| 1. |
- Bergström, Jenny, et al.
(author)
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Becoming materials : material forms and forms of practice
- 2010
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In: Digital Creativity. - : Routledge. - 1462-6268 .- 1744-3806. ; 21:3, s. 155-172
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- As a result of development toward ‘smart’ materials, materials now enable an expanding range of aesthetic expressions and user experiences. These materials are fundamentally temporal in their capacity to assume multiple, discrete states of expression that can be repeatedly and minutely controlled. These materials come to be, or become, only over time and in context—they are becoming materials. Thus, in the development and application of such materials, we must engage more extensively with the experience of materials in practices of design and of use. This paper introduces and discusses the concept of becoming materials—as well as the implications for practice—through a series of examples from our own practice-led research within art, design and architecture. Coming to terms with the implications for material practices of design and of use, we suggest, requires the development of new concepts and methods for doing and studying the design of becoming materials.
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| 2. |
- Collins, Robert, et al.
(author)
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The contestation café: a manifesto for contestation : prototyping an agonistic place
- 2022
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In: Proceedings of the 12th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI’22). - New York, NY, USA : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 9781450396998
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The Contestation Manifesto and its associated paraphernalia are artefacts from a speculative, near-future community action known as the Contestation Café. Being one in a series of research through design projects on contestation, the Contestation Café is a critical, yet also practical, design intervention rooted in how the act of repair has moved through the physical into the digital, and the shared values therein. Tracing the history of electronic repair - from the early valve radios, the invention of the transistor, microchips, programmable devices and through to IoT, connected devices and the "fluid assemblages"that emerge - we can see the shared values of the physical act of repair with the more intangible act of contestation in the digital world of algorithmic systems. Overlaying the values and tactics of the Right to Repair movement with the emerging concerns around data-driven systems we find ourselves examining the Repair Café as a potential model for community contestation and the construction of publics. The Repair Café started in Amsterdam in 2009 and has since spread to 35 countries with over 1700 instances of these cafés. The Repair Café is not intended to be a place where you bring your broken appliances for someone else to repair - rather, it is a place where you learn how to repair and recycle your own products and devices, and - more importantly - a place where you simply learn that things can be fixed rather than thrown out. In a similar spirit, the Contestation Café would be a place for those who feel mistreated by automated decision systems, AIs and algorithms, to bring their broken interactions and their unfair decisions to learn how to contest, push back and reclaim their agency and autonomy. Rather than Repairers, the Contestation Café has a panel of Fixers - people who inhabit the space between designers and users, with a particular knowledge of these systems and how to map and navigate them - who are there to share their experience and knowledge, and to guide the user in the ways of contestation and to become Fixers of their own futures. Although the Contestation Café is a speculative concept based on research into the shared values of contestation and repair, it has developed a life of its own through the process of imagining how it would work and what it would look like. Through the act of writing a manifesto for contestation, the space has manifested itself in the present and is waiting only for the fixers and public to arrive. Plans are already in progress for its first real instance and all of the imagined artefacts presented here will inform this process. https://contestationcafe.org/
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| 3. |
- Collins, Robert, 1974-, et al.
(author)
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The right to contestation : Towards repairing our interactions with algorithmic decision systems
- 2024
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In: International Journal of Design. - : Chinese Institute of Design. - 1991-3761 .- 1994-036X. ; 18:1, s. 95-106
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper looks at how contestation in the context of algorithmic decision systems is essentially the progeny of repair for our more decentralised and abstracted digital world. The act of repair has often been a way for users to contest with bad design, substandard products, and disappointing outcomes - not to mention often being a necessary aspect of ensuring effective use over time. As algorithmic systems continue to make more decisions about our lives and futures, we need to look for new ways to contest their outcomes and repair potentially broken systems. Through looking at examples of contemporary repair and contestation and tracing the history of electronics repair from discrete components into the decentralised systems of today, we look at how the shared values of repair and contestation helps surface ways to approach contestation using tactics of the Right to Repair movement and the instincts of the Fixer. Finally, we speculate on roles, communities and a move towards an agonistic interaction space where response-ability rests more equally across user, designer and system.
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| 4. |
- Giaccardi, Elisa, et al.
(author)
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Editorial: AI and the conditions of design : towards a new set of design ideals
- 2022
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In: DRS 2022: Bilbao. - : Design Research Society.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The five papers in the DRS 2022 track “AI and the Conditions of Design: Towards A New Set of Design Ideals” offer radical lenses to change the narrative around AI and open pathways towards pluralist digital futures, signaling redirections for experimenting with more inclusive and imaginative design practices.
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| 5. |
- Giaccardi, Elisa, et al.
