Research By DesignA probe to explore social

encounters, urban space and mobile ICTsJames Stewart (ISSTI)

Mark Wright (ECA and Edinburgh, Informatics)

Richard Coyne (Edinburgh, Architecture)

Penny Travlou (ECA)

Issues

• (Technological) Design as a social science and humanities research method

• Techniques and issues in conducting ‘Research by Design’

• Investigation of ‘User-designers’– Empowerment of users/citizens as creators– Mass customisation - mass configuration

User innovation• Innovation and technology studies: the active

user, user as innovator. – Open Source, Internet model

• Domestication; Appropriation; Innofusion; Lead user innovators.

• How to make this more than basic configuration, or take it or leave it in the market?

• Can we provide a toolkit and support infrastructure to allow more extensive innovation by non-technical ‘users’?

Users in Design methods• Users usually part of a commercial or policy

process– Requirements Capture, Product verification– User-centred design– Participatory design and co-design

• Ethnographic techniques: study the context and practice

• Interactive techniques: engage ‘users’ creatively– Rapid Prototyping– Cultural Probes and Installations

Creation, not ‘capture’

• Too much emphasis on ‘need’. • We wish to emphasise the creative and the

experimental as way of exploring current state of affairs, and inventing the future.

• (alternative phenomenology)

Social Science and Humanities Researchers

• Working for others: – User research– Qualitative/ Quantitative method

• User engagement as part of own design workBut SST and SL emphasis way technology reflects

social that created it, and leaves impression on non-technical.

Thus Another mode of enquiry: study user-designers working on a design project shaped by the research agenda– Research by design

Our Preliminary case

• Branded Meeting Places Projects– Interdisciplinary– Interactions of brand with place and social

encounters– Changing technological environment for these.– Privileged access to a new technology: image

matching via picture messaging– Budget to pay a technical assistant– Lightweight application development– Initial case with a group of Digital Design MSc

students, few with many IT skills.

Mobile Acuity System

• Image matching system - “unlocks information” on a match.

• Used with low quality images• Access though a Mobile gateway• Commercially developed as a marketing tool

e.g. snap2win™ : enhance print media campaigns

• Experimentally developed though game• Cheap way of providing location information

Brief outline

• Our research theme– Explore, through creation of applications using

mobiles and image matching, issues affecting the design and use of branded spaces, particularly related to groups and social interaction and action.

• Input to designers– Minimal Brief– Some exercises on brands and branded spaces– Demonstration of use of technology

Three Teams

• Invisible Art

• Comera– Login into branded places and signal social

network (Facebook)

• PhoneTag– Street game with ‘brands’

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Successes

• Speed of development

• Inspiration

• New directions

• Toolbox

• Knowledge of technical/business weaknesses

Failures

• Weakness of some of the designers• Failure to organise groups• Could we have done more, faster?• Technology not prepared• Designers did not engage with concept of brand• Designers struggled with some of the social

relationships, community ideas v. information and one-way communication. – still in ‘information’ mode rather than community and

communication mode

What did we learn?

• No precise answers to anything!• Opened many doors for exploration

– How does place mediate social interaction and how does this change with ICT

– How is individual and group identity related to place and brand? How may this be changed via personal technology?

– Power of imaginary real

– The normalization of online meeting places - how to make it flow and link more naturally with physical place?

– Branded spaces create distributed virtual space and communities

– New brands of online ‘place’ v. old brands of real place.

– Linking with online . Second Life experiment

Issues

• How much conceptual help and prodding should we give the designers?

• How much help with the iterative design process and engagement with users do the designers need?

• Need to engage with interests of designers• Getting designers to engage with technology• How ‘radical’ or ‘critical’ should we expect the

designers be?

Questions

• How to make this a more rigorous method?• What questions can we ask?• What questions can be answered?• How to chose new groups of user-designers?• How to adapt for use in a living Lab?• Who else is doing this?