DESIGN ANTHROPOLOGY

This week will be mostly about DAIM, http://chokobar.wordpress.com/ , the research project on design anthropology where designers - practictioners and academics and students from DKDS and IT product Design work on ways of letting everyday practices inspire design. Phase I , the recycling case, is coming to end, and phase 2 'golden projects' is about to begin. My research question in this is to what extent, and why, collaborative development of design languages is the solution to the problem of representing and transforming user-experiences of need and opportunity into new products, and in specific how the mechanism of projective identification relates to learning in the moment-to-moment encounters where such design languages are born.

WabiSabi and User Centred Design

Wabi Sabi can not be grasped or defined. However, Leonard Koren makes an attempt in his book: 'Wabi-Sabi'. There are stories of tea, which opens for the understanding, and today I received a picture of an unfolded tea sprout - which I Wednesday evening enjoyed as tea, and which on Thursday morning opened as portrayed here at the bottom of the empty cup. Somehow the picture tells what I in three consecutive lectures am going to talk aboutl this week: a systemic aesthetics: 'The whole is always in a metarelationships with its parts. As in logic the propositions can never determine the metaproposition, so also in matters of control, the smaller context can never determine the larger (Bateson in Steps, p 267) The meta-relationship which connects contexts is what Bateson understood as aesthetics: the need for double description/relational information, which is the source of innovations such as metaphors, art, science, religion, and poetry - designers should be sensitive to such patterns. If you look at the drawings on sustainbility you get the drift of what is NOT communicating about relationships http://computingforsustainability.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/visualising-sustainability/

IS RECESSION THE MOTHER OF INVENTION

Marketing consultant Martin Lindström (‘Buyology’) says in NYTimes March 14: ‘Two concepts apply. First don’t ask consumers what they want; figure out what they need. (No one knew they wanted an airbag, but they knew they wanted safer cars.) In recessions, affordable, small luxuries, like chocolate and perfume, hold their own, as do cheap entertainments like movies. Second, practical features give consumers a reason to make a purchase. Wellington boots sell because they’re useful — and have clever designs. Products that protect our assets and homes also do well, like anti-virus software. Shopping doesn’t stop in recessions, but consumers need a reason beyond just impulse. ‘ To me this sends a strong message to design anthropology: anthropologist should know how to get to understand user needs I think – but my dear colleague Wendy Gunn and I have been over it many times – she resists to talk a bout need. As I take it she – and many others - resists the ontological part. Frankly I do not understand their argument, but maybe this recession will be a dawn, not only of inventions, but also of a renewed epistemological debate beyond social constructivism? Bateson’s ‘Mind & Nature’ would be a point of departure as pointed out by Jesper Hoffmeyer in his Introduction to ‘A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics’, Springer 2008, where he quotes Bateson in Mind & Nature, p. 14 ‘ … a story is a little knot or complex of that species of connectedness which we call relevance.’

VISUALIZATION

I want to add Grove to my awareness list, because every time I go there I feel good about possibilities of visualization. These days we live through visual communication and storytelling, and somehow this fact should  pervade the way we plan and communicate about design projects. On the other hand - plans are also made to nail down contracts about who is doing what when, hence un-equivocal clarity across different experiences, practices and languages is a must. Sounds like a contraction in terms as well as in practice, hence a compelling design challenge :-) Tinkering may be a stepping stone on the way, staged performance another, but at some point the articulation process must land - and I would like to land it in a form of pictorial design brief. At the moment I just do not know how. But in the DAIM project as well as in teaching User Centered Design I try out all possible ways ...

BODY, BRAIN AND BEHAVIOR

This week's agenda is tangible interaction, and we will begin tomorrow with Bødker & Bøgh Andersens excellent model of mediation. As for now I just returned from owl-spotting, tree-hugging and dog-padding in the Schloss Park Charlottenburg, where birds were singing, the sun shining, and thick and thin, tall and small people of all ages were welcoming spring on its first day. If those ancient trees could talk ... Tree-hugging is tangible interaction with - with what? The sub-liminal part of me coming out of human history? The tree and I are branches on the same trunk of life as Jesper Hoffmeyer would put it in his bio-semiotics - and hurrah for that.