Interaction design / Industrial design / Service design / Co-creation / Participatory design
In the following series of sections, I will present my understanding of co-designing in relation to other design-related fields, terms, concepts and approaches, including interaction design, industrial design, service design, co-creation and participatory design. The purpose is to position this work partly in opposition to ‘classic’ design fields such as industrial design designing for others, and in relation to the fields that also explore and argue for co-designing with others. With this foundation for moving from designing to co-designing, this thesis particularly relates to and aims at contributing to participatory design and other fields applying participatory design approaches.
Co-designing… and Interaction design
This thesis is written within the field of interaction design (IxD) at K3 / Malmö University. This taken into consideration, it might seem striking to the outsider how relatively little I will relate my work to computers, mobile phones, ‘digital artefacts’, and the ‘digital’ as design material. However, at K3, IxD is viewed as a highly multidisciplinary field and practice, also in-corporating humanistic traditions and participatory approaches, thus hav-ing a focus on co-designhav-ing highly relevant to the field of interaction design.
In the following section, I will introduce and briefly discuss some of the most mainstream literature on interaction design, some relating to the is-sue of co-designing. I will discuss how I largely view the ‘methods’ in the field as designing for others.
Interaction design has grown out of and is related to various branches of IT and computer-related research areas, including but not limited to: hu-man-computer interaction (HCI) (e.g. Winograd, 1986/1996), information systems (e.g. Löwgren & Stolterman, 2004) and augmented reality, perva-sive computing, tangible computing, which all build upon ubiquitous com-puting (e.g. Weiser, 1991).
Generally, in interaction design, ‘the digital’ is (still) considered as the main
‘material’ being designed. This is captured in Thoughtful Interaction design, in which the authors describe the process of interaction design as one of
‘shaping digital artefacts’ (Löwgren & Stolterman, 2004:Preface). As a way of talking about IxD, their main concept of ‘use qualities’ does provide a useful way of relating and characterizing interaction designs and digital artefacts.
In addition to a focusing on the digital, as Ramia Mazé has argued, one of the main characteristics that distinguish interaction design from e.g.
industrial design is ‘occupying time’ (Mazé, 2007). In her view, it does not make sense to speak of or (co-) design interactions, or services or organi-zational changes, which I get to below, without considering flows of time.
Furthermore, and as a part of understanding (the digital in) these flows of time, a sound understanding of the use situations and ‘users’ is also recog-nized as essential within IxD. Related to this, Paul Dourish’s Where the Action Is, introducing a focus on ‘embodied interaction’ is a very influen-tial reference in the field (Dourish, 2001). Finally, Malcolm McCullough, author of Digital Grounds, a work that seeks to relate architecture and interaction design, has also emphasized the importance of understanding the contexts in which interaction is situated (McCullough, 2005).
In the IT-research projects I have been engaged in, our research related to tangible and ubiquitous computing, and we were partly ‘shaping digital artefacts’, to use Löwgren and Stolterman’s terms. Yet, rather than view-ing what comes out of our IT/interaction process as a product (e.g. a new software application), as widely recognized in participatory design (PD), we viewed our work as intertwining in and changing the socio-technical and socio-material situated actions in the field we were working with (e.g.
Suchman, 1987/2007). In all these projects, in different ways, we also ap-plied PD approaches. It is these PD approaches I mainly focused on while engaging in each of the projects, and focus on in this thesis, which is why I will not particularly relate to these other computing-related fields or branches throughout the thesis.
Ways of designing in interaction design
Bill Moggridge’s book, Designing Interactions, and Dan Saffer’s book, De-signing for Interactions – creating innovative applications and devices, both present examples of different IxD application areas, methods and techniques, including sketching and prototyping (Moggridge, 2007 / Saf-fer, 2010). Similarly, Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences also nicely illustrates practical ways of working in IxD (Buxton, 2007). Surely extend-ing the understandextend-ing of sketchextend-ing, he does not simply refer to drawextend-ing on white paper, but as the others, also to wireframing, storyboarding (to capture interaction over time), (lo-fi and hi-fi) prototyping, roleplaying and experience prototyping (e.g. also Buchenau and Fulton, 2000).
However, unlike the two others, Buxton does not just exemplify and de-scribe the various methods and techniques, but critically discusses them, claiming that ‘sketches are social things’ (ibid:153), Likewise, despite a chapter entitled ‘Methods and Techniques’, Löwgren and Stolterman also argue that methods cannot do the job on their own, but are highly situated and dependent on the skills of the designer applying them (Löwgren and Stolterman, 2004:63,100).
Chapter 5
Appendices 01, 02, 03
Exemplars 02, 06 Chapters 2, 3, 4, 8
Many of these ‘methods’ are also used in participatory design (research) projects with users and various stakeholders, and as shown in some of the Exemplars, in the IT-projects we were prototyping and roleplaying.19 Most of the books just mentioned include outlines of design processes and roles of designers, and they all emphasize a focus on user experiences in inter-actions. Löwgren and Stolterman, also include a short repetition of Pelle Ehn’s key points about participatory design practices (Ehn, 1988).
However, I would argue that most literature on IxD tends to view IxD as a field and practice of designing – not co-designing. This is despite the general recognition of the field’s multidisciplinary character and the necessity for a user-centered focus. Several authors do recognize that different people with different interests are engaged in the design pro-cess, and that sketches and prototypes – if not introduced in the right way – can lead to lengthy arguments and conflict (e.g. Saffer, 2010:176).
Similarly, as I will address in Chapter 5, in my experience there is a tre-mendous difference between one person or a small group of designer(s) pre-designing sketches and prototypes and showing these to others, and sketching together.
Yet, none of them discuss in detail how the multidisciplinary character of IxD makes it a very different practice from classic designing. It is obvious that a design team with stakeholders placed all across Europe will work according to different practices from a core team working together on a daily basis in the same studio. Such gaps in conventional literature on IxD make it necessary to look elsewhere for literature that can better illumi-nate participatory processes of interaction design.
Summary / Co-designing… and interaction design
I acknowledge the importance of the emphasis on ‘digital artefacts’, ‘the digital as the main design material’ and understanding of ‘users’ and the use situation in mainstream literature on interaction design, but, inspired by Suchman and others, I maintain the importance of under-standing the digital as situated within particular socio-material use situations over time. While mainstream literature on interaction design generally recognizes IxD as a user-centred and multidisciplinary field, I argue that much of this literature tends to consider interaction design as a practice of designing for others, rather than a practice of co-designing with others.20
19 Yet, partly related to Buxton, Löwgren and Stolterman, with my suggestion to view materials as participating in designing and co-designing, I generally oppose the focus
on ‘methods’ also within IxD(e.g. see Chapter 2, Part B / Introduction).
20 In many ways the field of interaction design (IxD) has developed out of, in extension to, as a corner of, in parallel with, as a mix of, or as one of the parts of the other different fields and approaches discussed in this section: industrial design, service design, co-creation and par- ticipatory design. So in the following section when I explore these, I intend to explore IxD.
Chapter 5 Exemplars 02, 06
Chapter 2