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.