New Approaches to Design

Washington, D.C.
The next session at Creativity & Cognition 2007 starts with a paper by Ron Wakkary and Leah Maestri. They note the rise of ubiquitous computing as providing a new focus on design for the home, and point to the fact that in the home, evolutionary solutions to common problems are most appropriate; this relies on pliable, changeable artefacts which enable users to be everyday designers of their home environment. Creativity in this context is a quality of resourcefulness and adaptivity, and relies on 'tinkerability': appropriation of available tools and technologies, their adaptation, and judgments of quality. Ron and Leah conducted a study examining such practices in a number of homes.

Examples for common patterns of appropriation are the hanging of jackets on the corners of chairs, or the use of lawn chairs as tables; resourcefulness is shown in the use of furniture as steps towards higher places. Such uses are ad hoc and expedient, some become fixed and are incorporated into routines, and overall, these appropriations can be collected and organised into a set of systems. Such systems are adapted as environmental conditions change; examples for this include the 'going solo' pattern as kids become more independent in the home and start organising their things in new patterns which are different from their parents' and siblings' - and such solo patterns are gradually incorporated into the overall systems in the home, in a collaborative process. This can be described as a process of design-in-use.

The quality of such evolving systems was understood largely implicitly rather than evaluated explicitly. It remains unclear how aware protagonists are of their creative actions, and this may be related to the gradual emergence of patterns of action and use through evolutionary processes. Many affordances are also unremarkable because of their simplicity, and may not even be realised as such; such insights, then, provide important challenges to the design process of new home technologies: in the design of new tools, appropriability should be a design goal.

The next paper is by Vesa Kantola, Sauli Tiitta, Katri Mehto and Tomi Kankainen, and Vesa is here to present. He begins by highlighting questions of trust in cultural transformation, and notes questions of trust also in the context of an academic conference. He shows a brief clip from a class performance; the clip is an example for the use of interactive drama in user-centred product design, for the purpose of collecting user stories from the participant groups (mainly participants over 50, from key public service professions - teachers, police, etc.).

Drama workshops were placed at the beginning of a longer process, allowing for the emergence of authentic material which leads to the untold becoming visible; they operate on a metaphoric level and involve all members of (small) groups of participants. Observing such interactions allows designers to gain better insight into user needs and wants; the designer empathises with users through interactive play, and commits themselves more fully to the process. The team is now exploring more possibilities for applying this process to specific problems.

Boris Bezirtzis, Matthew Lewis and Cara Christeson are up next, and Matthew presents the paper. Theirs is an ongoing interactive evolutionary design project, which employs genetic algorithms in developing new design solutions from the basis of an existing population of designs, which are chosen and combined - 'mated' - by the system. This leads to minor or major mutations on the existing designs, and of course requires the presence of a programmer to set up the system which performs such mutations. The aim of the project was to move beyond reliance on a programmer, and allow a wider range of non-expert users to participate in this evolutionary design process.

In the first place, this relies on parametric model building: identifying the feasible ranges for parameters determining specific aspects of the design, and building a hierarchy of parameters and components interconnected to one another. Once this parameter model is completed, different mutations can be created and evaluated, thereby navigating through the solution space and identifying key 'fitness' locations around which feasible mutations are located. This also enables a further adjustment of the fitness landscape, by making some parameter settings more likely than others and introducing new constraint systems. From this process emerge very specific design roles (the end user navigating the space, the meta-designer developing the parametric model, and the designer of the meta-design tools) as well as a number of specific skill sets which these groups of participants will need to hold.

Finally we're on to Joshua Hailpern, Erik Hinterbichler, Caryn Leppert, Damon Cook and Brian Bailey, and Joshua and Erik are here to present. They present a project called Team Storm, which acts as a tool for co-located collaboration in design. They begin by noting the existence of key theories in creativity, computational tools, and group work, and point to the need for further research which operates in the overlap between these three areas. Their work began with an observational study of group work interactions, and on this basis developed a new collaborative tool, providing some key affordances: multiple ideas had to be visible simultaneously, a clear delineation between group spaces and private workspaces had to be made, the tool needed to provide for multiple levels of sharing ranging from 'personal' to 'show' to 'share', and it needed to support the existence of a collective consciousness in which shared ideas remain.

Team Storm works in the first place in the domain of sketching, and therefore is only one implementation of such requirements; Joshua now demonstrates this tool. Interestingly, the tool can operate both by connecting individual users to a central, shared wall screen, as well as by providing access to a shared workspace on each user's own computer. The team evaluated this tool, and received a variety of positive comments which emphasised the affordances of the tool; these focussed especially on the various modes of work and sharing between the personal and the fully collaborative - further additional improvements were also identified, however.

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