Dear Klaus, dear all,
Klaus Krippendorff wrote:
> ...to ask students to engage in conversations with users. Personally, I recommend the same with all the stakeholders of a potential product...
When I use the word users, these are numerous. I am not just thinking of the end users. Many people come into contact or are in contact with a product or service both during its development and its final or one might even say ever changing use.
I find that by asking students to discover and work with this network of players, stakeholders and users is essential in helping them reveal the systemic nature of their design tasks. In a participatory innovation endeavour, which broadens to an even greater extent those involved, both within and without an organisation including marketing, business and HR, it is not just a question of enabling students to identify the networks of those involved, but because of the interdisciplinary nature of such a project, enabling them to find ways and means to involve and work with this range people.
The missing citations from my last post are:
Gibson J. J. (1979: 254) cited in Ingold T. (2000: 21-22)
which should have been the education of attention and not awareness as I wrote:
From Ingold:
"The idea of showing is an important one. To show something to somebody is to cause it to be seen or otherwise experienced - whether by touch, taste, smell or hearing - by that other person. It is, as it were, to lift a veil off some aspect or component of the environment so that it can be apprehended directly. In that way, truths that are inherent in the world are, bit by bit, revealed or disclosed to the novice. What each generation contributes to the next in this process, is an education of attention (Gibson 1979: 254). Placed in specific situations, novices are instructed to feel this, taste that, or watch out for the other thing. Through this fine-tuning of perceptual skills, meanings immanent in the environment - that in the relational contexts of perceiver's involvement in the world - are not so much constructed as discovered.
It could be said that novices, through their sensory education, are furnished with keys to meaning..."
The nursing research reference is:
Carper, B. A. (1978). Fundamental patterns of knowing in nursing. Advances in Nursing Science, i(I), 13-23.
To put my use of this in context, I cite from an unpublished paper of mine:
"Carper (1978) in her seminal paper on nurses’ ways of knowing of which aesthetics is one of four, brings Dewey’s concept of perception into the dynamic that evolves between a nurse and patient in a caring situation (ibid: 17-18). Carper and others (Fawcett et al 2001, Leight 2001, Newman 2002, Gaydos 2005) all discuss the aesthetics of an on-going engagement with an emergent situation between people, in this case nurse and patient, and the various roles that sensitive attention and narrative play in recognising “the patterns that connect” (Bateson 1979: 8). A dynamic that is continually “revealing and concealing” (Weiner 2001) the “actual and potential” (Sokolowsk 2000) of the situation, as those involved adjust their individual sense making and understanding of each other towards a collaborative synthesis of meaning."
The co-construction of narrative that arises as a result, for example the understanding between patient and nurse as to how a patient's pain is perceived is very similar to the referencing of association and metaphor and the leveraging of variations of interpretation that relate to my previous post on "differences in process between design and other creative disciplines" - September 21st 2011 - where I cited the example of a music teacher and her student.
If you wish to see the full text of the above, it is an unpublished paper, which can be downloaded here
files.me.com/designarena/ghtg5c
All citations in the above paragraph are referenced in the full paper.
My aim is to identify the similarities in the ways we as people approach sense making and their relation to design. How we do it and what we use in the process. Here is the link to Tinkering. We as people are very good at using objects as props to help guide the co-construction of narratives "to probe and forge connections" that we can project into the future. (Ochs, E., Capps, Lb. (1996). Narrating the Self. Annual Review of Anthropology, 25(1), 19-43).
For me a tinkered object is a tangible narrative, albeit still in its emergent state. An indication, a whisper if you will that helps as an orientation, for now, in the increasingly complex nature of a design process.
By identifying and differentiating the how of these processes of sense making, understanding them as fundamental human resources that come naturally to us and how they relate to a design or innovation process, one can build on these in design education, design practice and design research contexts.
In other words bring latent human resources into play that make sense to those involved principally because they are so very human. We can all do this. But it is the fine tuning of these resources, the education of attention and the development of a way of knowing in the context of design practice that differentiates their use here as opposed to other situations.
For those who are interested, a series of Tinkering examples can be seen here:
files.me.com/designarena/to7wru
This is a presentation, so there is little explanatory text.
For those who wish to have the fuller explanations much can be found here:
files.me.com/designarena/5amotu
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 all have various explanations and examples of tinkering and the more systemic thinking that lies behind their use. Or if you want to do a quick search, tinker and tinkered seem to give the most hits.
Tinkering is but one method and sketching is but one part of any design process. Yes of course students need to learn to relate to the complexities and demands of users, their contexts, technology and business.
How they do this and how we educate them is manifold. I am happy though to leverage my understanding of other practices and literature to adopt new takes on how we go about designing, what it is that we do. It seems to work.
Just to round off, my appreciation of any design process is that it is a process of inquiry, a process driven by learning where designers, with others, move from experiment to experiment to inform the learning, the ultimate expression of which is the emergence of a design proposal. This is rather different to understanding a design process as a linear series of doings.
So what needs to be done to inform the learning required to navigate through a design process? According to the context of a task, just about anything that is necessary.
By taking this position, I find it gives the freedom to consider designing and the way we can educate designers as a means to bring to bear whatever resources lie to hand in particular our natural human resources. But we have to see and understand what those resources are. This rather than assuming there is a particular, right or modern way of doing this.
I am convinced that our task as design educators and design researchers for that matter is to enable students to successfully conduct this process of inquiry with others and to realise that they must adapt the tools, methods and skills they engage to the ongoing, dynamic and inherently emergent character of a design process, regardless as to whether they are designing the next generation's intelligent products, chairs or a one off unika design.
I feel happier with the notion that it is attitudes of mind we are educating here, a way of knowing with its caring sensibility towards others, rather than just handing over a tool box of methods and techniques that suit current practice and current technological demands.
Design students, designers and engineers for that matter will increasingly need to be able to identify opportunities that lie in the unknown, to see the alternative patterns that connect. How can we educate them to do this?
Best,
Chris.
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On 8 Oct 2011, at 00:04, Klaus Krippendorff wrote:
> dear chris,
> just to say that i like your post a lot, especially your suggestion to ask students to engage in conversations with users. personally, i recommend the same with all the stakeholders of a potential product, making students aware of being part of an interdisciplinary network of people advancing materially supported cultural practices -- not merely designing a product for industry
> cheers
> klaus
>
>
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from:
Chris Heape PhD
Head of Institute, Head of Research
The Institute for Product Design
Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences - HiOA
Norway
Work at HiOA, Kjeller
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