How many times have you wished that you could really make a difference at your organization? If only you had the time to perform all that analysis or the budget to actually do some field research or the recognition and trust to lead multi-department participatory design sessions? In real life, the amazing stories you see presented at conferences don’t seem to get off the ground back home. Well, here’s a story of a user experience practitioner who saw a way to quickly pull together different materials into a cohesive, convincing whole. Within a few months of being “the new guy” just hired in, he managed to wake up his company. His name is Boris Chong. He works at the headquarters of one of the big-box stores in the US.

It was November 2009 when Boris joined the headquarters dot-com team in the newly minted role of User Experience Strategist. He had previously worked as a director at an online company overseeing information architects, creatives, and usability folks. At this point, Boris had been obsessed with getting science and data to further percolate through the product design process. He had been trying to bring more research into the process in recent years, and when he was faced with the opportunity that the big-box company was offering, he jumped at it.

“I was lucky,” he says, “Here I literally walked into a treasure trove of data. Not just raw data—analyzed data. I went through probably 10-15 PowerPoint decks of conclusions from merchandising research that had already been completed.” The decks were created by the corporate research group (and a few outsourced vendors) who does ongoing marketing support research. There was also one ethnographic research project done by a vendor just before Boris joined the team. Boris’ dream was to marry the quantitative, demographics type of marketing data to the qualitative, contextual inquiry data and make it more usable in design sessions. As many folks working for large merchants have observed, “We have so much data sitting out there not really getting used in the design process.”

A Strategic Roadmap

He also wanted to execute on the UX strategy handed to him, making the data more strategic to the company, to plot a path forward enabling the business to offer support more closely knit with actual customer needs.  Some good thinking had already been done and handed to Boris when he came on board, but there had been a couple of failed attempts at executing because the crucial DNA  behind the strategy had not been properly infused into the design and the team. “The good data was there, but not the story. A mental model was the right way to tell the story,” Boris concluded.

The group wanted to start building something, and they wanted release plans. So Boris did some heavy lifting. He took over an empty Vice President’s office and filled the walls with 3×5 cards and sticky notes, breaking down the conclusions from the many quantitative studies into discrete concepts. He admits that part was really hard work. Luckily, the folks who did the contextual inquiry had created a sequencing model and an affinity model which made the qualitative data feed into the mental model cleanly. “I didn’t do the work collaboratively because the analysis was already done. What I had to do was see how I could pull it together as the top part of a mental model. It was kind of a one-person job,” he explains. Everyone was interested in the process. They kept stopping by the office, gaping at all the notes on the walls, and asking what he was up to. Boris would explain his method. As more and more people stopped by, they developed a nickname for him: Nash … as in John Nash the mathematician from the movie A Beautiful Mind. He could look at all the data points on the wall and pull them together.

People were thrilled when three mental models rolled out of that office—each one ten to twelve feet long. “I put the data into spreadsheets and used the mental model script to generate the initial versions. It worked great!” In six months, Boris pulled together three mental models from existing, analyzed data that the company already possessed.

“After I finished the top parts of the mental models, that’s when I got collaborative.” He had slotted only a few existing features under the behavior towers in the model. Boris would roll up the scroll of paper and take it with him to meetings. All the disciplines would gather in the room together—the user interface guys, designers, and business team and they would start to add services and features and content below the line, aligned with the behavioral towers in the model that they supported. The group would include new ideas and things to ask the vendor for. Then Boris would organize all these items into layers according to whether they were interactive widgets, reading material, merchandising connections, or had to do with in-store or mobile situations instead of strictly online.

Finally the organization had a picture of what they were doing. In the one mental model, here were all the bright, shiny ideas folks had and how they came into play for the customer—or not. The team even added some dull, boring ideas that no one had bothered to imagine but that the customer really needed. Boris was able to line up all the touch points with the customer—from conception purchase—with activity online, in the store, and with mobile applications. The team could suggest places where an online account could be available in-store or triangulate how a customer might look for things in different ways.

Now we can start building the right things first.

