Following is a story of some of my material and professional journeys, skills and background of becoming a designer. The aim of sharing this is to unfold my maybe sometimes unstated assumptions throughout the text about what I mean by being a ‘one- designer’ and to acknowledge the ma-terially explorative and experimental designerly modes of inquiry taught (and learned-by-doing) at the architecture school where I was studying.15 However, the conclusion of this section is meant to also show how little of the ‘material’ of the co-designer was taught while I was studying.
The following letters match the letters on the image in Figure 3
a/ Prior to my architectural studies, I studied at a daily art folk school, and through hands-on experimentation learned a variety of classic artistic techniques like drawing, painting, doing graphics, sculpturing and pho-tographing as well as more conceptual ‘art’.
Then, in the Indian summer of 1996, I started my architectural studies.
From day one, I knew I would not be building houses, but I stayed as I found the hands-on, experimental, diagrammatic and project-based ways of working and learning, quite interesting.
b/ My first projects and years were all about understanding and exploring cores of architecture – scale, proportions, light, statics, drawing plans and sections, etc. We did this by creating tiles in plaster with different surfaces, and then by building various models around these to experiment with get-ting the desired light setget-ting. This and many other exercises and projects
15 The School of Architecture in Aarhus (AAA) in Denmark. After two years of basic architectural studies, I specialized for two years in industrial design, and after a period
with internship, studies abroad and a pause while engaging in the WorkSpace project (Appendix 01), I graduated from the small department called ‘Communication Design’
(September 1996 – January 2003).
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Figure 3/ a-h/ My suitcase highlighting glimpses of the repertoire of visualizing, materializing, experimenting, listening and publishing skills I have built up while training to become an architect specializing as an industrial and communication designer.
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staged by my tutors, gave me diverse experiences of designing (architectural proposals) by experimenting and working with different physical materials.
c/ ‘All-inclusive design’ was influencing architecture teaching at the time, so in a two-day workshop all second year students in smaller teams were to experience an existing building – for example while being blind-folded and in a wheelchair. Afterwards, we story-boarded our experiences and designed a quick proposal for a building based on these insights. Here my focus on the importance of understanding the use situation of different people (not just myself) was initially evoked.
d/ During my third and fourth year, I specialized in what my tutor at the time called ‘Hard core industrial design’. Mostly sketching and working in a human scale 1:1 with quickly-made models or mock-ups, on my own, I continually tried to put myself in the shoes of the people who were going to use what I was set to design. Once we got the brief to design a ‘video-phone’. Against the norm, I was working in a team with one classmate, and all our dialogues and questioning of adding yet another device to the home, made us challenge the brief and instead again through sketching and modeling designed a ‘Personal Home Communicator’ (included are parts of the high-fidelity model with a remote hard-button-interface and a rolled paper with four different use situations). (It was rewarded a bronze medal at the LG Electronics Design Competition 1999 in Seoul, Korea.) In the semester focusing on transportation design, the brief said: Design a Postal Car. I did.16 Yet, it was still not my call to design yet another mass-produced product, so luckily…
e/ Finally, as a designer I had an “Aha! Experience”. In the early days of user-centered design, in the spring of 2000, I was invited to a Nordic four-day hands-on workshop in Finland called ‘Designing for User Experience’.
Even though it was challenging, it was extremely inspiring to base our de-sign concepts on probe-based field studies with real people – in my case 10-year old girls – and to work in a multidisciplinary team of designers. This became a turning point in my approach to design and my understanding of being a designer. In retrospect, it was my spring board of becoming a co-design researcher and with that a practitioner staging co-designing.
f/ My internship was with Bang & Olufsen Telecom in Denmark (fall 2000), where I (for the last time) mainly applied my core industrial design skills (desktop research, a bit of fieldwork, sketching and modeling in different materials). Building upon the ‘Personal Home Communicator’ and a vision in the company, in quite close collaboration with engineers and interface designers from the company, I designed a conceptual model of a leather-bound ‘BeoBook’ (interaction-wise envisioned much like a double version of today’s iPad). This work-experience revealed good insights into devel-opment processes in a design/engineer-driven company, but I returned to Finland to further specialize in user experience design (spring 2001).
16 This process and example is further discussed in Part A / Introduction.
g/ Back in Denmark, after a pause while participating in the WorkSpace project, my diploma work was entitled ‘Journeys to the World of the Users…’.
It was an opportunity for me to gather, communicate and suggest various ways of assisting architects in easily engaging ‘users’ in their early de-sign processes. During the project, parts of the work were discussed and explored with architects from a large Danish architectural company. The large suitcase was filled at the final presentation, and here the little suit-case held the following, designed during that project: a ‘map of methods’
with the dimensions ‘in lab ‹› in context’ and ‘abstract ‹› concrete’; a pro-posed iterative loop-journey-process emphasizing planning, preparing, the actual ‘journey in the world of the users’ and memories; bags with pro-posed participating materials, a deck of question-cards and a ‘Focusboard’
(on the far right, a plexi-glass surface with holes and additional pieces and clips to place in the holes).17 This was designed to assist architects in mod-eling their planning and preparing for engaging people in their work.
With this kind of design-work I started realizing the need for designing formats assisting in staging dialogues and co-designing…
h/ Additionally, while studying, I missed reflectively reading and writing about what I was learning and doing, and I discovered others were too (at that time it was not a very strong part of the curriculum). We established a group across years of study and specializations, and our discussions became a series of booklets called ‘FORUM’. Six editions were published, before we merged with a similar group at the Royal Academy of Architecture in Co-penhagen and continued with the series (KÅRK) for and by architectural students and others who were interested. For me, this fruitful collaboration ended with making a special edition of the Danish architectural magazine
‘ARKITEKTEN’. Translated, the title is ‘X – The Creative Zone’. (My two first/
oldest papers in my List of Publications were published in this magazine.)
To summarize, I have shared highlights from my journey and background of being a student becoming a ‘one-designer’ with designerly and experi-mental modes of inquiry, moving into user-centred design and initial ex-periences with reflective writing. Yet, as I will further emphasize in the introduction of Part A, the aim of sharing this journey is also to show that most of the core ‘materials’ of the co-designer and co-design researcher, which I explore and propose in this thesis, was not a part of this back-ground and training. And, with my knowledge mainly of several Scan-dinavian design schools, still are not core parts of the curriculum there.
With today’s complex challenges, I strongly suggest it should be.
Back to my journey: After this, my journey continued into interaction design, participatory design research and into slowly my becoming a co-design researcher.18
17 Afterwards, this was used the most – and as it was engaged at an event in the PalCom project (Appendix 03), it is discussed in the Part C / Introduction.
18 This journey is also captured in the Foreword: Program in Figure 1 including my (so far) three main research programs. Figure 3egh of this journey roughly resemble Program 1.
Appendix 01