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

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.