In addition, Boris helped the team prioritize the ideas and updates into three phases. “I really like what Jeff Patton has to say about iterative releases and card-storming to get at what we need to deliver first,” says Boris. So he color coded each item below the line in the mental model for Phase One, Phase Two, and Phase Three. It was much easier with the model to get people to understand why a particular item was in Phase Two and not Phase One because they could see the most important user needs and the gaps that needed filling first.

Walk the Wall

The design process is underway. As the team creates wireframes to represent certain online experiences, they take the wireframe and “walk the wall along the mental model.” They make sure they have met the need of each item listed using the model as a guidepost and driver. As features are vetted by IT and the rest of the organization the model helps to inform tradeoffs, keeping the user’s needs at the forefront of decision making process.

A Thin Layer

Tactically, Boris also wanted to fix the way the online site was structured and written. “They’ve not yet fully taken advantage of leveraging libraries, components, and templates,” Boris observes. So he added a thin layer just below the line in the mental model to mark out what types of online templates could be used in support of the towers. This addition to the mental model reminds designers of other opportunities for serving customers. There is an opportunity to support a customer in the initial stage of a purchase. Perhaps she’s shopping for a refrigerator. Maybe she needs a bigger refrigerator because her family has grown or because she has started shopping for locally grown produce at farmers markets. Or perhaps she is worried that her current 17-year-old refrigerator might break down soon. “We can create some context for this. We can have an article about why you should replace an appliance before it breaks.” Boris also says that in addition to merchandising and marketing opportunities that can pop up in templates, the team can explore things like teaching customers about warranties earlier in the process. Listing the templates in the mental model helps designers remember other prospects and perspectives.

Opening Eyes Outside of the Dot-Com Division

Boris was eager to show the mental models to the store operations guys. “The first time we got these mental models in front of people outside of dot-com, I saw them have that ah-ha moment!” The guys said this was the first time they had seen it all in one place, made actionable, and aligned with offerings already in place. And they could see that, yeah, there were gaps. The store operations guys said the data agreed with what they had found—it was the same stuff, but presented differently. Right away they could see how to align merchandising opportunities and future content they were thinking of. They could see how what they were experimenting with for mobile would weave in to the model.

Senior management outside of dot-com had a similar reaction. Boris relates their words as, “Wow, this is really actionable now.”

Boris says in summary, “It’s interesting, from that aspect, that regardless of the data and the business, the mental model is successful in opening eyes.”

Where Next?

The dot-com management came to Boris recently asking to create a site supporting a new audience segment. Boris knew he needed another mental model to understand this audience segment, but there were no existing studies—and management said he has to release the new site in a few short months. So he looked at emerging work being done outside of the company and pulled a team together who had experience with the behavior of these particular people. Looking at each mental space in the mental models they already had, they asked themselves, “How would this re-apply to the new audience segment?” Boris grins, “Maybe this is cheating, but you do what you can with what you got.” What they got was a good sketch of behaviors to use as a new mental model.

They rounded up a collection of products that support the needs of the new audience segment. They slotted items below the line that would focus on enabling the audience segment to achieve what they wanted to do. They marked the ideas into three phases. “IT told us they couldn’t build half of the ideas, but we at least have a good road map now,” Boris chuckles.

Another project Boris is trying to get closer to is a research project another team is doing on store associates—the people who play the role opposite the customer helping them make decisions in the store. Boris wants to be able to juxtapose the store associate behaviors with the customer behaviors and see if everything aligns.

“You can’t do it all at once,” he muses. “Going forward we would like to do more formative research. I just don’t have the bodies to do that now, though.” Boris is building the user experience discipline and getting more user interface designers on the team. He is outsourcing more usability testing and moving to online remote usability. At some point, he envisions reaching across channels at the company and teaching everyone how to pull together mental models. “I want to teach them how to fish, so they don’t have to rely on me.”

Back in the late 1980s, Bill Verplank, when working at what would become IDEO, stopped calling what he did ‘user-interface design’, and instead coined a new term: ‘interaction design’. His work over the years has included  Xerox Parc, IDTwo/IDEO, and collaborations with design schools such as the RCA, MIT and Carnegie Mellon. Steve Baty talked with him about interaction design.

You’ve been working as an interaction designer for three decades: how has your approach to your work changed over that time?

