From 'tacit' to 'story'

During the seminar we found that the first translation 'from tacit to story' worked well, letting tangibles and storytelling mutually support and enforce each other, so that understanding information ecology becomes easier, once you combine storytelling, theater, and working with tangibles. Unfortunately we did not have time to explore going 'from story to form'. The translation of stories into knowledge organization will take place in the virtual learning environment. Card (image and/or words) sorting activities are a challenge when people sit remotely and work. Another point from the seminar was that postponing 'vision' to the end made the outcomes much clearer, than in other cases, where we started with the vision part.

Transformative translation through tangibles

I am teaching information ecology this week. I suggest to the students to take a 'discovery-route' running from 1. discovering knowledge organization to 2. discovering information foraging to 3. discovering information ecologies to 4. discovering design to 5. discovering visions, to ... wherever they as Information Architects want to go. Each 'to' represents a journey and a transformative translation - which is what I call 'discovery'. You can not arrive at the concept of 'information ecology' unless you have discovered the concept of 'knowledge organization', and so on and so forth. I find vision-design-information ecology-information foraging-knowledge organization mutually inclusive: without the one you can not understand the others. All these concepts are elusive, hence, we must make them tangible, to use them as 'hangers' for stories, metaphors and images - the works of transformative translations. Taking the discovery route implies communicating images, words on cards, drawings, and theater.
Thanks to my eLL www.ell.aau.dk/ colleague Thomas Ryberg http://twitter.com/tryberg who alerted me to the concept of permaculture, we will also explore this design method.

ICONIC RECIPE

According to Rebecca's pocket of today http://www.rebeccablood.net/ IKEA has just launched a cookbook http://www.todayandtomorrow.net/2010/09/24/homemade-is-best/ , presenting ingredients as pictures. Misplaced concreteness I'd claim, without having seen and tried it myself - but - I am going to.

ALLWAYS DO THE INTELLECTUALLY MOST IMPORTANT THING

said Aron Sloman to me in 1987, when I visited Cognitive Studies Unit at University of Sussex as a PhD student, and asked him for advice on how to find my way as a researcher in between AI and the late Wittgenstein and Chris Freeman and the other scholars, whose work I was introduced to at Arbetslivscentrum in Stockholm. His advice has stayed with me: It helps me remember why I went into academia in the first place: pure selfish joy of being close to reason.In these early days of preparation for the autumn semester, where all the day-to-day business of administration is dimmed, we come close, in reading, in discussing over lunch, in having time to listen to each others ideas and arguments. Nice.

Design - re-assembling form

I am half way through Latour's 'Reassembling the social', motivated by Mette Eriksen, who told me that Latour's way of seeing if and how things ask other intermediaries to become actors by asking them to do stuff is fruitfull in design. A different take than that of affordances and that of Krippendorf. I am still waiting for the clue, but I feel that my reading makes me appreciate my habit of listening to the voices of things, cultivated throughout childhood, and initially inspired by H.C. Andersen's fairytales.

REPEAT ition

Doing it again, and again, and again is a precondition to become skilled. How to redefine repetition, from boredom to inspiring garage-time? I talked to a martial arts instructor yesterday. He told me that his students have to obey three rules to study under his guidance: 1. Never say "I can't", 2. No excuses for failure, 3. Eat the shit.

Simple, but not easy. I'd like to add a 4th: Time, task, and territory, the good old tavistock insight. It is a tremendous relief to know where to do what when, including where, and when to apply rule 1,2,3.

FORM

This spring I have taught a course 'Design, Use and Meaning' where we have tried to update the Scandinavian tradition for participatory design with a semantic turn a la Krippendorf. We were grabbling with ideas, but it was like we hit a 'what is it that we are talking about, really' glass ceiling. My idea was and still is that we have to develop a product semantics for ICT applications. It must be domain- and setting specific, because what we need the semantics for is the communication with users - the 80% of design sense making, while the designers can add their ideas and knowledge about technical constraints for the other 20%. At first we worked through the Scandinavian tradition of involving users. Then we analyzed the history of the pneumatic tube, the logbook, the calendar - all interesting stuff, but we got kind of stuck - we lost the nerve to explore further. When I talked to Anne Marie Kanstrup about this, she said: It is because coming from participatory design, we do not know how to focus on form, we focus on use situations. So here is the challenge to participatory design: to develop a sense for form without loosing the capacity for situation.

Local R&D

These days I am excited by finding ways of improving local research and development - which I take as another word for userdriven innovation - how to take that local creativity to other nodes in the network, and grow and come back. I know one example - the idea of quality circles which traveled from the UK to Norway, to Japan and to Europe - bu that is in a way a sad story, because it lost it's situatednes along the way. Will a statement like 'Humans first' help people to remember that such practices die if cut off from the lokal working culture?

CAN WE SEE LEARNING - AND CAN WE MANAGE IT?

If the mind works like a mechanical system, following laws similar those according to which rockets and billard balls move - then yes. But if the mind works as systems of living communication - then we are limited to interpretations of behavior. A wealth of theories mushroom around this interpretation. And if you are an action researcher like myself, you also need methods for collecting data and for relating them to theory and go back and forth between theory and practice, if you want to build a strategy for managing learning. This week I will work on creating networks around action research in learning which involves ICT.

SPRING TERM 2010 Product semantics of ICT for development

The graduate course 'Design -use and meaning' I teach this term is a continuation of the Design course last Autumn where we worked with designer-identity and basic design skills. Product semantics is the link, and Krippendorf's work is the backbone here, although it does not cover participatory design. Nor does it address eLearning Lab's research on ICT for development - so luckily, there is room for improvement, and lots of research work to do

DESIGN TOOL APPROPRIATION

The Mobile Design Lab is part of e-Learning Lab, and it needs a make-over. This is high on my agenda this week. I plan to pack each element together with a brief description of its design-tool-potential. I consider the Mobile Design Lab a box for tools dedicated provocation, articulation and communication of conceptual ideas: we have tools for building personas, for building scenarios, and for forum theater. And we have games, designed by students over the years. All by inspiration from ITProduct design at the Mads Clausen Institute in Sonderborg, and further developed in the design workshops held by Anne Marie Kanstrup and I together with students.