designswarm thoughts

The building in which i spent a year (should have spent 2) is for rent…. there are no words for the anger and bitterness i feel.

Via the excellent Experientia.

Not sure how I feel about this latest announcement of the RCA’s new Head of Department Tony Dunne. The Interaction design department (which apart from IDII and Umea was the only other school teaching a less Xerox park approach to the field is renaming itself “Design Interactions”.

“The focus of the department is shifting, and although electronics and computing will remain at the heart of the course, we will begin to explore how design can connect with other technologies, such as biotechnology and nanotechnology. The course has been restructured to reflect this shift and was validated in March 2006.

Design Interactions is a small change, but we think it is significant. It reflects our emphasis on designing interactions of all kinds – not just between people and digital technologies, or even other emerging technologies, but also between people and possible futures, and between design and other fields of art and science.

At the last summer show, we characterised the thrust of the department as follows: ‘Design Interactions explores new roles, contexts and approaches for design in relation to the social, cultural and ethical impact of existing and emerging technologies. Projects, which are often speculative and critical, aim to inspire debate about the human consequences of different technological futures – both positive and negative. Students work closely with people outside the College, designing for the complex, troubled people we are, rather than the easily satisfied consumers and users we are supposed to be. Project outcomes are expressed through a variety of media including prototypes, simulations, video and photography. The students have backgrounds in art and design, computer science, engineering and psychology.” from Regine’s wmmna.

I think there is something very sad here which is the loss of a focus on making technology more usable and more human in every form. Physical computing is one of the ways in which that can present itself. And a field which turn inwardly toward catering to less and less consumer-relevant ideas, quickly slips into the realm of art. If the disappearance of IDII and this shift in the RCA are to indicate a trend in my field, then i wish everyone would support CIID’s growth even more.

In Europe and the UK, there needs to be a space for professionals to learn to understand people, their needs, the business opportunities that design can bring, that fosters the growth of user-centered design in meaningful and playful ways, instead of veering towards the edges of the Bell curve and become design “comments” like the world of product design has become.

I wont be attending Emergence but I had the pleasure on working on illustrating our design process for the poster session where Fresh Start will be presented and i suddenly found it a fascinating exercise. How do you represent what starts out by being boxes and arrows and make it compelling? I had to think about the flow of the process for one. We went through some design steps that influenced the way we analyzed prior assumptions (so the loop) and iterative processes around core design elements (around experience prototyping for example) that completely shaped the final product. So I tried to convey the dynamic essence of that process without losing sight of the visual flow i wanted to keep, i.e. some respect of a left to right, top to bottom way of reading.
So what i came up with eventually was reshaped because we had a lot of copy to include for each step as well as pictures, but i still really like the visual illustration of 7 weeks of hard work, that solely focuses on process and not on detailing the service. On an academic level it’s really interesting and worthwhile.

The final poster version will be present at the conference of course, but consider this the teaser ;)

As I catch up some sleep from the past months of continual work and stress, something new arises, an immediate and utter boredom. I guess that’s what happens when you are a workaholic. I also realised that i was going to have to change this blog since I’ve officially graduated and so can no longer call this a thesis blog. Grant you I do feel that i could keep working on this project for at least another 6 months, but more practical concerns fill my headspace at the moment. I willl therefore change the “raison d’etre” of this blog slightly in the next days to reflect my many current and future interests while still containing all the content of my thesis work of the past year. Boxing things up and moving forward. I’m off to Amsterdam this week for few days and will be back to Milan until the end of the month and then… who knows… the future is here : )

Ok so here are the final official details about the end of year show!:

Limited Edition

You are invited to experience 17 thesis projects from the final graduating class of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea

Opening: June 7th 2006 (18:30-23:00)
Exhibition: June 8/9/10th 2006 (noon-20:00)

Where: Galvanotecnica Bugatti
Via Gaspare Bugatti, 7
Zona Tortona
Milano 20144

More details: http://milano.interaction-ivrea.it/
info@interaction-ivrea.it
www.galvanotecnicabugatti.it

I’m finally done writing.. which says nothing about the work i have left to do to prepare for the end of year show…hmm so much to do so little time.

You can download my full 52-pages-in-single-spacing report here or read this handy resumé : )

Stint
By Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino

With the global growing concern around sustainability and over-consumption we find ourselves having to question our relationships with high-tech personal devices and the business models that support that industry. Using the mp3 player as a case study, this thesis proposes to explore the design opportunities that surface when we design high tech devices with forgotten behaviors, community, status and emotional attachment in mind, using textiles as a way to display history and emotionally rich platforms. Stint is the result of this.