Bill Verplank

After my PhD from MIT in “Man-Machine Systems”, I went to Xerox and spent three years testing systems that had taken ten years to invent; then after the Xerox Star was introduced, we spent five years refining and extending it. So in my first decade, I did “human factors” testing and “user interface design”. This is also the decade that ACM started SIGCHI and I started teaching “graphical user-interface design”. (‘70s ‘80s)

In the next decade, I was hired by Bill Moggridge at IDTwo to move the insights from computers to products of all sorts. We called what we did “Interaction Design” and saw what we were doing as the key to modernizing “Industrial Design”. As consultants, we were dependent on clients, so for me it was a scramble to keep up with the variety of problems. When IDTwo merged with David Kelly Design and Matrix to become IDEO, we had established a new kind of multi-disciplinary design consultancy. (‘80s ‘90s)

In the third decade I have returned to invention and teaching. At Interval Research, we enjoyed the freedom to develop technologies (e.g. haptics) and methods (e.g. “body storming”). Also, we encouraged educational programs at RCA, MIT, NYU, Stanford and finally at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII). My favorite post-graduate program now is a spin-off of IDII: the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID). Also, at Stanford, I have been teaching Computer Science and Computer Music with a focus on the tangible aspects of interaction. (‘90s ‘00s)

Over that same period, how has the practice of interaction design changed generally?

What do we think a “computer” is? I like to contrast three dominant metaphors or paradigms: PERSON, TOOL, MEDIA.

In the ‘50s, we called computers “electronic brains” and many were motivated to make them intelligent, language processors. There are still people pursuing these “anthropomorphisms”; they call it “artificial intelligence” or “robotics”. Interaction is a verbal dialog. A computer is an “agent” or “assistant” – autonomous and intelligent. Think of the computer as a “PERSON”.

In the ‘70s, rather than replicating or replacing people, Englebart proposed “augmenting intelligence” – thinking of the computer as a “TOOL” which extends and empowers us. We became “users” not just programmers or operators. Anyone who asks “Who is the user?” and “What is the task?” is very much in the business of “interaction design”. Good interaction is useful and efficient.

In the ‘90s, with ubiquitous networks, mobile, graphical and dynamic interfaces, computers are “MEDIA”. Televisions, phones, games are all computers that we watch, connect, play and mostly enjoy. A good interaction is engaging, immersive and persuasive.

PERSON, TOOL and MEDIA are sufficiently established as metaphors, we can call them paradigms; they define our business, schools and conferences. What will the next paradigms be? What will we call what we do?

Here’s a sketch I did in 2000 on Metaphors for Computers: PERSON, TOOL, MEDIA – each one a robust “paradigm”. Beyond those three, I predict LIFE, VEHICLE, FASHION.

Bill Moggridge's Metaphors for Computers diagram

In your “Interaction Design Sketchbook” you write: Interaction design is a profession that will mature in the 21st century. Where do you think interaction design is currently immature, or is this more a reference to the emergence of embedded and ubiquitous computers? Implicit in that section of the IxD Sketchbook is the idea that interaction design concerns itself with computers and computer-driven interactions. Do you see a place for the practice of interaction design in non-computing environments such as services?

Interaction Design in the 21st century will be a challenge because almost everything (and everybody) we interact with will have computers in it or on it. Services and systems will be autonomous and only ask for guidance (think of automated cars and guideways); tools will be augmented and powerful; even the most mundane artifact might have far-flung connections and consequences; media will be interactive and engaging and we will all become fashion designers.

We’ve recently seen the principles of interaction design applied to situations where the aim is to shift individual or group behavior in social, economic or environmental activities. Do you see this a logical extension of the work you were doing in the 80s and 90s or a shift away from interaction design’s foundations?

Interaction Design as I practiced it, is very much in the “TOOL” paradigm; the principles were “consistent conceptual models, direct manipulation and WYSIWYG”. If the “aim is to shift individual or group behavior” then use the “MEDIA” paradigm. Advertising, education, persuasion, are at the core of ancient practices. Making media more interactive may or may not get your message across. Media can mystify and intrigue. All I know about media is that “the medium is the message” – a technocrat’s rant.

You’ll be speaking to nearly 600 interaction designers in February at the Interaction conference in Boulder. What is the one thing you’d like them to take away from your lecture?

