SUSTAINING VALUE NETWORKS IN DESIGN AND RESEARCH

This week is about communication of ideas and concepts in creative teams - of designers or researchers - I emphasize the commonalities here. In both cases my perspective is that of value network, and my point is that each and every encounter must give value to all parties: users and designers, designers and developers, actors and researchers, researchers and publishers. All these asymmetrical yet mutually dependent relationships undergo at least three phases of value-attribution: the initial trust-building, the idea development where the question what is the problem, and the conceptual phase where solutions are tried out, accepted or rejected. To sustain value networks participants must experience both autonomy and community within their zone of competence. For this to happen, sufficient information, choices and the possibility of expressing mixed feelings are crucial conditions (Ryan & Deci). Simple, but not always easy to provide.

ALEXANDER - OR NOT

I am a great admirer of Christopher Alexander's work, and as I just stumpled over a nice collection of bits and pieces which describes it http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/Chris.text.html I sank in, and read. Then I sat back and wondered: Why is it, that the whole 'synthesis-of-form and patterns' way of thinking design suddenly strikes me as a strait-jacket? Maybe there is more truth to Löwgren & Stolterman's claim that a design language must be formed anew for each project than I thought at first. Maybe.

Experiencing-by-proxy: IMAGE CLOUDS and STORY-BY-WALKING

Clouds of water molecules, or of concepts, are same-quality-objects-in-proximity except for one parameter. We take omens from cloud (weather-forecasting), and we infer that concepts written with larger font indicates more attention. Image clouds are more difficult to deal with: we can think of Warhol's Monroes, the Harvey Keitel tobacco shop-owner's corner pictures in the movie 'Smoke', or 'humping man'-positions on the Youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz4lix7hiLo&feature=player_embedded. When it comes to image clouds, the variation in one quality has difficulty to produce meaning right away. However, human kind has a strong tradition in telling stories by inviting people to follow the food steps of someone else. Numerous tourist guides follow ' in the food steps' of some famous explorer, but also the police investigator/detective can choose to walk the path of a victim in order to better make sense of traces.

From a design perspective sharing experience across cultures, across ages, across individuals is always a challenge, and there may be some gold to be digged in learning from these ways of experiencing-by-proxy.