The research in this thesis largely builds upon practical designing and co-designing experiences, so in the following I will use two different ex-amples to initially show how I have experienced and how I view designing and co-designing as two different practices:
Example of designing / my one-designer ‘postal car’ proposal
While a student of industrial design, in the fall of 1999 throughout a whole semester, I was to individually design a proposal for a ‘postal car’. Every-one in the class got the same initial brief for this assignment, but twenty different proposals were presented on the last day. I had my individual pro-cess of developing my proposal. During this propro-cess, I at set times had to make mid-way presentations and was in dialogue with my tutor and some-times more informally with other classmates. But otherwise I had limited interaction with a few postal-professionals. I was alone with the various materials I was working with and that is what got me to my proposal.
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Figure 7/ a-c/ A few selected materials from my logbook during a project of individually designing a proposal for a postal car (as a 4th year industrial design student – 1999). >
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Figure 7/ d-i/ A few selected materials from my logbook during a one project of individually designing a proposal for a postal car (as a 4th year industrial design student – 1999).
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a/ b/ The project started with some desktop research and a whole day of following a postal woman working from 5:45 am at the mail packaging unit and on the road in her current slightly re-build Peugeot Partner-postal car.
Based on this, two of the important design program criteria for me in my process of designing a new postal car became to design an ergonomic and user-friendly postal car, for the delivery person to easily get in and out of with new letters and sometimes packages about 200 times a day. To do this I was working and prototyping with many materials on my own in vari-ous parallel ways:
c/ d/ Sketching on paper for understanding the scale of the human body and for capturing different possible overall spatial principles to match this.
e/ The postal car as an ergonomic and user-friendly work place was my main focus, but from my day-trip, I clearly realized that the car was (of course) not a stand-alone product – which we as industrial design-ers could tend to view them as. Thus, in parallel with the above I was working with a series of diagrams on paper of organizational structures, because I acknowledged that what might happen in and around the car when delive-ring post, was to a large extent connected to the practices and systems at the letter-sorting postal unit. This was where the driver packaged the car in the morning. Yellow plastic boxes keeping the letters in the right order, were essential in the current practices of organizing the letters and when moving them from indoors to the car. Thus to me the spaces for, organization or and movement of these boxes got a lot of my attention – again to assist in designing an ergonomic and user-friendly postal car work-place.
f/ g/ h/ This was combined with small-scale model-making to get all ve-hicle-elements in place and full-scale 1:1 prototyping to personally explore and rehearse the interactions. The full-size explorations included stan-dard letter and package sizes, mock-ups of my new box proposals, etc.
Practically imagining myself in the car made it very concrete.
i/ Creating many sketches of car styles – to eventually end at my final proposal.
I was working with all these materials and considerations, and for my tu-toring sessions and mid-way critiques during the project, some of these materials were picked by me to assist in telling my current story of my focuses and proposals. It was all refined for the final presentation of my fi-nal proposal – at that time still visualized as hand-sketched drawings! (i/).
Of course, while doing this project I was not alone in a world of my own.
The teaching style was studio based, so I was mainly working in the studio sitting next to the 19 other students also making their proposal for a postal car. Some were friends, and we did of course interact and help each other in the process now and then, but not very much – in my views – because we at the same time were competing to make the best proposal.
This example is from 1999, and as an example from teaching, of course it is not as complex as design processes in a research project or design bureau collaborating with clients, engineers and other professions. Yet, the example corresponds with the kinds of tangible materials engaged in Schön’s example from architectural (also teaching) practices.
Additionally, my reason for including this example here, is to later em-phasize some similarities and many differences between the just exempli-fied individual one-designer practices of designing for others, and collabo-rative co-designing practices in multi-disciplinary, distributed project teams. The following is one such example from the Palcom-project:
An example of co-designing / Exemplar 02
In the previous example, I was designing a proposal for a postal car, to sup-port new workflows and practices for people delivering mail and pack-ages. At the Rehab Future Lab event, the aim was also to make proposals for mixed-media technologies to support and hopefully improve new work-flows and practices for both hand-surgery rehabilitation staff and patients.
But happening within the participatory design (IT research) PalCom-proj-ect, the intension was also to co-design these with the hospital stakehold-ers. In both projects the outcomes – proposals – were accomplished based on an understanding and analysis of current practices, but the little ‘co’
makes the practices of creating these proposals very different.
This rehab Future Application Laboratory (FAL) co-design event happened about 1½ years into the PalCom project. In the meeting room with Group 2, it was the first time one of the programmers (a person also on the managing team of the whole project and from another country and university) met the two staff members from the hand-surgery rehabilitation department at the hospital. The hospital department is an official but quite small stakeholder in the project, but the occupational therapist had been engaged throughout the project with the local PalCom team at the local university. Project mem-bers from this university had organized the event, and were there repre-sented by the PhD scholar in interaction design also sitting at the table.
Generally, this has been a premise of all the large distributed, participa-tory and multi-disciplinary co-design (research) projects I report from in this thesis. New people continue to meet, and continue to quite quickly have to somewhat understand each other to be able to engage in co-de-signing (in the situation at the table).
Before this event, a design process of developing and detailing the propo-sals introduced in the situation (with scenarios and mock-ups), had been happening partly in dialogue with the occupational therapist and another physician-colleague, but mainly among the small team of four interaction design researchers at the local university. As I was not there at the time, I cannot report in details about what happened, but I know parts of this pre-paratory work happened with fragments of processes as if the individual process described above – but then coordinated among them to reach the proposals shared and explored with the others at the event.
Appendix 03
Chapter 7 Appendix 03 Exemplar 02