I would like them to take away my enthusiasm for metaphors and engage in the search for metaphors that help us organize the various paradigms of professional practice.

What will the next metaphor be in your practice? Is your design motivated and organized as a form of LIFE? Or as infrastructure or VEHICLE? Or as the latest FASHION?

Verplank's professional practice metaphor simplified for Designing Interactions

Interaction 11

Bill Verplank is one of the keynotes at Interaction 11 . It has sold out, but workshop places are still available. It is the fourth annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Boulder, Colorado (USA).

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Picture of Verplank: Mayonissen with CC

This week we dive into books and research. I read Donald Norman’s newest book, got interested in Bill Moggridge’s Designing Media and read many other interesting things.Designing Media, the new book by Bill Moggridge, director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and founder of IDEO, is now available in hard copy, as a DVD and as a downloadable pdf.

The Megacities on the Move report, compiled by the Forum for the Future, says authorities must start planning their transport infrastructure now for a future when two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. Of particular interest too are the four scenarios for urban mobility in 2040, which paint vivid pictures of four possible worlds in 2040. Scenario animations bring each world to life, as they follow a day in the life of an ordinary woman, examining the mobility challenges and solutions in each world.

The book, This is Service Design Thinking, introduces an inter-disciplinary approach to designing services. A set of 23 international authors and even more online contributors from the global service design community invested their knowledge, experience and passion together to create this book.

I just finished reading Living with Complexity by Donald A. Norman and considers it an important contribution to our field.

Sebastian Greger, social interaction designer, internet sociologist and post-graduate student at the Media Lab of the Aalto University School of Art and Design in Helsinki, has published his Master’s research, entitled The Absent Peer, that aims to provide a framework for the consideration of non-users in the context of social interaction design, in particular for the design of social network sites.

Norden, the Nordic Innovation Center, has published the results of U DriveIT, a research project between Denmark, Norway and Iceland, that explored the increasingly strong connection between ICT and user-driven innovation in those countries, and how this approach could be transferred from the IT sector to traditional businesses.

This month Jon Kolko’s newest book ‘Exposing the Magic of Design’ will be released. It focuses on design synthesis: a way of thinking about complicated, multifaceted problems of this scale with a repeatable degree of success. In this article Jon shows us what it’s all about.

The Backstory

With the help of publications like Businessweek and Harvard Business Review, ethnographic research has become increasingly familiar to those in the business of innovation – generally, those engaged in new product development embrace research as a mechanism for arriving at a new product, system, or service. Not all agree on the power of the research in large-scale change, however, and the ever-provocative Don Norman stirred quite a controversy with his article Technology First, Needs Last . In this article, Don leads with the succinct: “I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.” The response from Bruce Nussbaum – one of those responsible for bringing an awareness of design to a larger audience through the publication Businessweek – was vehement: “So it is within an intellectual spirit when I say that Don Norman draws erroneous conclusions from the weirdest atavistic analysis I’ve seen in a decade.”

A year later, I offer an observation to both Don and Bruce: as you assess where innovation comes from, you have both overlooked a critical element of the design process, one that fundamentally connects research to form-giving, and one that is repeatable, methodical, rigorous, and dependant on a reflective, immersive, and rich relationship with culture and society. Design Synthesis is where innovation comes from, and it has both a rich history of both theory and method. Unfortunately, neither the method or the theoretical underpinnings are commonly taught or discussed, and so most designers and only a very few engaged in business and technology have acquired a formal way of entering into synthesis, embracing the chaos inherent in the process, and then communicating the outputs of synthesis in a meaningful manner. I offer in this article a brief introduction to the process, with the shameless intent of bringing awareness to my new book that dives deeply into the connection between design research and innovation.

An Introduction to Synthesis

Synthesis in design involves the combination of two complicated entities: the designer and the design problem. During this process, the unique qualities of the designer (her experience, expertise, and the complexity of her design and personal experiences) and the unique qualities of the designer’s frame of the design problem (the inherent constraints and her mental model of the problem) engage in a dance of process, creativity, and often, conflict.

