Designers constantly deal with the ill-defined to help people negotiate uncertain situations or artifacts, but how well do we understand our own ways of dealing with ambiguity? Using examples, I’ll discuss three approaches to ambiguity that can inform design, and how these approaches can affect peoples experience of products.

This ties in with recent moves in my PhD, and builds on my thinking about artifacts and affinity.

I’m thinking of presenting different approaches to ambiguity because it appears to be a largely unexamined foundation of design practice. How we approach ambiguity can have the largest effect on a design, because it frames the epistemological foundation of a design, or how a design understands and uses knowledge.

The three approaches that I’m contemplating using describe an arc along a positivist – constructivist spectrum: from extreme empiricism (I’m thinking Herbert Simon etc) to phenomenological (Heidegger or Dreyfus), with the pragmatists (Dewey) in the middle.

The key challenge will be to cover this ground in the allotted 10 minutes, and keep the predominately professional audience engaged. I think it’s totally possible, but will need to draw things back to real world examples constantly. In fact I’ll need to create some exemplary anchors early on to use throughout the presentation.

Interesting thing about it is that they make it really easy for you to get your first “freebee”: by giving you 4 purchases on the card you only have to purchase 1 coffee to then experience the satisfaction of a free coffee.

nice example of the law of reciprocity in action.

Simon & Buchanan think it always has, but one thing I keep seeing is a ‘resistance’ to using the word “design”.

I think there are a number of reasons for this, one of them being that many people don’t think they ‘do’ design. It’s about this thought that I’ve been thinkin’…

One workshop participant described two courses they have introduced in an IT program. Both courses gave students a grounding in conceptual foundations of programming and the web, and the program saw an immediate increase in the number of students who passed subsequent courses.

To me, this sounds a lot like teaching students to be better designers by teaching them how to ‘read’ as well as ‘write’.

Design is a literacy, and we experience its literature every day.

• Herbert Simon’s use of the word “cookbooky” in Sciences of the Artificial
• Richard Buchanan’s “placements” and subsequent alignments I started to see with
• Dewey’s “expressions” as opposed to “statements” (via Jodi Forlizzi’s thesis)
• The notion of “free indirect style” James Wood uses to describe the way novelists will slide from third person to a semi-first person perspective, in order to put you into the head of the character (without being so explicit)

I’m pretty excited with this last bit, as it leads on from some of the thinking I’ve been having around design fiction (particularly sci-fi) – namely that the fictitious novel form has a way of leaving enough out so that the reader can inhabit the experiences of the characters. The experiences are re-simulated (ooooh nice, just thought of that )

As a flavour of design that explicitly focuses on experiences enabled by design, ixd is where a lot of solutions, challenges and changes will be prototyped. By extension, IxDA can be seen as an important actor in the way these shifts in design practice and awareness of design play out.

Here’s some areas I can see IxDA playing a role:

Education: currently the world of interaction design education is very fragmented. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I do see an opportunity for IxDA to play a unique role in bringing programs together under the banner of a global education network to discuss approaches, challenges, and attitudes.

Mentorship: IxDA has an ongoing mentorship program (mentees here, mentors here) and has attracted a lot of people to participate. The requests for mentors far exceed those available, and that’s where I think a design approach can begin to help.

In a global network like IxDA, the mentoring relationship can be seen not only as a way to teach and pass on skills, but also as a way to make weak ties strong. Network theory stresses the importance of weak ties in information traversal, but strong ties are important for scaling the culture of an organization.

Its to this point that I think IxDA can really play a big part: scaling culture. The culture of professional collegiality is something I’d be loath to see these kinds of design lose, as I think there’s far more to be gained by working together than there is from working apart. Bodies like IxDA need to design themselves in order to generate the outcomes they seek: and culture is one of them.

What do I mean? well.. for starters: we have more mentees than mentors. How can we use this as the input for a service design that encourages/creates a culture of continual learning and mentorship? How can we mentor more of our network to be mentors?

* yep. I’ll put those two or three ideas together in one sentence. sosumi

The article introduces our framework for Social Data Visualization, and gives a good intro to the idea of object centered social systems. Let us know what you think!

This is the start of our communication strategy around the Loupe project – there’ll be some articles that dig deeper into social visualization and some visualizations of the impact this kind of interaction will have on the day-to-day life of financial knowledge workers.

SocialVizPatterns introduces a framework of interaction design patterns to support collaborative data visualization in social web environments. It takes an object-centered approach to the network (as opposed to an ego centered one) and discusses the following interaction design patterns:

Mapping – help people to choose the most appropriate way to visualize a dataset

Decoration – help people to attach visual meaning and identity to a visualization so that it can exist within an object centered social space and its meaning can be quickly transferred to others

Tweakability – give people a way of shifting and reformatting a data visualization so that they can make sense of the whole data set by understanding how it responds to dynamic changes

Annotation – help people to comment on, or draw attention to specific elements of a visualization without compromising legibility of that visualization

Snapshot – help people to be able to store ‘snapshots’ of the visualization in order to communicate their understanding of a specific visualization configuration

so, have a look : we’d love to know what you think!

Designers who do this kind of stuff are making a lot of it up as they go along. They’re inventing new methods, creating hybrids of “best practices”, testing the effectiveness of their existing methods, and (thankfully) sharing their discoveries with the wider design community. This is one reason why I believe we’re seeing more innovation come out of the practice of this kind of design than we see emerging from the study of this kind of design:

This kind of design is still forming, still moving, still coalescing.

I also believe in (or maybe its more accurate to say that I have faith in) the ability for design processes to uncover unseen foundations, meaningful relationships between elements, and different ways of seeing something. I believe that looking with design eyes at the practice(s) of this kind of design, will reveal latent elements of practice and behaviour, leading to a more holistic undertanding of this field.

but, you might ask, what do you mean by this kind of design?