Exam 1
April 24th, 2006Had my exam 1 on friday, some really nice crits were there: Mark Delaney from Plan Design, Jay Melican from Intel research, Chris Downs from Live|Work and Steve Thompson from Newport School of Art and Design in Wales.
I hate to say the critique was very harsh and pointed out some really important gaps in my thinking , maybe related to the fact that i had so little time to prepare for this exam, right after Salone. Well that’s no excuse really. So i thought id make a diagram of the foundation of my thesis so i avoid having to discuss it again and can go: here it is and avoid a lot of communication problems i encountered in my presentation.
So essentially I am looking at sustainability and the ways in which our society is supposed to address it. Through concepts like PSS (Product Service Society and service design, we are advocating that we should do more with less; use more services and less material objects, transition from a society that values access versus ownership. I think that this is a very valuable way of looking at the future but it hardly addresses the designer’s role and how we design within and for these services. If we are advocating that we should use less, does that mean that we should care more and therefore throw away or discard less? When we talk about high tech personal devices, we often find ourselves with a little bit of ause-phobia mainly because use and the degradation of those objects is not something that is desirable or appealing. I am calling this negative history. What i seek to find out is if we can design for “positive history” or to create meaningful object-subject relationships by using and treating fabrics as a material that displays history in an appealing and engaging way. History of use is something desirable in a pair of jeans or a teddy bear, so why not in a high tech device?
To test this theory out, i wanted to find a design space that would allow me to address mack of emotional relationships and i found that the area of music and its more recent form the mp3 and its player was a convenient case study. With the disappearance of a physical token for music and an ephemeral attachment to its containers, this was the perfect area to start.
So there, I have laid down the foundation of my thinking for this thesis and can now concentrate on the design work that is necessary for the next review which will take place on the 15th and 16th of June 2006.
[…] Value profiles of objects In his paper entitled “Everyday robotics: robots as everyday objects“, (Proceedings of the 2005 joint conference on Smart objects and ambient intelligence: innovative context-aware services: usages and technologies), Frederic Kaplan defined the notion of “Value Profiles” to describe how the experienced value of an object change over time: “Experiences change the value of objects. In some cases, high expectancies are followed by disappointment. In others, unexpected qualities are discovered after a while. Time increase the historical value of some objects and make other obsolete. Such kind of evolution may be rapid. It takes only a few minutes to be excited or disappointed by an object. But it also involves long-term dynamics. In some cases, the same objects can continue to be used for many years.(…)A value profile is meant to capture in a single hypothetical curve the evolution of the experienced value of an object. Immediate value is characterized by the first minutes of interaction with the object. Short-term value corresponds to a time range that starts with the first days of usage and lasts for over a month. Eventually long term value is characteristic of the evolution over months and years.“ Acoording to him, 9 features characterize the experience with objects and then contributes to the value profile: versatility, social orientation, network factor, investment, historical capacity, personalization, control types. Data mining techniques on examples led him to put the emphasis on historical capacity, social orientation, network effect and control type. He then interestingly represents hypothetical curves of various value profiles: fashionable clothe (a), a computer (b), a corkscrew (c) and a notebook (d): Why do I blog this? although his point in the paper is to investigate the potential value profile of robots, I think the concept can be applied elsewhere and may interestingly be pertinent for discussing design problems. Would it be possible to create unusual value profiles (with spikes?) or take advantage of the existing value profiles to create new objects in different area? For instance, the value profile of a Nabaztag is quite flat and spiky, depending on the moment you receive messages (or if the rabbit does tai chi movements). Would it be possible to have the equivalent of the notebook value profile? yes for sure if the historical capacity of the object could be raised (a la blogject, creating some positive history as described by Alexandra D.S. [via pasta and vinegar] […]