A brief consideration of synthesis reveals two main benefits to the reflective designer. First, synthesis acknowledges the complexity of the designer, and it begins to hint at what makes a “good” designer “good.” Through the designer’s experience, he has been able to develop knowledge that extends beyond the domain of a specific design sector (mobile, Web, pharmaceutical, retail) and into the actual process of design. With a fair degree of autonomy, an experienced designer can therefore understand, rationalize, and better frame a given design problem. The designer develops unique constraints that are not part of the original client brief and understands how these constraints directly contribute to his ability to solve the given problem. Secondly, synthesis acts as a foundation upon which the “magic” of design occurs. This is the cognitive rationale for why design happens. It explains why designers are able to take incomplete data, manipulate it in various ways, and invent things that are relevant, innovative, or appropriate.

In the generative stages of a design problem, designers often turn to pencil sketching on paper to think through the various nuances. For example, to visualize the appropriate form of a new touch-based cell phone, an industrial designer will sketch in three dimensions and in orthographic (or plan) view, often laying ideas on top of one another and switching between a stylistic approach to a more pragmatic, component-based investigation (looking at the actual elements that might need to be contained within the phone, such as a screen, a keypad, and so forth). At this ideation stage, the most high-level design problems have been defined, so the designer is problem solving. That is, the designer knows what he is creating—a phone, and not a toaster or a printer—and he knows the general constraints of the object (it has a certain-size touch screen and requires a certain-size battery to power it, and so forth).

But consider the previous stage, in which the high-level design problems are defined or identified. Why isn’t the designer creating a toaster, for example? It may be that the company in question has a high degree of competency and history in creating mobile phones. Or the company may have developed a new technological approach to building low-cost touch screens, so it is trying to find new applications for it. Or it may be that the company has identified, through research, a new opportunity for producing a touch-based phone.

Where do these discussions happen, and who has them? Typically, these types of considerations are made by directors of marketing and technology. These organizational structures control a big budget, which they (often independently) assign to whichever projects and programs they deem to be most strategic. Once they have made the decision, a product team is assembled. Eventually the product “trickles down” to the designer, who then begins to sketch what the item might look like.
But with the recent popularity of the phrases “design thinking” and “innovation,” designers have been asked to participate in these strategic conversations. Designers are increasingly expected to discuss not just how to solve a problem but also which problems to consider solving. They are increasingly pressured to speak with clarity about product launches, strategic product road mapping, competitive marketplace trends, short- and long-term revenue opportunities, partnerships and sponsorships, and other issues related to the business of design.

This presents a great opportunity for designers to move from a tactical role to a strategic role, where they are valued not only for their ability to produce but also for their ability to think and analyze. Yet even at these more fundamental levels of a design problem, there is an implicit expectation that the designer is designing—producing things that are visual and tangible, that trigger additional discussion and that evoke emotive responses. Essentially, if a designer is to enter the boardroom, she is expected to bring something unique to the boardroom discussions.

What are these unique things? What does the designer do or make while attempting to find and understand problems at a strategic level?

Design synthesis generally describes this aspect of design, where the designer is not yet solving a problem but is still doing, and making, in an attempt to understand complexity. Synthesis is an intellectual approach to creativity, and it can offer a rationalization for repeated business success and a set of tools for moving from research to specific and actionable design ideas. Because synthesis is tied to logical processes of managing complexity, it can be communicated throughout an organization and used to substantiate the seemingly “magical” world of design and design thinking.

A designer attempting to produce an innovative design will conduct research focusing on the experiential, emotional, and personal aspects of culture. This research will describe an opportunity—design research acts as problem finding. The research findings may be captured in PowerPoint presentations or described on a whiteboard. Either way, the research has allowed the design team to gather data within a constrained problem space.

Translation and Sensemaking

Design is that act of problem solving—of appropriating formal qualities into a new design idea that fulfills the stated criteria and adds value to the human condition. Design synthesis, then, will translate the opportunity into specific design criteria, or a set of elements that must be present to afford a cohesive and concrete design. The synthesis will describe the solution; design synthesis is the process of problem understanding. Although data gesture toward an opportunity, data are frequently thick and convoluted, overwhelming and incomplete. The data alone lack contextualized meaning, and so it is difficult to decode data in their “raw” state. Synthesis is a sensemaking process that helps the designer move from data to information, and from information to knowledge.