(author)
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Technology and More-Than-Human Design
- 2020
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In: Design Issues. - Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. - 0747-9360 .- 1531-4790. ; 36:4, s. 33-44
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- As digital technologies such as big data, the internet of things, machine learning, and artificial intelligence increasingly challenge and even disrupt the everyday job of design—not to mention everyday life—there comes a need to raise critical questions about the ways we design.Design as we currently know it and practice it was born out of the logic of industrial production. Although initially mimicking the form and expression that were characteristic of craft and making by hand, it soon became obvious that making by machine required something else. In places such as the Bauhaus, ideas about a unity of art and technology started to evolve. Over time, design came to develop methods meant to ensure that a product was “right” by working iteratively with prototypes and minimizing the risk of mass replicating faults and shortcomings, and to form an industrial aesthetic celebrating (rather than hiding) what “new” machines and technologies brought to the making of everyday things.Contemporary technologies of networked computational things and artificial intelligence, as well as the data capitalism they have made possible, differ from the logic of industrial production. Not only that, they fundamentally challenge the conceptual space designers have created to cope with complexity. For instance, with runtime assembly of networked services, constant atomic updates, and agile development processes, the boundary between production and consumption is almost fully dismantled. No longer is the design process something that happens before production; rather, we see a complete intertwining of development and deployment, sometimes as frequent as daily releases. It appears that this characteristic of a constant becoming is going to be further accelerated by technologies that actively “learn” while in use, changing and adapting over time at an even more fundamental level than is currently the case.As is already evident, not least in the public debate around what to consider a fair and secure use of data, this emerging technological landscape brings up many issues we need to tackle. One of them is that we might be reaching the limits of what our current primary framework for design can cope with—that is, the boundaries of what can be conceived within the frames of human- and user-centered design. In what follows, we discuss what happens if human-centered design is unable to effectively give form to this new technology, why this might be the case, and where we could look for alternatives.
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| 6. |
- Giaccardi, Elisa, et al.
(author)
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The making(s) of more-than-human design : introduction to the special issue on more-than-human design and HCI
- 2024
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In: Human-Computer Interaction. - : Taylor & Francis. - 0737-0024 .- 1532-7051.
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Human activities have drastically altered the planet, with design playing a significant role. While design may intend to do good, its consequences are not always positive: from climate change to resource depletion to unforeseen social dynamics. These transformations also include ourselves, as our relationships with new technologies blur and complicate previous human and machine agency distinctions. Increasingly, design has become a matter of defining what it means to be human. This special issue explores the proposition that conventional human-centered design approaches may not adequately address the complex challenges we face, and that there is instead a need to ground design in more-than-human perspectives. This introduction outlines the evolving landscape of more-than-human design in the context of HCI. Articulating a series of emerging research trajectories, we aim to illuminate the transformative potential of more-than-human orientations to design, including how they both extend and depart from familiar lines of inquiry in HCI–for example, how designers are redefining data, interfaces, and responsibility, and reshaping posthuman knowledge through design. Ultimately, this special issue aims to explore new pathways for designing in the era of the more-than-human, challenging the perceived divide between practice and theory to imagine alternative futures for HCI.
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| 7. |
- Göransdotter, Maria, 1968-, et al.
(author)
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Kitchen choreographies : Homes, things and modern movements
- 2016
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Thinking of things in relation to users and use, there is always some kind of action involved in the usage of things (or interaction, as contemporary design would have it): an action that happens in time and over time, and that more often than not involves movement. This paper investigates how time – seen in relation to the physical dwelling, the objects in it and the people living there, using things – have been the basis for proposing new designs for things and homes, literally new practices of “modern movements”, in the homes of 1940s Sweden.The home and its’ everyday things and practices has over the years emerged as a research theme within design history as well as in other disciplines. Relationships between dwelling, architecture and the ideals of modern living manifest in floor plans and city plans have been explored, as have the styles and aesthetics of things and buildings. Relationships between people and everyday things and environments have opened up for research into how things and people reciprocally build both meanings and practices, as well as how design scripts actions and behaviours. Many studies focus on the kitchen: its’ physical design, the objects related to it and – not least – the (mainly women’s’) work and values associated with it. The Frankfurt kitchen in the late 1920s, for example, has become almost a standard example of how ideas of rationality and modernity were brought into the equation of solving problems of low (or non-existent) standards of housing to address issues of economy in planning and building. Such examples also illustrate interests in scripting new behaviour specifically in the kitchen; behaviours that extended also to the home, and on a larger scale to life and society in general within the modern movement.In the process of forming the Swedish welfare state, ‘the home’ was central both as a metaphor and as an area of reform and rethinking. In parallel to the planning and building of rational housing to address the appalling housing situation in Sweden, there were similar concerns for planning, education and reform of how homes were actually used and inhabited. A focal point came to be the kitchen, where the movements and actions of women were investigated systematically and scientifically with the threefold aim of improving the building standards, finding the best design of kitchen utensils and equipment, and determining the best ways of working, acting and moving around in the kitchen. In this paper, studies of housework and household objects made by the Hemmens Forskningsinstitut (HFI, ‘The Home Research Institute’) in the late 1940s forms the basis of an analysis of the relationships between things in use and users in action, and how notions of rationality and repetition, optimisation of motions and methods, brought from industrial contexts came to define also what makes sense in a home.
