In this seminar, David Cuartielles will discuss the work he is doing for his forthcoming PhD thesis. Below is an introduction to the talk.

The area of specialization is interaction design in general and the democratization of the access to platforms within the pedagogics of technology in particular. The main research question this thesis tries to answer is whether the creation of platforms can empower users to become autonomous in the use of technology. A side question emerging from this research is how to involve groups of users of different sizes in co-creation processes using digital tools and platforms.

The author will argue that the creation of technical platforms is opening up the possibility to people from all backgrounds to acquire knowledge in creating artefacts using digital electronics and software. The knowledge in those fields empowers people beyond the basic digital literacy and, by extension, brings them to create their own digital experiences and tools, but also solve real life problems and create new professions.

During the course of the research that resulted in this thesis the author explores, by means of experiments with users, how to bring platforms to the hands of users. There is a clear red-thread in the experiments that evolve from being created for single users at the beginning of the research, back in 2004, up to groups of 1.500 subjects at the time in the last years.

There is also a conceptual evolution in the work, while the early experiments explored aspects dealing with embodied interaction, the latest contributions to the thesis explore how contemporary pedagogical models like Constructionism and Project Based Learning can be deployed to large groups of population at once using collections of experiments like the ones created at the early stages of the research.

The repertoire of cases hereby presented was built in under the assumption that the human factor should be the key design consideration for tools having an educational value. Aspects like: ease of use, affordances, predictability of errors, and even price to the end user were of a lot more importance than technical performance or engineering excellence. That said, when deploying the empirical tests over periods of months at the time at multiple locations simultaneously, all regulations were taken into account, in other words, safety plaid a big role in the creation of the experiments.

This thesis explores two concepts from a more theoretical perspective: tools and platforms. The reflection upon these topics allows building the whole empirical body of work.

Tools are understood as bundles of electronics and software. As society evolves the concept of tool is moving away from the purely physical artefact as more and more devices carry embedded electronics. The arrival of this new kind of tools is transforming professions and professionals. This is bringing a new type of digital divide to society between those that know how to use these tools and those that don’t.

Within this context, a platform has to be understood as a bundle of electronics, software, and documentation. The author defines platforms as the tools including documentation or educational materials on how to use them. Platforms can therefore be a lot more abstract than tools and there can even be meta-platforms made of other platforms and tools. During the process of the fieldwork the author created or co-created several platforms that were used in the different experiments.

In the last years, notions such as citizens’ participation and cross-sector collaboration are increasingly to be found in strategic documents at both local and EU levels about how to address contemporary urban challenges. At the same time an increasing number of initiatives (and labs) have been established by public administrations to practically experiment with how participatory and collaborative approaches can be used to address different kind of challenges (from social integration, to environmental sustainability). Suddenly, it appears as ideas (and practices) about participatory and collaborative governance are not anymore marginal proposals driven by activists or academics, but rather are “scaling up” and being adopted by civil servants and public institutions.

The seminar would like to articulate and discuss the nature of the “scaling”/”diffusion”/”adoption” of participatory and collaborative governance within public organizations operating on an urban scale. And the role (and responsibility) of participatory design researchers engaged in such a “scaling”/”diffusion”/”adoption”.

The starting point for the discussion will be an article draft, in which we dig into a case of (urban) participatory design we have been engaged with in the past 2 years. The case is the pilot of an upcycling center, a new waste handling service driven by a municipal waste handling organization. Here, citizens’ participation and cross-sector collaborations have been at play as approaches in the development of the pilot itself as well as core characteristics for the functioning and organizational model of the center itself.

We aim at highlighting both the practical and political issues that the “scaling”/”diffusion”/”adoption” of participation and collaboration entailed in this case. We look at how participation and collaboration got to travel, being translated, being adopted (but also resisted) among the different parties involved in the upcycling centre, but also what kind of tensions and frictions emerged in relation to both context-specific as well as “systemic” conditions. We focus also on who and what has been play a central role in the”scaling”/”diffusion”/”adoption” of participation and collaboration, how it has been a collaborative effort trespassing and pushing boundaries of organizations, communities, existing working practices and understandings of waste handling, citizens, public organizations but even of the notions of participation and collaboration. We also want to focus on the role of the participatory design researcher involved in collaborative boundary work: what kind of learnings but also dilemmas emerged so far.

User Experience (UX) design lifts human experience as the ultimate design goal for the HCI community. Designing for experience requires a concrete definition of the desired experiential outcome, which in turn requires a concrete understanding of desirable user experiences. Further, Internet of Things (IoT) is a new field in which existing desirable experiences are not readily available for use in the design process.

In this seminar we will take a pragmatic stance in discussing what an ideal experience design process for IoT would look like. I will firstly give a short presentation on UX design processes and IoT, and then we will have a discussion session during which we will attempt to identify design methods, and other elements that would make for an ideal IoT experience design process.

Here is a pdf of Dimitrios’ power point presentation (uploaded September 20): pdf-dimitrios

On April 19 at 10.15-12.00, Zachary Thomas Dodson, professor of Practice at the Aalto University, Helsinki, will hold a seminar with the title “Visual Narratives”. It will be held in room: NIC 0502 in Niagara. Here is a an abstract for the seminar:

This seminar focuses on a new approach to narrative and narrative design which deploys graphic elements and design thinking strategies to arrive at ‘hybrid’ image/texts. The visual literacy and communication methods of the design field open up new possibilities in fiction, from structuring narratives in a formally designed way to creating moments of emotional impact with well-timed visual or typographical surprises. The combination of text and image-based narrative has implications for interactive works, graphic novels, games, and designed novels. Zach Dodson has built a new Visual Communication Design masters curriculum around the techniques and methodologies of hybrid works at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. The program is interdisciplinary as well as cross-cultural, creating a tinder box for new ideas. There is also a new major in Information Design. He will present these emerging fields, the programs built around them, and a peek at the exciting works that are emerging from a hybridization of storytelling.

