Research By Design

Research By Design A probe to explore social encounters, urban space and mobile ICTs James 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 work But SST and SL emphasis way technology reflects social that created it, and leaves impression on non-technical. Thus Another mode of enquiry: study userdesigners 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

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• Comera – Login into branded places and signal social network (Facebook)

• PhoneTag – Street game with ‘brands’

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?