My new book ‘Exposing the Magic of Design‘ offers both theory and methods to better make sense of complicated situations and approach complex problems with a new and thorough approach. You will be able to bring rigor to what has traditionally been an “intuitive” and haphazard process, to rationalize and better substantiate design decisions, and to articulate that path succinctly. This is the link between research and innovation, and it is this link that connects ethnography and new product development. Research alone does not create an innovation, disruptive or otherwise. Through the culturally sensitive and flexible process of synthesis comes a rigorous and repeatable manner of driving towards powerful new products, systems and services.

This week: urban transformations in from Chicago to Cyprus, and storytelling using  science fiction.

A group of young designers are exploring how methods used within user-centered design can improve urban regeneration, and are now making their mark on the urban scene of Nicosia, Cyprus, by creatively redesigning “misused public spaces”.

More urban transformation in Chicago where citizens harness technology to offer up solutions to problems in their communities, with the support of the Give a Minute! initiative, created by Jake Barton’s media design firm Local Projects.

Also in Northern Europe they are experimenting urban transformations, as Living Labs have become an established part of local and regional innovation systems. So it became necessary to start benchmarking and harmonizing best practices for setting up and conducting individual Living Lab research.

Storytelling is another big theme this week.

Intel’s Chief Futurist, Brian David Johnson, is a big advocate of using science fiction narratives as a jumping off point for a discussion between management and engineering about the future of Intel’s business, and has commissioned four writers — Douglas Rushkoff, Ray Hammond, Scarlett Thomas and Markus Heitz — to produce science fictional pieces on the future that the company can use in its own planning.

Finally, Digital U is the first television/web series to examine how the internet and social media are changing the way we live, work, play, consume and communicate.

One of the valuable things academic design research can do is to take on projects that would be impossible within the world of practice. That’s one of our guiding principles in the Public Design Workshop at the Georgia Institute of Technology—to explore the issues and opportunities of design that might go unexplored in the world of practice, and then find ways of communicating the insights we discover back a larger, more general, audience. There are, of course, lots of unexplored areas of design.

Our recent work focuses broadly on how to engage groups with little past experience in design. Specifically, we are interested in how we can use design to bring together diverse stakeholders in an issue to engage in speculation about the future, to collaboratively imagine and design possible futures. A large part of this involves education—how can we foster a level of design and technology literacy in our participants, and just as important, how can we learn from them about their practices, desires, and values?

Over the past year we have been exploring how robotics and sensing technologies might be used to support small-scale local agriculture. There are already many examples of sophisticated technological products and systems for agriculture, but most of these focus on large-scale farming. Moreover, most of these products and systems don’t translate well to small-scale agriculture—you can’t simply take a robotic harvester or a sensor network designed for a 10,000-acre farm and put it to work on a 1-acre farm. But it’s not only an issue of size; there are also different practices of farming and values at play that influence (or should influence) the design of technologies for small-scale agriculture.

As design researchers, for us the process is as important as the product that might be developed.

As design researchers, for us the process is as important as the product that might be developed. So, how do we develop a process to discover and invent these future agricultural technologies? Our answer to that question is through co-design and cooperative inquiry: working together in a collaborative fashion not just to create future products, but also to collectively explore together the issues and opportunities of local-small scale agriculture.This requires a long-term engagement and commitment to both a subject matter and a community, and a willingness to shed the authority that often comes with the title of designer or researcher.

Okay, so enough with the background, what have we been doing?

To address these questions we developed the growBot Garden project. The core part of the growBot Garden project is a series of workshops that bring together designers, researchers, artists, farmers, gardeners, and other food makers (e.g. cheese-makers) to collaboratively explore how robotics and sensing technologies might be used to support small-scale local agriculture. To date, we’ve held three workshops locally in Atlanta, GA and nine days of daily workshops as part of 2010 01SJ biennale in San Jose, CA—the largest new media festival in the United States, attended by over 25,000 people . Each of these workshops is a substantial event, taking weeks of planning and preparation.

