in order to make more ‘human centered’ design.

I think 2 and 3 might go together rather well. 1 is essentially the same set-up as 4 is, instead roles are shifted: in 4 designers pretend to be Anpy’s that study future users (a people), and in 1 the Anpy’s themselves study designers (a people). Anpy’s had big problems with intepretation 4, on account of it being in practice reduced to ‘quick-and-dirty ethnography misused by the marketing department’. (Those poor marketeers, they are truly the new millenium’s heretics. On the staple!)

On a side note is the discussion on ‘participatory design’. Just as an Anpy cannot stay ‘objective’ with respect to the people she’s studying (I realise now I’ve made Anpy into meaning both Anthropology and Anthropologist. Good. Even more simple - *grin*), a designer cannot stay objective in doing user research: you are in effect meddling with those people’s lives, so might they not also have a say in it? Shouldn’t it be not more a situation of collaboration between various parties, instead of one party designing for, or researching, the other? But how to be able to do research if you start collaborating, isn’t that sort of going over a line?

Anyway, as I said already in Dutch below: luckily there was an easy path up the hill and an easy one down, so despite all the confusion we didn’t actually get lost.

Vandaag zijn we de Bennechie heuvel op geklommen, in een dikke mist. Het was redelijk fris, vooral bovenop de stenen top, waar een straffe Schotse wind waaide. Samen met ongeveer 30 andere Phd-students uit allerlei landen ben ik hier voor een cursus ‘Design Anthropology’. Er is vooral veel discussie over wat Design Anthropology nu eigenlijk is. Niemand weet het zeker. Sommigen vinden dat het gaat over de studie, door Antropologen, van ‘het ontwerpproces’ zoals uitgevoerd door bijvoorbeeld industrieel ontwerpers of architecten in hun dagelijkse praktijk. Anderen vinden dat het gaat over de studie, door antropologen, van het ‘design’ aspect in de gebruiken en rituelen van mensen, in het algemeen, met speciale focus op improvisatie, skill, en de rol van het lichaam. Anderen, met name de aanwezige ontwerpers-onderzoekers, denken dat het gaat over het toepassen van principes uit de antropologie in het doen van onderzoek naar ‘je eigen ontwerpproces’. En even zovelen denken dat het gaat over het toepassen van die principes bij het doen van ‘gebruikersonderzoek’: onderzoek naar mensen die producten gebruiken of gebouwen bewonen die de ontwerper heeft ontworpen of aan het ontwerpen is. Daar doorheen loopt nog een discussie over ‘participatie’: in hoeverre die ‘gebruikers’ meedoen aan het ontwerpproces, of in hoeverre de onderzoeker ‘participeert’ in dat wat hij studeert, of meer algemeen in hoeverre iedereen eigenlijk in iedereens proces participeert en dat het allemaal dus best wel heel complex is.

Gelukkig was er een simpel pad naar boven, en een simpel pad naar beneden, dus we zijn ondanks alles niet echt de weg kwijt geraakt.

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Mevrouw Alice Jennings houdt van vleespastij-roze in haar Bead & Breadfast. Ik zal daar de komende dagen nog wel wat over schrijven, hier in Aberdeen, waar ik leer antropologisch te denken over Design.

Zie de foto’s

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…steeds dichter bij Nederland

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Merleau-Ponty: The Seer is Seen

danielcoffeen’s Podcast

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