Maliheh Ghajargar: A journey from (Industrial) design to (Interaction) design… and vice versa

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Maliheh Ghajargar, Associate Senior Lecturer in Interaction Technologies at K3. The title of her talk is:

A journey from (Industrial) design to (Interaction) design… and vice versa

The talk will take place on Wednesday, April 24, at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk:

During my first K3 seminar I would like to mainly introduce my previous works, present a synthesis and then introduce a preliminary research idea that I am currently developing! So, my seminar will have three main parts: The first part will be an introduction about my previous design and research projects as a design researcher and design practitioner, with a particular focus on my PhD dissertation project entitled: Designing Tools for Reflection: a Concept-driven Approach”.

The second part will be about a design approach and probably also a design methodology, that I think it has been developing during and after my PhD dissertation and it is still in progress! That approach is inspired by research through design and concept-driven approaches (e.g. Stolterman, E. & Wiberg, M., 2010). It favours a cross-disciplinaryinclusive and critical approach in design (Ghajargar, M., & Bardzell, J., 2019) and it has four main phases from informing by theories to constructing theories.

And the last part of my seminar will be focused on my research project idea, that I am currently developing. The topic is around aesthetics and forms of interaction with everyday use objects that make us think and reflect on actions, by using IoT technologies — e.g. in the areas of education, energy consumption or health. From a design perspective, I would use aesthetics as an approach that does not only value the arts and the beauty of everyday life, but also as an integral and essential part of the usefulness of interactive artefacts. I will inform my work by available literatures across different disciplines on form giving practices, aesthetics of interaction, and design for reflection, so hopefully, to be able to (re-)open up to some areas to (re-)explore.

Hence, as the title of my presentation suggests, I wish to make sense of my journey from being an industrial designer to an interaction design researcher, by constructively building upon the resources and values that these different areas of design, share.

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