RCA Design Interactions: Tribal Futures project

Whilst reading the Putting People First blog this afternoon I saw this post, which led me to the Matt Jones' blog, Magical Nihilsm. Here he described his involvement in the "Tribal Futures" project with the RCA's Design Interactions course, in collaboration with Vodaphone's user experience group. 

The brief they were set asked them to:

“…focus in on the mundane and the extremes of our behaviour in groups and propose design interventions to support, subvert and celebrate our tribal connections. We encourage you to extrapolate the current trends in mobile, social and other technologies in terms of their failures as well as successes, and examine what technologies intended and unintended consequences might be.”

I was pleased to see that an ex classmate of mine, Alison, got a mention. Her Waltz of the Orange Men described the flows of movement she observed whilst following the council's recycling removal men. It was really interesting to see the insights she found from observing their work, including their reliance on each other to work effectively.

Waltz of the Orange Men from Design Interactions

I think this has given me some inspiration of where to go next with my project. I know I need to focus in on an area, but it is encouraging to see the insights that can come from something that appears mundane at first. I'm not sure if I want to focus in on group behaviour in public space, or this idea of individuals and disconnectedness. 

Focus, focus, focus

At the moment all I can think of is words...

urban, space, design, society, people, city, sound, media, social, interaction, art, environment, globalisation, culture, architecture, existence, mobile, connections, communication, place, community, technology, context, flow, simplicity, complexity...

I'm struggling to find the focus for my project, everything I look at interests me and sends me off in another direction. I know I need to narrow down, otherwise I will be going round this loop forever. I feel like I need to grab hold of one bit of inspiration. I found this image here from Robin Howie, which I feel captures some of what I'm thinking about. A Dialogue with Public Space "transforms the public landscape into a conversation."

Via Picacool

Any ideas or suggestions from anyone on how to find focus on the project would be much appreciated. I'm sure I'll get there, I just hope that it's soon.

Traces of Human Activity

Yesterday we travelled through to Edinburgh for the day to conduct a fieldwork activity. We were given the task of observing and recording traces of human activity in the built environment, and we were given some criteria of what to look out for. These were:

• By-products of use
• Adaptations for use
• Displays of self
• Public messages

We were also looking at them within their context i.e. clarification of/by the larger picture. Chris and I walked along Princes Street firstly, before heading through the Old Town along the Royal Mile and the Cowgate. We then went back towards the New Town and walked along Rose Street.

In the few hours we spent on the streets we noticed many examples of remnants of human activity. We were both intrigued by the amount of litter that had been placed down. It appears that people will happily place empty cups, bottles, cans etc. on a wall or shelf. It is as if they feel it is not really littering, as the object almost fits the spot it has been left at.

Traces of human activity in Edinburgh

The image above also shows how people will puts stickers on objects such as lamp posts and bins. Often it seemed that people were more likely to place their sticker somewhere if there was already one on it, giving the impression that people will "break a rule" if someone else has already done so. This also relates back to the people I observed in London, who would hold back and watch how someone else operated a ticketing machine in the underground before doing so themselves, and so picking up on the social cues.

The 11th Hour

In our current People and Design project we have been given the task of envisioning a future society in 2108. We also have to imagine a ritual that our society would partake in and then embody this through design.

We have had a series of lectures to get us thinking a lot about issues such as climate change, and how they will have a large effect on what the world will be like in a hundred years. My group have been doing a bit of research and we have set up a blog here to illustrate our process.

I've been doing a bit of my own research into the area, mainly by watching the two films An Inconvenient Truth and The 11th Hour.

Both of them bring up some pretty astonishing facts and statistics, and I'd say a lot of them are quite disturbing. We have been asked to consider what we think the main drivers of the issues that will affect the future of earth. Even though the glaring issues are global warming, soil erosion, fossil fuel depletion, population growth, from watching these films it is plain to see that the problem is humankind, and our disillusionment that we are separate from nature.  

I am interested to look at the positive side, in the 11th Hour it says that this could be the generation to turn things round and make a difference. I've been looking at sustainable design and how it could have a great impact. Bruce Mau's book Massive Change presents some really interesting thinking, and provides possible solutions for the future.

