This document summarizes Raphaël Velt's presentation on translating academic concepts like trajectories into design practice. Velt was a PhD student who studied how to apply the trajectories framework, which analyzes user journeys, to designing a music festival app. Through partnering with a festival for two years and designing the app himself, Velt found that trajectories can frame the design process, guide methods, and support decisions at different stages. He developed a toolkit including domain exploration cards, visual representations, heuristics, and prototypes to support applying trajectories in practice. Velt also presented a trajectories design lifecycle model inspired by action research to structure the use of the framework.

1. Designing with
Academic
Concepts:
The Example of
Trajectories
Raphaël Velt
EuroIA, Stockholm, 29.09.2017

2. Who am I?
I was a PhD student in a Human-Computer Interaction
(HCI) lab from October 2013 to September 2017
Last week,I submitted a thesis titled
“Putting Trajectories to Work:
Translating a HCI Framework into Design Practice”
… before that I was a web designer and developer.
@raphv
R&D

3. This is a story about
translating knowledge
“Traduttore,traditore”

4. This is a story about translating knowledge
cc-by-nc-nd Samuel Huron
© University of Nottingham
Academic
Research
Professional UX
Design Practice
Forms of knowledge that
support design activities

5. This is a story about translating knowledge
• Why do we academic HCI researchers need to
translate our knowledge?
• Informing the design of interactive stuff is one of the
purposes of the discipline
• But we are geared towards producing journal and
conference papers

6. What are
trajectories?
An overview of the trajectories conceptual framework

7. What are trajectories?
They are a series of concepts to
talk about user journeys
through complex cultural
experiences
• The canonical trajectory
• The participant trajectory
• The historic trajectory
• … and many more concepts:
it’s a “framework”

8. What are trajectories?
• They are an HCI construct
• They’re based on studies of
mixed-reality performances.
• They serve multiple purposes
• They can be used to analyse
experiences
• … or design new experiences
• … or build other HCI concepts

9. What are trajectories?
But they’re almost
unknown outside of
academia…
• We have introduced
them to various
departments at the BBC
• They have been
presented at this
conference in 2015

10. What are trajectories?
A big question for us academics is
whether trajectories (or HCI
theory in general) can be any
useful to designers… and what
would be required to make them
useful.
?
?
?
?

11. How did we address
that question?
An overview of my doctoral research

12. An overview of my research
• To explore that question,we have:
• Tried to get professionals to use
trajectories as part of our industrial
partnership with the BBC
• Done design ourselves…
• We started by identifying what we
thought would be a rich design
setting to use trajectories
• We started looking at music festivals

13. An overview of my research
• Why did I design something myself?
• It’s part of a broader trend in HCI where design is an essential
part of the research activity: “Research through Design”,a.k.a. RtD
• But generally RtD is about making speculative,future-oriented
design,and not about investigating design processes.
• Surprisingly,even though we HCI researchers do design,we don’t
talk about the way we do it.
• We wanted to do design in a design-like environment
• With the constraints and deadlines of a real world project

14. An overview of my research
• We partnered with a local
festival for 2 years
• The novelty wasn’t in the
app but in trying to fit
trajectories into its design
process

15. What we learned
in the process
How do we “use” a HCI conceptual framework?

16. Lessons from using a HCI Framework
Framing the process
Guiding design methods
Supporting design decisions

17. • Trajectories are useful at different points in the process
Global level concepts:
Canonical,participant
and historic trajectories
Local level concepts:
Transitions and
encounters
The global shape of the
experience
Refining articulations
between parts of the
experience

18. Lessons from using a HCI Framework
Technology
requirements
Trajectories
Organizational
constraints
Other design
considerations
Compositional
design
judgement

19. Lessons from using a HCI Framework

20. How do we support the use
of trajectories in practice?
New tools for design

21. Supporting trajectories in practice
• I collated a toolkit for translating trajectories into
practice
• On one level,it is a set of methods and tools that support
design
• On another level,it is a process model to frame the use of
trajectories,and is inspired by action-research

22. Methods and tools
Domain exploration /
ideation cards
Visual representations
HeuristicsPrototypes

23. The trajectories design lifecycle

24. The trajectories design lifecycle and its methods

25. The trajectories design lifecycle: prototyping

26. Thank you!
Any questions?