Technology feats of strength: I've just blown my mind. I was able to get the Airport Express to talk to my Linksys WAP 11 so that I can control my Sony Receiver with my IBM x31.

And it only took two firmware upgrades, a new driver and a 13 character WEP password to do it.

Just completed a presentation by Liz Sanders, founder of MakeTools (and fomer Vice President of Fitch, and current Ohio State Professor); notes are reproduced below.

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Design and the Empowerment of Everyday People

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Training in psychology and anthropology; been working in design for an entire career, including interior space.

What is going on today?

Consumers are becoming creators. design research ismoving to the fuzzy front end. Prototyping is moving to the fuzzy front end. Design research is being done for inspiration, not just for information. New design spaces, design for adapting and co-creating, are emerging. New design spaces are emerging;

Consumers are becoming creators. In the last 25 years, even the language used to discuss the people being served has changed. Customers (late 80s) and Consumers; rise of computers and interaction design begins to talk about them as users or participants; perhaps as adapters, or even as co-creators.

Consumers are becoming creators, today. We know how to fullfill the demands of the "consumptive" mindset. We know how to create brand, and to promote shopping, bying, and purchasing.

We understand user-centered design, and how to create artifacts, and objects.
But consumption feels larger than creativity; the creative side is light, and sparse, and shallow. More and more people are expressing an everyday need to be creative; end-users want to consume and create.

We don't yet know how to use design skills to fill the needs of the creative mindset. How can we use design to make everyday activities more productive and fullfilling? Ideally, the future would hold a setting where consumption and creativity are equal.

Idea => Prototype => Product; cyclical and iterative.

Generative research (idea) => evaluative research (prototype) => experiential research (product). Different types of research during the design development process.

Over the last twenty years, the focus of research has been moving closer and closer to the "front end"; design research has moved away from the field, seeing how people use products similar to the one you are using, and then towards focus groups and usability testing; now, the focus is on generative research - to determine what people really need, want, and dream about.

The nature of the prototype has also moved towards the fuzzy front end as well. A prototype has evolved from a very detailed appearance model, towards rough mock ups, and finally, towards user-generated dreams. The rougher a prototype, the more one can learn up front to guide the process. Prototypes for users can help users satisfy their dreams.

There is a clash, today, between information and inspiration. Information has traditionally been conducted by researchers and applied social scientists; it would borrow from the scientific method, and was required to be reliable, valid, and rigorous. This builds upon investigation, analysis and planning, and relies on an extrapolation from the past towards the future. This has shifted towards a backwards pattern; design research can be done for inspiration. It's typically not conducted by researcher or social scientist - instead, it's conducted by the designer. The tenants of what makes it "good" are still being discovered. Some of the key attributes of the research are that it is relevant, generative, and evocative; it should stir emotions, and stir emotions of those you are serving.

thus, the field of generative research is evolving, and deals with experimentation, ambiiguity, and surprise; it draws primarily from the future, and from imagination.

scenarios, personas, video collages, design noir, cultural probes, empathy probes

Empathy probes; items that are sent out, gathered, and given back to designers to give them inspiration

technical university of delft - video collages.

New design spaces seem to be emerging, as well. We are currently in a design for consuming space, focused on consumptive activities such as shopping and buying, which can lead towards owning and using. This is market driven, rather than human centered; this also tends to result in products that have too many features and are difficult to use.

Design for experiencing space is emerging now and is most evident in the domain of interactive media. The objective is to look at the entire experience domain that the product fits in to. Experience designers can only really design the scaffold on which experience can occur. Scenarios and personas are being used to drive the design process.

At the edge of practice are the newer "design for adapting spaces" where people fill in the designed artifact to meet their own needs and dreams. These are being explored in software and in architecture; the idea can also be thought of as "underdesign", "meta-design", "loose fit design", "design for hackability". Design for something to be completed.

Co-creating spaces, where designers and everyday people work collaboratively throughout the design development process. New roles for designers will become evident; these new design spacs will become especially important in highly complex domains. They will also become important for domains that people are passionate about. However, before we can co-create, we must understand experience.

Means new rules for designers, because the designers role shifts towards helping the people you are "serving" to become creative.

Experience is subjective; what is experience? past => future, memories lead to the moment, which lead to dreams. We tend to think of experience as the part articulated "now", but experience really extends all the way back to the past and includes all memories and feelings one has growing up. Also extends all the way into the future, and includes your dreams and aspirations. Interpretation thus relies on how one grew up and where one thinks they are going.

Using converging perspectives, as what people Do (ethnography), Say (marketing), and Make (psychology and design). The different perspectives will get a designer to different places along a timeline; watching what people do gets us to "the moment". when you listen to what they say, they can only go a little ways out into the past and future. Make tools give people greater access to things in the past and in the future.

Developing a participatory design language that encourages everyday people to explore and present their thoughts and feelings.

Ah, the good life.

For some bizarre reason, I woke up at a quarter after six; given the ungodly hour of a Saturday, I decided to work on the site a bit. It's slowly coming along; we seem to have a strong vision for "episode one", and all that really remains is the creation and editing of a lot of content. After J woke up we wandered over to the gym, and then to the ceramics studio; I glazed a number of things, with one piece in particular that I actually "liked". It's not very frequent I appreciate my own fine art abilities; the self-censor is probabily my worst enemy and my best friend. It remains to be seen how it turns out after glaze firing, but I'll keep my fingers crossed.

And then, about five hours of tattooing. The "work in progress" is nearing completion; about two more sessions should do it. We completed the leaves on my lower ribs and the work on my arm; all that remains is the shoulder and the *shudder* armpit.

I'm sore, exhausted, and "fat and happy"; I wonder if the endorphins released fade into a diagnosis of serotonin and delight?

Great first day of classes. The sponsored HCI project went very well; the kids seemed engaged, and they were very receptive to the challenge presented by Maestro Music. I'm continually impressed with my students' ability to "seize up the situation" so quickly and get to the heart of a problem; it will be interesting to see the results of this one and compare it last quarter's Adobe project.

Information Architecture also looks quite promising; we are playing some 'ball tonight at the park, and it's a perfect night for it - chilly, but clear, and with a low around 50.

Tomorrow is a whole other bag of tricks - forty studio one students, 20 at nine and another 20 at noon. Eek.