For those of you whose first language is English rather than binary: Drupal is a software product called a Content Management System (CMS for short). It’s used to power dynamic web sites with features such as blogging, media integration and community participation. Digital Eskimo has been using Drupal for several years, and we’re proud to support Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and its largely volunteer community. In terms of ethics and philosophy, Drupal is closely aligned with Digital Eskimo. We’ve launched several successful Drupal sites recently, including our “experiment full of experiments” live local.

Quick wrap of my favourite presentations this weekend:

• Liz Henry: Abandonment Issues. First talk of the conference, and in my opinion the best. Liz came out here all the way from the USA, to discuss with us the cold hard fact that Drupal sites need to be maintained, often for a very long time, and that developers often don’t stick around for terribly long at all to do so.
• Angie Byron (webchick): Drupal 7. D7’s mega-enthusiastic lead developer (especially visiting from Canada) gave us a terrific demo of the highlights of the upcoming new version, which is currently in alpha. Angie also invited us all round to her place last night for a hackfest, where I learned how to write about 2% of a core SimpleTest.
• Chris Burgess: doesn’t play nicely. Just when I thought there was nothing new to hear about Drupal module development gotchas, this talk (which rapidly expanded into a facilitated discussion) clearly summarised some issues that Drupal coders experience far too much, and talk about far too little.
• Giuseppe Maxia: Blaming the unknown. Database guru Giuseppe’s talk was more of a general coding talk than a Drupal-specific talk. His basic message hit home to everyone: “it’s always your fault”. We always blame first what we least understand. Honest, upfront, and very informative.

I also gave a quick lightning talk, in which I gave a demo of the Migrate module, which (of late) I’ve been working with extensively here at Digital Eskimo. I’ll be blogging in geekier detail about the conference on GreenAsh — I’ll post the link in the comments (below) when it’s written.

Related posts:

1. DrupalCon DC: reporting back

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.

At Digital Eskimo we are responding to this in a range of ways, including developing a range of codesign activities and applying participatory methods that attempt to facilitate the engagement of communities around a project or campaign. We refer to these as “seeding activities” and the paper presented some of our recent learnings, reflections and approaches.

There were a lot of great speakers at the conference, some of the highlights included Gary Marsdens (author of the excellent Mobile Interaction Design book) keynote on doing HCI in South Africa, or rather failing to do HCI. He generously presented on his mistakes and learnings, and provided an insight into some of the issues he encountered when applying traditional HCI assumptions and methods into this particular context. Gary discussed Mxit, the massively successful Mobile Instant Messenger, and presented some of his own innovative work, BigBoard, which uses Bluetooth to create a free community sharing tool.

Other highlights included the Indigenous Led Digital Enterprise panel, where Vicus Steffensen, from Traditional Knowledge Revival Pathways and Troy Mallie from Cultural Systems Solutions (two different technology approaches to knowledge and land management for Indigenous communities) presented alongside Pasty Cameron (Telling Places in Country, Tasmania) and Yvonne Cadet-James (Gugu-Baden Cultural History, Townsville). Yolande Strengers also presented her excellent research into water usage, and how our social norms require us to wash and bath much more frequently that we really need to.

Related posts:

1. Reflections on the role of seeding in Social Design

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.

No related posts.

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.

For me this generates some questions in relation to conventional design and research processes, relationships and protocols e.g how do we handle (most effectively) the relationship with our participants/potential community members? Is it data or content that is produced in these projects? Who owns it, the right to use it and to distribute it? Are traditional researcher/participant roles which are based on protection of privacy and the assumption of anonymous data still relevant? What are the opportunities of these types of methods to seriously engage in co-design with participants and communities of users?

