Technology

I’m sitting right now in the main presentation room here at DrupalSouth Wellington January 2010, the second ever Kiwi Drupal conference. This is my second time representing Digital Eskimo at a Drupal event (previous one being DrupalCon DC last year), and my third Drupal conference. I was super-excited to be attending the first-ever Drupal event in Australasia to feature international guest speakers. After a full weekend of presentations, hack jams, mingling, and beverage guzzling (in no particular order), things are just about to wrap up.

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Last week was the 20th anniversary for the Ozchi conference, the leading forum for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in Australia and New Zealand.

I had the pleasure of presenting a paper co-authored with John MacFarlane, a producer at Digital Eskimo, Reflections on the role of Seeding in Social Design (pdf). In it we discuss the way in which social technologies, dependent on participation for success, bring into focus the dynamic and critical relationship between design and use. In social technologies the user literally determines the design, we (designers) only provide the platform. This is an interesting landscape for designers as our role starts to extend beyond constructing and making, to taking responsibility for facilitating and enabling participation. Designing and implementing social technologies successfully means also developing strategies for engagement.

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We are happy to see a definite theme emerging this year as design, technology and sustainability gets picked up (finally) as part of the bigger picture across the board. Digital Eskimo has quite a few opportunities lined up already to share and engage in our design and sustainability conversations (and hopefully actions).

First up is the greening of CHI 2008 where I have been invited to be part of the panel Beyond the hype: Sustainability & HCI in April. The growing interest in sustainability at CHI, and as part of conferencing in general is exciting, and I hope to participate in this one remotely and save some air miles.

Closer to home …

May brings us the Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability Workshop at Pervasive 2008 here in Sydney 19-22 May. Duncan and myself both hope to attend this local one. Our submission, “Understanding Motivation and Enabling Action Towards Change” focused on how Considered Design enables us to both understand what motivates people make change, as well as design technology to support that.

We will be spending the air miles (offset of course) to attend Ezio Manzini’s (a true leader in the field) Changing the Change conference in Torino, later in year. The conference focuses on the role and potential of design research in the transition towards sustainability – we hope this marks a major step in the re-defining of designers as facilitators of significant, positive change.

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Earlier this month I presented at DUX in Chicago on our Mobile Diary method (link to Pdf of paper). The conference theme was on the shifting landscape of design (and our roles within it). I outlined the re-negotiation of conventional processes and boundaries I see occurring in our design process as a result of research methods such as Mobile Diaries. This is because participants generate research ‘data’ themselves (self-reporting) with blogs and mobile devices, in a way similar to that of user generated content or citizen media.

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This post was triggered whilst reading ‘Designing for interaction‘ by Dan Saffer (of Adaptive Path). I’ll admit I haven’t quite got to the last page yet but I’m happy to recommend it already. Unlike some of the other more amorphous or academic texts on the subject this book is a useful, intelligent and digestible description of what we do all day. Saffer includes a section on Design Research (a topic along with ‘design thinking’ that is fast gaining attention in and out of the design world and something we specialise in at Digital Eskimo). Saffer outlines three design research methods: Observation, Interviews and Design Activities. What got me interested in particular was the use of the term Design Activities…

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I’m off to Chicago in November to present our paper ‘Engaging With Stakeholders: Mobile Diaries for social design’ at the Conference on Designing for User Experience. The paper describes our work on mobile diaries and design research methods over the last 18 months. The act of doing these kinds of collaborative design activities with our clients and their stakeholders produces rich results. As well as generating data that inspires our future design work the research facilitates a co-design process in itself. This can lead to the generation of content by participants, as well as a reflection on, and change in existing practice. Kinda of a Participatory Design meets User Generated Content.

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Leisa has put together a short series of posts entitled Embracing the Un-Science of Qualitative Research – parts 1 – Small sample sizes are super, 2 – Ever-evolving prototypes are ace and 3 – Improvising is excellent.

It’s an interesting take on how qualitative research differs from quantitative research – and how some of the “un-science”, that is the lack of “hard numbers”, provides research benefits.

We do a significant amount of qualitative research for our clients, so it’s interesting to see another perspective on qualitative methods.

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So I went to hear Sarah Bloomer (co-founder of Hiser Group) speak at the inaugural UPA Sydney meeting last night. The topic was Expanding User-Centered Design in the 21st Century OR Why Design Thinking is The Next Big Thing.

It was interesting to see usability professionals excited about what designers have been doing for a long time. Though the division between doing user experience or usability and design doesn’t exist too much at Digital Eskimo anyway (perhaps when it is differentiated, it’s specifically based on methodology).

There weren’t any big surprises in the talk (which is a relief really since my background is in design and we are a design company), and it was reassuring to see how much of what is considered the ‘design thinking’ approach (new, inspirational, nimble, exciting, participatory, innovative and strategic) we already do at DE.

It does trigger me to comment on something that has been in the back of my mind recently though – that for usability professionals, HCI peoples and interaction designers, their/our/my history has come from the computer, from computing technology. Where as design more generally has never been constrained to this. Design has been coming to computing rather than the other way around.

Lots of the more recently introduced “design thinking” and “designerly approaches” to HCI (which are indeed exciting but not new to designers of course), are becoming popular due to HCI/UPA peoples being “released from the desktop” as computing becomes ubiquitous, mobile, pervasive, and everyday. Whereas designers have always been in the everyday. Our products have always lived in the world (although, that doesn’t directly translate to design practice always being human-centred in the way that we mean that in HCI).

I’m not sure how significant this is if all, but I think it is a pretty interesting aspect of the HCI/Design convergence thing that is happening.
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We’re currently researching and reviewing how people use news sites for a client – so we thought we might ask some questions here too to see if we can get some further insight from our blog readers.

The basic question is this:

How do you use the articles you read on news sites?

We’re interested in the questions from both a practical and conceptual angle. Some practical examples: do you bookmark articles (your browser bookmarks, delicious etc.), share them via social networking sites(Digg, seed to Newsvine etc.), print, email to friend or save copies? And conceptually, do you use news articles with your work, study or as talking points at the pub or “over the watercooler” at work?

While we’re on the topic, have you come across any news sites recently that really raise the bar? Or even news sites that just have a cool feature or two that you find useful/fun/interesting?

If so, leave a comment and let us know what you think…

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So I am on a sort of mini research sabbatical this month which means I finally get a moment to think about sharing some of the exciting work we’ve been doing in articulating our design research. As a Considered Design agency design research is a critical part of our scoping phase. It’s how we really get to immerse and learn about clients and their stakeholders, the world they live in now, and the world they hope to live in 3, 6, 9 12, 24 months time. We consider the opportunities and options, and pick out a path (or let one emerge) that is most applicable to the specificities of each situation and context. It’s an incredibly exciting part of the process as each client and project is different. We have a range of methods that we employ (e.g naked personas, imaginary scenarios and mobile diaries) to reveal these things and I am planning to post some more detailed writing on how these work and why we use them in the near future. In the meantime, I wanted to share this representation of our process, developed for us by lovely friend and artist Emma Magenta, as it really is the best depiction of the Digital Eskimo design research process we’ve managed to date.
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