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| 8. |
- Göransdotter, Maria, 1968-
(author)
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Transitional design histories
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Design practices are to a large degree conceptually and methodologically based in ways of designing rooted in the 20th century. Some of the challenges that arise in contemporary design stem from an unawareness of design’s historicity, and the discrepancies between what design methods and concepts once were made to handle, and what we presently try to apply them to. This historicity of design, embedded in its methods, tools, and thinking, shape and limit what is possible to do in design. Unless we actively deal with the historicity of design’s central concepts, we risk inadvertently reproducing and reinforcing past norms and values in outcomes as well as in practices of design. Bringing history more actively into design can reframe the spaces in which to explore possibilities for how to go about designing differently.The program of transitional design histories presented in this thesis is formulated on the proposal that the historicity of designing should be made more present in design to support developing approaches and methods for responding to contemporary issues of complexity and sustainment. Design histories therefore need to work differently, taking an outlook in design practices rather than in design outcomes. I propose a methodology for making design histories as prototypes, combining a programmatic approach from practice-based design research with research methods in history that focus on analysing concepts and ideas. These transitional design histories do not provide solid foundations for, or explanations of, what design is or has been. Instead, they aim to make conceptual moves that support developing design practices capable of engaging with a complex ‘now’ and with uncertain futures. The aim is to support making conceptual moves through using historical perspectives in exploring if it would be possible to see, think, and do design in other ways. By shifting the outlook of design history from product to process – from things to thinking – an ambition is to sketch the contexts in which foundational concepts and central methods in design once came about. This shift of position can provide a provisional and propositional scaffolding that activates an awareness of how – and why – the ways we design have been formed over time.How transitional design histories could be made is here prototyped in three examples that take a starting point in concepts and themes central to Scandinavian user-centred and participatory design. As prototypes, these histories are constructed in slightly different ways, and aim to explore partially different aspects of mechanisms of design history and designing in relation to each other. The first prototype focuses on the concept of ‘participation’ related to turn-of-the century 1900 ideas, in the writings of Ellen Key. The second revolves around the concepts of use and users, more specifically the relationship between designed ideal or intended uses, in investigations of ‘dwelling habits’ in 1940s Sweden. The third prototype works with methods development in user-centered and participatory design, through examples of research into everyday domestic work carried out at the Hemmens forskningsinstitut (Home Research Institute) in the 1940s.
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| 9. |
- Hauser, Sabrina, 1983-, et al.
(author)
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The widening rift between aesthetics and ethics in the design of computational things
- 2023
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In: AI & Society. - : Springer-Verlag New York. - 0951-5666 .- 1435-5655. ; 38, s. 227-243
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In the face of massively increased technological complexity, it is striking that so many of today’s computational and net- worked things follow design ideals honed decades ago in a much different context. These strong ideals prescribe a presenta- tion of things as useful tools through design and a withdrawal of aspects of their functionality and complexity. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, we trace this ‘withdrawal program’ as it has persisted in the face of increasing computational complexity. Currently, design is in a dilemma where computational products can be seen as brilliantly designed and engag- ing to use yet can also be considered very problematic in how they support hidden agendas and often seem less than trust- worthy. In this article, we analyse factors shaping this emergent ethical dilemma and reveal the concept of a widening rift between what computational things actually are and do and the ways in which they are presented as things for use. Against this backdrop, we argue that there is a need for a new orientation in design programs to adequately address this deepening rupture between the aesthetics and ethics in the design of computational things.
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| 10. |
- Lindh Karlsson, Monica, 1965-, et al.
(author)
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Design Togetherness
- 2015
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In: Nordes. - Nordes. - 1604-9705. ; :6, s. 1-10
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- While science typically approaches complexity through analysis, that is, by unpacking a complex whole into distinct and more manageable parts, the challenge of design is typically to do the opposite; to resolve often contradictory issues and bring together a meaningful whole. We think that there are more to forms of doing design together than our current terminology allows us to articulate. In particular, we want to explore if there are forms of design doing that open up for a kind of bringing together that is qualitatively different from collaboration, in the same way as the meaningful whole design deals with is something qualitatively different than a combination of parts coming out of an analysis. To learn more about doing design together in design education, we have done a series of experiments with multi disciplinary teams. Analysing the results using Arendt’s distinctionbetween work and action, we suggest that there is a difference between collaborative design where people come together as what they are, and a kind of design togetherness where people come together as who they are. In conclusion, we argue that design education might need to revisit its artistic and methodological foundations with respect to participation.
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