The May 2010 growBot Garden symposium, our premiere event, provides an overview of our process. The day-long workshop was held at a local artists’ community called the Goat Farm, which is a complex of a half-dozen or so antebellum factory buildings housing studios, an independent café, a community garden, and of course, some goats, all tucked into a few acres of land in an otherwise industrial part of the city. About 18 participants joined us that day, together with the designers and researchers, making a group of about 25.

The day began with a short presentation surveying contemporary robotics technologies and then quickly segued to an activity in which the participants constructed physical models of farms and gardens. This storytelling relied on crafting as a means to prompt participants to share information about their work, while the act of making physical representations served as a conduit for imagining technological interventions in said spaces. Participants were provided cardboard squares for their models, along with a selection of craft materials such as paper, hot glue, markers, clay, string, and sticky notes. In addition, we had placed blank prompt cards with the question, “What Would Your growBot do?” on each table for participants to use throughout the day. We were pleasantly surprised when so many of our participants shared their ideas on the prompt cards as they introduced their farm/garden model to the rest of the group. Some participants shared as many as eight ideas – a welcome jumpstart to the day’s imaginations. After learning about their farms and farming practices, we shared a series of science-fair-like demonstrations that we had developed to introduce them to the capabilities of robotics and sensing technologies. Members of the design research team staffed these demonstrations of machine vision, proximity sensors, tweeting plants, and a roomba, while answering questions from participants.

After a leisurely lunch of local organic foods, participants began prototyping ideas for robots on their farms and in their gardens. Guided by the research team, participants divided into groups, creating sketches of their ‘growbot’ and moving into cardboard prototyping. A variety of materials were available for this exercise, including recycled children’s toys, thrifted wires, and craft materials. Later in the afternoon, participants presented their concepts and prototypes back to the group. By the end of the day, over two dozen idea had been proposed and six of them had been developed into physical models. Each concept and prototype uniquely reflects the specifics of small-scale agriculture, providing insight into what distinguishes these practices and too, begins to hint at the values and motivating desires of our participants.

Each concept and prototype uniquely reflects the specifics of small-scale agriculture, providing insight into what distinguishes these practices and too, begins to hint at the values and motivating desires of our participants.

For example, many of our participants did not use pesticides, as they are organic farmers. Of course, not using pesticides makes dealing with insects more difficult, so it should not be surprising that several of the concepts focused on pest control. In addition, as several participants noted, some insects are beneficial to the crops, so indiscriminate elimination of insects isn’t desirable. The Bio-Rover prototype was one idea developed to balance the issues of insects on the farm. This robot was designed to use a series of vision sensors to collect information about pests throughout the farm environment. Instead of having the robot take action on the pests, the robot would return the information gathered to the farmer, who would then make decisions regarding the pests detected—for example, which should or should not be eliminated and how.

This workshop, and the subsequent ones, have taught us a great deal about the needs of small-scale farmers, about the ways in which they do their work and the structures of their farms, and what they think is important. As we continue on with our endeavor, we are beginning to work on ways to share their ideas through videos, print media, and websites. We also continue to work with some of the participants, to further develop design concepts and our methods of co-design. What effect this sharing will have is unknown, and in this way, the project exemplifies the kinds of work academic design research can contribute to design practice. What we will produce is not a product or service, perhaps not even a set of product or service guidelines, but rather a series of novel insights into the challenges and possibilities of designing to support local small-scale agriculture, and too, a methodological framework for engaging in co-design and cooperative inquiry.

Now, you may be asking,  what does this have to do with interaction design or user experience? The answer is everything. As interaction design continues to expand its boundaries, we need examples of and models for what interaction design and user experience might be like beyond interfaces. For us, these workshops are themselves a kind of interaction design, through which we discover and invent how to work together with various publics to create possible futures. The workshop in effect becomes the product, becomes the interface, as we develop and refine its structure and flow, prototyping and testing it over and again. User experience here is vital, but it’s not with a product or service, it’s with an event; it’s the user experience of participating in design. So, in addition to exploring how robotics and sensing technologies might be used to support small-scale local agriculture and processes for co-design, we are also working to explore the very practice of design itself.

Interaction 11

If you want to meet Carl DiSalvo in real life: he is one of the speakers at Interaction 11. It is the fourth annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Boulder, Colorado (USA).