I’d be very interested to hear from people working in this area, or for whom these ideas are interesting… these ideas form part of a PhD I’m currently undertaking. I’m getting ready to turn into the longish second last leg, where you work out wtf you’re really on about, and how you might communicate this coherently to someone who isn’t … well, you.

As I also mentioned before, I was happy to see that I could do it coherently in under 10 minutes

One thread of the presentation will discuss Etienne Wenger’s take on
ambiguity, as described in his book Communities of Practice. Rather
than talk about that now (and send you all away to the other talks
I wanted to muse on another big concept in Wenger’s theory:
reification.

Wenger says that “in reification we project ourselves into the world,
and not having to recognize ourselves in those projections, we
attribute to our meanings an independent existence” (p58)

This sounds like a good description of what happens when designers use
sketching to visualize the relationships between elements of a design.
Ive been looking for ways to frame this lately, and I think
reification would be a good start. Particularly as it compliments the
other half of Wenger’s duality (reification, participation)

Note to self: examine projects in the phd through this frame… What
artifacts emerge as critical?

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.

I’m currently writing two papers. At this point, bits of these papers seem to resemble two chapters of my thesis.

The first paper discusses what I’m calling the affinity gene (apologies to Peter F Hamilton) or a way of framing design capability in terms of affinity. This idea came out of a lot of reading, practice, and the realization (while presenting on a public panel at ozchi 2009) that just about every aspect of design has a dependence on the designers ability to activate and modulate their perception of affinity between objects.

If I was writing science fiction, I’d say that better control of affinity makes for a better designer. Which leads me to the second paper.

Designers use artifacts to activate their perception of affinity. There, I said it. Seems obvious, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Krippendorf has talked about this, and I particularly like his expansive take on artifacts, ranging from objects to discourses.

In this second paper we’re not looking at this aspect of activation, mainly because it relies on the first paper, and neither are published yet . My colleagues Hugh Macdonald, Yoko Akama and I are using Dewey’s model of the expressive object to frame artifacts in terms of how they help people inhabit an experience. In Dewey’s terms, some artifacts are statements, that lay out the circumstances under which an experience may take place; while other artifacts express an experience, or are an experience. These expressions are what we’re talking about when we say that artifacts can help people to inhabit experience.

I’ve been thinking about where this term inhabit came from, and realised that I’ve picked it up from James Wood. In How Fiction Works, Wood uses the term in two ways. Initially, he suggests that writers should inhabit their stories – or attempt to empathize with their characters. Secondly, he describes the “free indirect style” – a technique writers use to help readers inhabit the experience of a character.

So, lets riff on this for a moment, as we follow Diana, an interaction designer, down the street… The cracks in the sidewalk slip away as a couple round the corner, spines scrunched in an iPhone gait, oblivious to anything outside their user experience bubble…

Hugh Dubberly recently published an article called Models of Models where he introduces the concept of models and then breaks down the constituent parts so the reader can think about how to make and evaluate models for themselves. (hint – read the pdf, it communicates more richly than the post. the article also appears in Interactions Mag )

I was looking at this while thinking a lot about my PhD and some curriculum review that IxDA is currently undertaking with BDW. The following thoughts particularly resonated:

Passing models from one generation to the next is a responsibility of teachers and managers. Models are what students take away from school and what young people take away from early jobs. Models are what you remember after leaving.

I recently spoke with Hugh about a wide arc of ideas and histories related to interaction design, cybernetics and education. The issue of literacy (of systemic or ecological thinking) came up repeatedly, and re-reading this article reminds me to write a little about it.

If models are (as Alan Kay states) where “we do most of our work” (and I think they are) then why not teach modeling as well as models?

Let me explain. It is my belief that education is obsessed with trends; what’s relevant now? who’s hot now? what extends the canon? etc. These invariably manifest in a model of some sort; frameworks, theories, templates and protocols can all be traced back to a model. These are important to pass on. Reinvention is silly, except when it can help us understand.

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 )

Inge Scholl, 8 May, 1950
The view behind the foreground. The political history of the Ulm School of Design (1953-1968)«. Stuttgart 2002.

Photo: Hannes Rosenberg: Inge Scholl bei der Arbeit für die Ulmer Volkshochschule. November 1949., originally uploaded by ReneSpitz

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

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?