Designing with…

October 5, 2022

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This week we continued our discussion from last week’s workshop by Stephen Neely and talked about the topics of worldmaking and the toolmaker’s paradigm. 

Students immersed in the silent game

In groups of 3–4 students, we played the silent game which tested our shared understanding and communication without spoken words. Through the game, we learned about the importance of — 

• Communication — how we rely so much on verbal communication as a medium of sharing our ideas and thoughts that breaking that paradigm to use other mediums becomes extremely challenging
• Goals — A lack of a common goal creates a mismatch in the actions of the builders and the interpretation of the observer might lead to conflicting ideas that do not always build of each other’s thoughts
• Context — Shared understanding of the context in which the idea or the concept can play a critical role in its interpretation. 

We also discussed the idea of common ground which comes from awareness, agency, and mindfulness on part of the designer and the participants. 

Builders A in action during silent game

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Materials for next week — 

1. Christopher Frayling. Research in Art and Design. 1994 and Abi Durrant’s interview with Christopher Frayling ‘RTD Provocation’ (7 short videos). 2015
2. Zimmerman, John, Jodi Forlizzi, and Shelley Evenson. 2007. “Research through Design as a Method for Interaction Design Research in HCI.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 493–502. CHI ’07. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/1240624.1240704.
3. Look through the variety of different “sessions” (e.g. “Novel Interfaces” or “Postcolonial Engagements”) at the following publication venues, and pick two that intrigue you. As well as watching/reading, think about the form in which the work is presented and print one image or diagram (letter size) from each paper:
   Papers and Video Presentations from DIS 2022, CHI 2022 Proceedings, Papers from RTD 2019
4. For Phds, and optional for Master’s students: How does academic research get translated into forms designers can use? David Dylan Thomas. Design for Cognitive Bias. 2020 (Ch 2 and/or 4)