TU Wien Informatics

20 Years

Things of Practice

  • 2015-11-20
  • Research

Research on creativity, design artifacts for research, and critical and speculative reasoning in design that leads to inquiries on new types of interaction

Abstract

Ron Wakkary will present on the recent work from the Everyday Design Studio at Simon Fraser University. As a group we investigate the changing nature of interaction design in response to everyday design and social practices. In particular, we research everyday creativity, design artifacts for research, and critical and speculative reasoning in design that leads to inquiries on new types of interaction design artifacts, materials, conceptual understandings, and methods. In this talk, Wakkary will discuss the approaches and outcomes of a series of research through design investigations we refer to as “things of practice”, including recent interrelated concepts and commitments. These include, material speculations (see Wakkary et al 2015a, Wakkary et al 2013), an extension of design fictions that emphasizes material and actual aspects in design over the conceptual; unselfconscious interactions and unaware objects (see Wakkary et al 2015b, Odom & Wakkary 2015) that highlight ensembles, the ongoing configurations of material artifacts in relation to each other that accumulate and change over time; intersections, the unknowing or unnoticed crossing of paths of artifacts and people in which a manipulation may or may not occur; and unaware objects, a type of interaction design artifact that emphasizes actuality over functionality, which has neither an explicit interface nor computational awareness of its owners presence or actions.

Related papers: * Wakkary, R., Desjardins, A., Hauser, S., & Maestri, L. (2013). A sustainable design fiction: Green practices. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 20(4), 23. * Wakkary, R., Odom, W., Hauser, S., Hertz, G., Lin, H., (2015a). Material Speculation: Actual Artifacts for Critical Inquiry. Proc. of Aarhus ’15, 97-108. * Wakkary, R., Desjardins, A., Hauser, S., (2015b). Unselfconscious Interaction: A Conceptual Construct. Interact. Comput. first published online July 17, 2015. doi:10.1093/iwc/iwv018 (20 pages). * Odom, W., Wakkary, R. (2015). Intersecting with Unaware Objects. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 33-42.

Biography

Ron Wakkary is Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) at Simon Fraser University (SFU) where he established the Everyday Design Studio, a design research studio that explores interaction design. He is also Design United Professor and Chair of the Impact of Interaction Design on Everyday Life in the Industrial Design Department at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Wakkary’s research investigates the changing nature of interaction design in response to everyday design practices like home life, DIY, amateur experts, hobbyists, and sustainability. In the spirit of design research, Wakkary’s research aims to be reflective and generative, creating new interaction design prototypes and uncovering new, emergent practices of design that help to shape both design and its relations to technologies. Wakkary publishes regularly in design, human-computer-interaction, and tangible computing journals and conferences. He is a co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM interactions, Director of the Interaction Design Research Centre at SFU, a member of the Steering Committees for Tangible Embedded/Embodied Interaction (TEI) and Designing Interactive Systems (DIS). For more information see http://eds.siat.sfu.ca and http://www.3tu.nl/du/en/people/ron-wakkary/

Note

This lecture is organized by the Institute of Design and Assessment of Technology.

Speakers

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