JellevanDijk.org

Mijn goede vriend Olv Klijn zag ik nog maar weinig: hij is een druk bezet man. (En ik ben zelf ook niet alle dagen zonder afspraken).

Nu kan iedereen zien waar Olv de laatste tijd zo druk mee is geweest. Hij heeft namelijk de Prix de Rome gewonnen, de meest prestigieuze en oudste prijs voor architectuur in Nederland. Olv, van harte gefeliciteerd!

Uit het juryrapport:

‘Als geen ander bleek Klijn er in geslaagd antwoorden te vinden op de ‘gecompliceerde sociale, economische en culturele dynamiek’ waarover in de opgave voor de eindronde was gesproken’, en dat hij ‘op basis van uitgebreide consultaties en een grondige en veelomvattende analyse een rijk en gelaagd plan heeftgemaakt, dat voor tal van opgaven oplossingen aanlevert’.

En van www.architectenweb:

Bij deze editie van de PRIXDEROME.NL presenteren de genomineerde jonge architecten, stedenbouwkundigen en landschapsarchitecten hun voorstel voor een interventie in de modernistische bebouwing van het Amsterdamse August Allebéplein (een ontwerp van Cornelis van Eesteren, winnaar Prix de Rome 1921). Twee actuele thema’s komen bij de Prix de Rome-opgave voor deze locatie samen: de openbare ruimte als ontmoetingsplaats voor mensen met uiteenlopende culturele achtergronden en de vraag hoe de wederopbouwwijken weer nieuwe levenskracht ingeblazen kunnen krijgen. De ontwerpvoorstellen spelen in op het versterken van het gemeenschapsgevoel in de wijk en onderzoeken welke betekenis de archetypische stedelijke figuur van het plein kan hebben in de huidige tijd. De plannen weerspiegelen optimisme en een geloof in de ‘maakbaarheid’ van onze samenleving.

De eindpresentatie van de vier prijswinnende architecten(duo’s) Thijs van Bijsterveldt & Oana Radeº, Olv Klijn, Johan Selbing & Anouk Vogel, Jeroen Spee & Jeroen Steenvoorden is nog te zien tot 3 juli a.s. in ARCAM Amsterdam (Prins Hendrikkade 600) in Amsterdam.

Hier meer informatie

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Closely related to the Critical Design movement is the concept of Provotypes: Provocative Prototypes. Today we made some. The assignment was to convince engineers that a certain thermostat system was too complex for end-users to work with in daily life. The thermostats were all in separate room and separately controllable, but if one would want the heating system to work optimally, one would have to set all the controls to the same value. The engineers’ position up until that moment had been that the users simply must learn to use the system, which wasn’t so complicated. We built a provocative prototype that would show how the current system was perhaps understandable, but still not workable, in practice, by the users. We created a balance beam with two plates. We called it the Balancing Breakfast. The engineers (just other students in our group) were asked to sit and eat from the plates. Only if you would eat in exactly the same rythm, and grab something from the plate at exactly the same time, would you be able to use this Balanced Breakfast. But of course in practice the balance would tip over and the food would be spilled on the floor. That way the engineers could understand what the problem is from the perspective of the end-user. That is (more or less) what a provotype is for. I mostly was interested in how the provotype evolved. I will write about that in another blog.

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Dag lezer, zou je deze post [http://www.jellevandijk.org/wp/2010/04/28/creative-spaces-15-16-en-17-juni/] door willen sturen aan zoveel mogelijk mensen van wie je denkt dat zij erin geinteresseerd kunnen zijn? Hartelijk dank!

Op 15, 16 en 17 juni organiseren we (hogeschool utrecht) een workshop en aansluitend symposium, met als thema: de rol van de fysieke ruimte ter ondersteuning van het creatieve proces. Kortom: wat valt er voor zinnigs te zeggen over de ‘brainstormroom’ en alle varianten daarop? (Ik zelf ben natuurlijk geinteresseerd in interactive moderne mediatools in die ruimte: de ‘augmented‘ creative ruimte). Iedereen die zich professioneel of vanuit een studie bezig houdt met creatieve processen en de rol van de ruimte/omgeving daarin, is zeer van harte uitgenodigd.

Zie: www.creativespacesdesign.nl  en meld je aan!

Voor de workshop vragen we om een ‘position paper’, het kan ook een poster of ander format zijn, waarin je stelling neemt en jouw visie op ruimtegebruik en creativiteit laat zien. We gaan op bezoek bij enkele ‘brainstormruimtes’ en creatieve centra en we gaan ook hands-on aan de slag om onze ideale ruimte te ontwerpen.

Het symposium op donderdag 17 juni is open toegankelijk en gratis. Locatie Oudenoord 700, Utrecht. Key-note speaker is David Kirsh van de university of San Diego, bekend van de ‘epistemic actions‘. Prof. Kirsh is een van de leidende wetenschappers op het gebied van Distributed Cognition. Van zijn website:

Although my official areas of specialization are artificial intelligence, situated cognition, philosophy of mind and science, and foundations of cognitive science, I have been working for some years now on cognitive engineering and how to better design highly interactive environments.

Kijk, dat is nou juist wat ik over mijzelf had willen zeggen…

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Vergelijk de ‘affordances’ van bijgaande plaatjes. Denk “Wat is het eerste wat ik zou doen” of “Wat is hier de bedoeling?”. Denk niet langer dan 2 seconden na. En wen maar vast aan het tweede plaatje… (met dank aan Sander Langhorst voor het plaatje van de Chipautomaat)

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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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(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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In october I will present NOOT (like Janneke did before me based on her thesis work on the CHI-NL conference), a product we developed @ Hogeschool Utrecht. I will be focussing more specifically on how NOOT relates to Embodied Embedded Memory. My ideas on that can be found in the conference paper that I just added to my literature list on this weblog. It is also the first publication together with Remko, my daily supervisor from Utrecht and Kees, my promotor from Eindhoven University.

Meanwhile, Sanne (product design) and Hans (Electronics) are still working hard on making a new prototype, such that we can have some good experiences with a technically sound NOOT that clips easily onto a piece of paper. This new prototype has been developed in close collaboration with The Creativity Company, and the people over there are also anxious to see it really work… Fingers crossed everybody…

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Heet van de pers: het eindproduct van de studenten Interactive Media Products (voorheen Human Computer Interaction) uit het derde jaar van de opleiding Mediatechnologie. In opdracht van het Kenniscentrum voor Productontwikkeling (i.c., mijzelf) en De Nieuwe Regentessebasisschool voor Freynetonderwijs, te Utrecht: de Verhalentafel. Geinspireerd door o.a. het zetten van een tekst dmv de drukpers, een traditie gestart door Freynet en nog steeds in praktijk op de Nieuwe Regentesseschool. Nou ja, kijk zelf maar:

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