Alienation through technology

For our group project this semester in DE we have been discussing ideas and looking to focus our research. We all agree that often technology can alienate individuals or even entire communities. We feel that design has the potential to prevent this alienation, and we hope to look at how people interact with publicly-cited information in order to inform this.

Through looking at and understanding peoples needs and actual requirements, we feel that a design could help prevent this alienation. We are under the opinion that it would be a good idea to concentrate on the elderly as a group. We feel that as a group they are often not taken into consideration when new technology is produced. We also feel they will have a good insight into the community aspect of the project, and there will be a lot of areas to look in to. 

I got a bit ahead of myself and started thinking about how we might present the research. I remembered the paper by the RED group at the Design Council I looked at last year when I was researching how to present my findings. I feel their booklet on ageing is a really good example of how to tell and present the stories of the people we spend time with.

Nokia Open Studios

I've been doing some more research into my essay and ideas for the third semester project. On Jan Chipchase's blog I found the presentation entitled Nokia Open Studios.

It illustrates how they engaged a community in the design process. The broader study was the exploration of "the impact of mobile connectivity within the context of global urbanisation".

The research was done in partnership with Younghee Jung, and the full paper can be found here. I think it is particularly interesting to see the emotional links people have with mobile phones, often the participants wanted their mobile to symbolise something about their personality. Also there were examples of the people presenting a need for the phone to solve problems they have or include functions they desire.

 

The video above shows Younghee Jung talking about the Nokia Open Studios project at the Lift08 conference.

Space and Place

I've been doing a bit more research in relation to the DE project, which we'll hopefully be finding out more about next week. I've tried to divide my research into three main areas:

• People (and their behaviour)
• The space and it's environment 
• The object or interactive system involved.

I found this paper, which deals with social interactions in public spaces. It was geared towards researching possible frameworks for mobile information systems. I like how they have structured their research and hopefully I can take some of this into how we manage our task as a group.

Whilst thinking about people's behaviour in space I remembered a blog entry I came across last year on desire paths. I always find these desire paths captivating, it helped me realised how people will make a space work for them, even if the design of it impedes them. It's visual evidence of where a designer has "imposed their own will onto the site, as opposed to finding a solution that accounts for the wants and “desires” of the users." I think it will be interesting to also look into urban, environmental and architectural design in relation to the project.

Desire Path - Flickr

In relation to objects and interactive systems, I am often drawn back to my roots in interaction design. I find it hard to get away from looking at big interactive systems like display screens and a lot of the examples on Interactive Architecture. I do like a lot of this stuff, although sometimes I feel these interactive pieces can verge too much on the art side of things and fail to acknowledge an actual requirement.

I did find this blog Interactive Displays in Public Spaces, which had some interesting insights, particularly in regards to zones and behaviours around the displays. There's a link to a good write-up on SlideShare, with some useful diagrams.

Diagram of interactive display in public space

People in Space

Whilst in London I was attempting to observe things in relation to the group project we have been set in DE. The full brief has not yet been handed out, however we were told that it will involve people, and how they collaborate in space, particularly with big interactive systems. I tried concentrating on watching how people behaved in public spaces, and how they dealt with systems such as ATMs and ticket kiosks. It was also interesting to see people interacting with other information devices such as maps and some of the exhibits in the Science Museum. I found that in different situations behaviour became quite similar, especially when it came to queueing for things.

People interacting at the Science Museum

Often I found myself reminded of Jane Fulton Suri's book Thoughtless Acts? It illustrates how "we adapt, exploit, and react to things in our environment; things we do without really thinking." I kept finding examples in London such as an empty coffee cup left on a ledge at a tube station, someone sitting on the steps at a statue, and people keeping behind the yellow line at an ATM.

Thoughtless Acts

Jane Fulton Suri is involved in the human factors section at IDEO. Last year I read the article Informing Our Intuition, which I found related to me and my desire to understand people in order to create intuitive design. It was also interesting to read her describe the need for design research to be "integral to the innovation process, rather than as an external activity."

I actually saw another book along a similar theme in the Design Museum called Design by Use: The Everyday Metamorphosis of Things, which sadly doesn't appear to be in the library here.