A music sharing service made of physical tokens that represent links to people’s virtual music that are coupled to a widget that talks to the main music application. Each “stint” represents one friend and is made of leather. By giving it to a friend, one links it to the main player, collecting the stints into a network. By pressing each one, a song from that person’s music collection that she has sent it to you, is played. A song can be sent to a friend by holding both the stint containing that music and the one representing the friend we want to send it to. As you interact with the stints the ones with a richer interaction get used and worn, showing history of the relationship. The online widget will show the listening the origin of each song as well as who you have sent it to and how often they have listened to it since receiving it. This builds a visualization that will help you choose better or more appropriate music for that person or to discover what they’re musical tastes are. Stint creates a meaningful relationship between the user, the container, the content and how they affect each other, allowing for richer and long-term relationships to exist with high-tech devices.

Oh my god I’m graduating in a month!!! So much to do. I have a review on tuesday afternoon to present to my advisors Jan-Christoph Zoels and Heather Martin what i intend to present and develop for the exhibition.

Basically I’m thinking of doing the following:

-3 Video scenarios
- presenting screen shots of an interface
- developing a working prototype of the products
-clearly presenting the service around these touch points

Oh and i have to hand in my thesis report for the 22nd…gulp…

This has been a question that has been on my mind for the past couple of weeks whenever i’ve needed a paper bag to help me breathe (which occurs often enough these days considering i have 4 weeks left to this thesis) or was interviewed by tristam sparks for his thesis prototyping. A mantra of the school, thanks to Gillian Crampton Smith, its founder has always been “JEP” Just Enough Prototyping. This means that you need to illustrate your idea with the right amount of prototyping, and not push it too far, this also implies that you are able to prototype your project yourself and you will know when to say “when” in a way. I find myself however in a situation where i could go 2 ways with prototyping: 1. video prototyping the service i am designing using props and smoke and mirrors, or 2. spend an indecent amount of time trying to come up with a functional prototype that ultimately i do not have the skills to build and will only be asking Massimo Banzi to help me with this.

This is part of my frustration with considering technology in design within the school. I see a difference between understanding what technology can do and designing within those constraints and being limited by what i can personally implement. It’s as if my school was expecting me to develop a skill-set some people spent years developing and that by being able to hack a fridge, i’d somehow be able to infuse more value and meaning into what i am designing.

At this point in time i think that video scenarios have a much bigger chance of explaining the value of my project and the interactions through time than a functional prototype which might be just one touch point of the service. So frack it as my friends would say : )

So because of feedback during the exam, i decided to sign up for Last.fm and see what all the fuss is about.

Good things:
1- Interesting ways to surf for music and good indication of the popularity of a song
2- I like the simplicity of the interface and browsing through the different elements of the “service” if one can really call it that, i’m not sure at this point.
3- Kind of a direct way to buy music, not so dissimilar to iTunes
4- I like the friends/neighbours category.

Elements that might need improvement:
1- How on earth do you find someone with your tastes??? Very hard to properly browse for users although each user has an interesting profile. i think that this is the feature that lacks the most innovation for tis service. It’s also extremely anonymous in the visual display of users, no sense of where users are from, and can one really look for someone based on location? isn’t the great thing about music to be able to hook up with people who share your interests and not your location?

I think that i am definitely no interested in making this service i am developing a way for people to browse other users as a main element. I am much more interested in displaying and developing a platform for music exchange that documents use and history of the listening habits, catering to small communities of people who know each other, are flirting, are using music as a way to discover what they are about. This, i think is the best way to discover someone and be introduced to new music.

Had 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.

The redesigned radios were on show at Salone del Mobile 2006 and are still at La Fabbrica del Design till the 22nd of april from 12 to 17 every day except the 16th and 17th.

Hope to see you there!

So i havent been a good little designer and haven’t updated you what is up these days. I’ve been working on the 2 radio projects that me and Dave Chiu developed first more than a year ago. These will be shown at IDII’s presence in Salone del Mobile 2006 at the Fabbrica del Vapore from the 6th of April to the 10th actively ( i will be there in the evenings) and then till the 20th on exhibit. Come and see it as well as my Service design project that we did with Haiyan Zhang.

Down load the invitation.

“I am a woman or maybe I am a dog”

“and then there was design”

” they treat the battering ram pretty well”

Victor helped me out pimping my blog today… so no more weird sidebar errors…yeh!!! Thanks victor…

I am now sucked in again into another exciting 2 weeks of what we call Applied Dreams. Working with Jan-Christoph Zoels, Alie Rose, Yaniv Steiner and Myriel Milicevic from IDII and with great guests from Laboratoire de Recherch Informatique, Jean-Baptiste Labrune and Aurélien Tabard.