In summarising one speaker summed up my pres in the following terms “where does the research end and the community begin”. Personally I think this does pretty well to capture the tangle of questions, ideas, intersections and tensions I for one have only just begun to unravel. Thanks to all the other presenters and attendees who gave feedback and added their thoughts and I look forward to further dialogue…

Related posts:

1. ‘By the People’ DE presents at DUX
2. Design Research = Fishing
3. Engaging Stakeholders

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…

We have recently been engaged in an internal debate about the use of this term to describe some of our design services. What does it mean and more importantly will it mean anything to clients? When we use the term Design Activities we mean: engaging stakeholders in creative activities that generate and make available valuable design information to inform the design of the future products and services. Which, I think, is pretty much the context in which Saffer uses the term, but sometimes (more and more) we also mean also something different.

We also do Design Activities, or perhaps Design Interventions with our stakeholders as a value activity in themselves. They can inform the design of a product, but do not necessarily need to result in such to be of value. The Design Activity is a way of intervening, an act of provocation. We engage with stakeholders in a collaborative exercise making available new information, ideas and experiences. They might take the form of remote self-reporting projects using mobile diaries, or day long innovation workshops. Mobile diaries enable participants to record, share and reflect on their every day lives via moblogs. Innovation workshops are where we work collaboratively with clients and/or their stakeholders to expose their world view, to generate new possibilities, creative ideas and extra-ordinary connections.

In these examples we don’t necessarily go on to design a product, but we do design and facilitate the activity or intervention. Possibilities for change emerge from the experience, regardless of whether there is a tangible output. Through participating in a Design Intervention seeds are planted, even though they may be left to grow organically. With so many tools already in existence that can be combined and re-used this makes some sense. We don’t always need to build another, only to make visible new uses for existing systems or ways of leveraging existing touch points.

(with thanks to Emma Magenta for the image)

No related posts.

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.

For those that are interested I’ll post the paper shortly, but here’s little more general theorizing on what has emerged from our recent experimental design research program that I think is interesting for designers and researchers.

We are using mobile and online tools/devices in design research for the development of sites that encourage social change, (e.g. that support campaign action or community sharing). We are by no means alone in the use of these methods though our long time social bent is pretty unique and this communal commitment to a social goal between us and our clients (and their stakeholders) does creates certain opportunities for collaboration.

But back to the method: (In short, the method consists of giving participants mobile phones and cheap video cameras for them to record aspects of their lives over a fortnight. Participants send images and audio representing their daily activities, thoughts and experiences via MMS’s to a password protected blog where they can login and see their posts, comment and also respond to posts from the researchers over the project period). In addition to the benefits of this kind of self-reporting which I cover in the paper, what we are finding is that the experiential relationship between the method that we are using (i.e. the use of technologies that encourage participation) and the purpose of the research (i.e to design technologies for participation) is significant.
It is not just that these new “digital” methods enable remote, self-directed in situ data collection using everyday tools. While those aspects are critical it is also significant that while participants are using mobile and online technology to generate research ‘data’ they are also generating potential content and design material for the sites we are designing.

A hypothetical example would be – we do research into a home gardening site, and during the generative research into this topic with participants, they generate lovely rich, textual and audio visual material about gardening. So you already have your ’seed’ user generated data. While this is great, and fun and exciting and very rewarding research – seeing the participants’ data as potential content is at odds with the conventional role of research outputting data for analysis, and the notion of participants as anonymous subjects.

While (from my perspective anyway) these are interesting outcomes of our research into design methodologies in themselves – I am also interested in what it indicates about the potential for social software (in a pretty broad sense) to trigger a rethinking of methodologies and/or approaches in the design process. And, subsequently, the role of design research and generative activities in themselves for this type of design.

[much of this was originally posted to the Yahoo Anthrodesign Group List]

Related posts:

1. DUX Debrief: Where does the research stop and the community start?
2. Engaging Stakeholders
3. Engaging stakeholders: mobile diaries for social design

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.

No related posts.

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.

Related posts:

1. Design won’t save the world, Design Thinking will

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…

No related posts.

Related posts:

1. DUX Debrief: Where does the research stop and the community start?
2. Design Intervention
3. Engaging stakeholders: mobile diaries for social design