Design Things Binder, Thomas; Michelis, Giorgio De; Ehn, Pelle ...
09/2011
eBook, Book
Design Things offers an innovative view of design thinking and design practice, envisioning ways to combine creative design with a participatory approach encompassing aesthetic and democratic ...practices and values. The authors of Design Things look at design practice as a mode of inquiry that involves people, space, artifacts, materials, and aesthetic experience, following the process of transformation from a design concept to a thing. Design Things, which grew out of the Atelier (Architecture and Technology for Inspirational Living) research project, goes beyond the making of a single object to view design projects as sociomaterial assemblies of humans and artifacts--"design things." The book offers both theoretical and practical perspectives, providing empirical support for the authors' conceptual framework with field projects, case studies, and examples from professional practice. The authors examine the dynamics of the design process; the multiple transformations of the object of design; metamorphing, performing, and taking place as design strategies; the concept of the design space as "emerging landscapes"; the relation between design and use; and the design of controversial things.
Designing interactive prototypes involves multiple tools and skills. In addition, several design cycles are required to iterate through idea generation, evaluation of design alternatives, and ...development. Consequently, prototyping tools should offer flexibility and adaptability to allow designers to quickly test and evaluate different ideas, design alternatives, materials, interactions, etc. To meet these requirements, we designed Protobject - a rapid prototyping tool aimed at making the early stages of prototyping interactive products more flexible. Protobject allows designers to reinvent and reuse existing objects for prototyping purposes by making them interactive. After introducing the features of Protobject and discussing the differences with similar tools, we present a user evaluation through two workshop sessions held in Milan during Brera Design Days and attended by 22 people. The results suggest that Protobject facilitates cooperation between people with different skills by allowing them to envision interactive prototypes together.
How Thumbelina Knows De Michelis, Giorgio
Informatics,
12/2016, Volume:
3, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In this paper, I take the book by Michel Serres, “Thumbelina”, as an occasion for reflection on the conceptual basis of knowledge management, as was built by Nonaka and co-workers. The direct access ...to knowledge that Thumbelina practices together with her peers is, in fact, for me, and is a good observation point to bring Nonaka’s reflection further towards the discovery of a new understanding of knowledge and knowing processes. If the digital revolution is the third step, after writing and printing, regarding the soft changes in the relations between human beings and knowledge, then it highlights the urgent problem of deepening our understanding of what knowledge and intelligence are, changing our practices at the educational level, and designing new digital tools to support our knowledge management processes.
Abstract In this paper we present two large user studies in which we gather evidence about the adoption and satisfaction level of users in regard to electronic records that manage health related ...information from two distinct but complementary perspectives: that of General Practitioners (GPs) about their Electronic Medical Records (EMRs); and that of citizens/patients about their Personal Health Records (PHRs). In these user studies we also probe the user attitudes towards innovative functionalities from these two perspectives and, on the basis of the collected perceptions, we apply an original ranking method to infer what features are valued most and hence could inspire design to make PHRs more situated into the users׳ lives and drive a higher adoption of these tools. On the basis of the perceived shortcomings of current records, we envision an InterPersonal Health Record (IPHR) that is a sort of hybrid electronic record that merges together typical EMR- and PHR-related features and is endowed with specific functionalities aimed at enhancing interpersonal relationships, communication and collaboration between citizens/patients and their GPs through the record and about its contents. This study is then a contribution in understanding the current attitudes and expectations of potential users towards full-fledged prospective PHRs, as well as a first step in identifying those requirements and priority areas on which to focus further for the design and deployment of more community- and communication-oriented tools in the primary health care domain.
In this article, I demonstrate that objectification is an inherently social process situated within a dynamic actor network in which material and semiotic actors create meaning. In some sense, an ...object is a partial, intentional view of the actor network in which it is situated. In order to understand this approach, I will consider how things and objects emerge in human experience through three steps: first, I revisit the relationship between things and objects; second, I summarize how, in the book Design Things, A. Telier arrives at a new characterization of the object of design as a web of things; third, I will show how objects then appear as things immersed in actor networks. In the concluding section of this article, I will discuss how this conceptual itinerary suggests new, fruitful directions for thinking about experience and design.
Encountering Things brings together leading design scholars to explore the relationship between thing theory and design, exploring production processes and offering an engaging, theoretical ...perspective about the social and cultural lives of objects. Focusing on the themes of process and product, the contributors investigate the productive interplay between the activity of design and the objects that design uses and produces. Chapters span the design disciplines and essays examine the processes by which objects, things, and artifacts are made; the lives of design objects; and things in their cultural contexts. Theoretical discussion is encouraged by in-depth case studies of things themselves. Each chapter includes an informational sidebar per essay and a useful glossary of key terms.
Workflow management systems are considereda hot technology. Nevertheless, up to now they havenot had the diffusion other packages such asproductivity tools, E-mail systems and groupwareplatforms ...have. We believe that this fact is due tothe many limitations of current workflow technology(weak support for changes; complex exception handlingmechanisms; limited openness to and integrability withother system components;...) and that radically newworkflow management systems should be designed anddeveloped in order to offer adequate products to themarket. In this paper, we outline the main innovativefeatures of the workflow management component of theMilano system making it highly flexible and adaptable.Particular attention is paid to its modellingframework, which is based on a class of net systemswell supported by efficient algorithms, and to theservices it offers to both workflow designers andactors. The most relevant aspects of the MILANOworkflow management system are also illustratedthrough a realistic example.
Interactive artistic installations represent avantgarde forms of Contemporary Art. They are artistic works able to change their behavior in response to the behavior of the viewers, turning them into ...(more or less) active participants. This paper discusses an interactive installation the authors developed during the beginning of 2012 for the St. Elmo Castle in Naples, Italy. In this installation the audience determines the evolution of the life cycle of specific plants, in terms of an opening/closing process. The paper proposes some reflections on this case study, especially about the engagement dimension promoted by the work.
In many environments, the landscape of space and artefacts is evolving and changing with the tasks at hand. Integrating digital media and computation in these environments has to take into account ...the fact that people will configure space functions and tools according to the situation, organising use in unexpected ways. In this article, we present and discuss how the issue of configurability is dealt with, in a series of field trials with design students. The aim of these trials was to construct, for architecture and interaction design students, a mixed-media environment for inspirational learning. The results include physical infrastructure in space and in furniture as integral parts of the interaction technology and the creation of composite representations called 'mixed objects', which blend digital and non-digital media in one design artefact. Configurability has to be supported at different levels (infrastructures, artefacts, functions) and across the physical and digital realms. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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