This talk reports and reflects on the results of a teaching experiment conducted with senior students of Arts and Humanities at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M).
The goal of this experiment was to assess the suitability of design-futuring techniques for students with no design background and experience, and refine these techniques in
preparation for an interdisciplinary Masters Program in Digital Living, currently under development at UC3M. The experiment was conducted as part of the course “Humanities and Computing” during the academic years 2009–2010 and 2010–2011. Thirty students participated in the experiment as part of their required curriculum, including students from Literature, History, Media Studies, Library Sciences, Journalism, Business and Law. Students engaged in this experiment followed a design-futuring methodology meant to offer a cultural mapping of the social, political and ethical implications of a potential design future.
Understanding through Design: A Teaching Experiment in Cultivating Cultural Competence for Interaction Design Research
1. Understanding through Design: A Teaching Experiment in Cultivating Cultural Competence for Interaction Design Research Elisa Giaccardi Institute of Culture and Technology Universidad Carlos III de Madrid HCI 2011, July 6-8
2. The Digital Living Initiative: A Platform for Interdisciplinary Research [email_address] CCID2 4-5 July, 2011 composición: ARdelasH Díaz, P., Giaccardi, E., Aedo, I. (2011) Rethinking Education in A Changing World: Towards A Curriculum for Digital Living, Interactions , 13:4 (in press).
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4. Expanding the Design Process [email_address] CCID2 4-5 July, 2011 1 2 3 4 Study Design Build Evaluate 5 Understand 2 3 4 5 1 A. Sellen et al. (2009). Reflecting Human Values in the Digital Age, Communications of the ACM , Vol. 52, No. 3, 58-66.
Add Antonio’s picture and link to website (if completed) how to prepare a new generation of students to the challenges of a world under rapid transformation to be able to envision and pursue new contexts and roles in the society of the future what does it take to shift the emphasis from ‘digital information’ to ‘digital living,’ from the design of information systems to a design centered on the human experience of people living with and through digital technology?
The goal of this experiment was to assess the suitability of design-futuring techniques for students with no design background and experience, and refine these techniques in preparation for an interdisciplinary Masters Program in Digital Living
The kind of design-futuring activities described in this paper incorporate in the interaction design process a wealth of disciplinary knowledge and experience that extends the ways in which user research is conducted: addressing human experience and human values
Done through the mapping of the social, political and ethical implications of a potential design future In this paper, I call cultural mapping the result of this initial stage (understand)
This scenario is part of CamUs, a design future that students imagined by reframing a technology in its infancy such as the electronic contact lens with built-in recording capability developed at the University of Washington. Other scenarios of this design future include a journalist accessing, distributing, and commenting live news through other people’s eyes, and a teleworker ‘disconnected’ from his own vision during the working day. Together, the CamUs scenarios are meant to reveal and map the social, political and ethical implications of living in a society in which digital technology enables people to record and archive what they see, and to ‘align’ themselves in real-time with what other people see.
First, they were exposed to the changes in computing and interaction brought about by emerging technologies etc. Reframing is (Jon Kolko): A method of shifting semantic perspective in order to see things in a new way Explores associations and hidden links Identifies implications and insights (“what if” scenario) During the first stage, students are exposed by means of examples to the changes in computing and interaction brought about by emerging technologies, and are asked to identify the aspects of these changes that each of them finds either positive or negative. At this stage, students are challenged to express and discuss their own personal concerns and values. The second stage brings together students with similar concerns (but often conflicting values) to pick a technology in its infancy, and reframe its use in the context of a potential design future. In the third stage, students elaborate a scenario through synergistic activities of creative writing. These activities result usually in the production of short stories or short movies. At this stage the techniques used for developing the scenario are quite flexible and opportunistic. Students are given a high degree of freedom in exploring different language tools and models of collaborative writing, and to elaborate the technique most suitable to their different backgrounds and expertise. The ultimate goal of the scenario is the cultural mapping of the implications of the design future students have collaboratively envisioned.
Importance of facilitation
Individual expertise and personal perspectives (mix) Individual abilities
Experience prototyping: A representation of a design, made before the final solution exists (Bill Moggridge) Explore or communicate what it might be like to interact with the product we are designing (Jane Fulton Suri) Experiential quality of interaction Design probes: track emerging developments in specific areas (politics, economics, environment, technology and culture) in order to come up with concepts to stimulate debate
difficulties in understanding and sorting out the difference between the artistic creation of imagination and the aesthetic transformation of reality produced by design challenge of how to use the mapping (cultural awareness and collective understanding)
challenge of how to use the mapping (cultural awareness and collective understanding) Beyond teaching experiment (students empowered)…