On March 30, 15.15-17.00, Åsa Harvard Maare, senior lecturer in Design, will hold a seminar with the title Designing for Peer Learning. She finished her PhD – Designing for Peer Learning : Mathematics, Games and Peer Groups in Leisure-time Centers – last year. It can be found here.

The seminar will be held in Niagara in room NIC 0826.

K3 seminar with Henrik Svarrer Larsen, senior lecturer in Interaction Design: Engaging design and design engagements

Wednesday, March 16, at 15.15-17.00 in NIC 0502 (Glocal Classroom).

Intro to the talk:

“As newly employed, I would like to present two of my research interests:

• Designerly ways to co-develop caring professions and design.
• Sensuous designs within the field of tangible interaction.

I will address my previous work as well as applications in the making.

Sneak peaks:
My dissertation can be found here:

https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/publication/5265731

The designs can be seen on p. 54-67
with demo-videos here: https://vimeo.com/album/3269467
People outside IxD may wanna start with the videos + p. xvii+‘Popular abstract’ p.233-4
The ‘entry points’ listed on page xiii can guide you to your possible field(s) of interest.”

March 3, 15.15-17.00, room NIC 0826, Niagara

Abstract:

This article draws on empirical research of television crime drama The Bridge (Filmlance International, Endemol Shine), a format within the nordic noir genre (see Waade and Jensen 2013). The research includes interviews and observations with thirty producers, and audience interviews, focus groups and participant observations with over one hundred audiences and fans (aged 18-65+) in Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, America and Mexico (2013-2015). The empirical research is used to critically examine varieties of audience experiences, specifically how cultural engagement with this crime drama is situated and multilayered within production and reception environments. This research uses a variety of methods to critically analyse what Kathleen Stewart (2007) calls ordinary affects, the contemporary registers in popular culture that mark ‘the intensities and banalities of common experiences.’ The article makes two key points. First, there is not one definition of engagement with this crime drama, but rather a complex semantics of engagement within production and audience interactions. John Corner (2011) calls this stages of engagement that are based on cognitive and affective work. Second, there is a spectrum of audience engagement, from positive, to negative to disengagement with The Bridge, suggesting a shifting in and out of different identity positions and intensities of engagement. Overall, the idea of a spectrum of engagement encapsulates the interplay between institutional contexts, producer and audience practices, aesthetic form and affective structures.

References

Corner, John. (2011) Theorising Media, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Stewart, Kathleen. (2007) Ordinary Affects, Durham North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Waade, Anne Marit and Pia Majbritt Jensen. (2013) ‘Nordic Noir Production Values’, Academic Quarter, Vol. 7(2).

Author Biography

Annette Hill is a Professor of Media at Lund University, Sweden. Her research focuses on audiences, with interests in media engagement, everyday life, production practices, genres and cultures of viewing. She is currently project leader for Media Experiences, funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation. Her latest book is Reality TV: Key Ideas (Routledge 2015) and her forthcoming book is Media Experiences (Routledge 2017).

09/06 – kl. 10-12 Room E203 (Aktersalongen)
Martin Farran-Lee, Staffan Schmidt, Richard Topgaard
Proposing a K3 publication series – a discussion

During the spring the formation of a K3 in-house produced publication series now results in a platform to be shared and discussed.

We have been looking at web-publication, shaping a graphic design identity and questions related to what kind of material would be relevant, and make sense of it in an academic context, and outside.

Please join us for a presentation and a discussion on openings and possibilities.

Memory on Trial, Media, Citizenship and Social Justice

20/05 – kl. 10-12 – Room E203 (Aktersalongen)

Oscar Hemer, Professor, Anders Høg Hansen, Assistant Professor, Malmö University

The book approaches the memory sharing of groups, communities and societies as inevitable struggles over the interpretation of, and authority over, particular stories. Coming to terms with the past in memory work, alone or with others, is always unsteady ground and the activation of memory will always relay imaginations of futures we want to shape and inhabit.

The contributors all explore in different ways how citizens can actualize a public and how citizens and groups struggle with their pasts and presents – and other group’s understandings – in their work for futures they dream of, or envision. This implies an engagement with the notion of social justice, which in turn entails trial and revision of ideas and procedures of how to share the world. But to share also requires some kind of common ground and distributed power.
The anthology thus engages with a range of cases that bring views and voices back in public, demanding justice, recognition, sometimes literally triggering new trials.
Some of the memory work is done strategically, in the context of communication for development and social change interventions where NGOs, community-based organizations, governments or UN agencies pursue not just voice and views, but also very material demands for social justice and social change.

The anthology contains theoretical as well as case-study contributions. The contributors are: Kendall Phillips, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Jo Tacchi, Thomas Olesen, Thomas Tufte, Tamar Katriel, Elizabeth Bird, Alfonso G Dagron, Toby Butler, Oscar Hemer, Ayisha Abraham, Sarah Nuttall, Anders Høg Hansen and Erling Björgvinson.

08/04 – 10-12 – Room E203 (Aktersalongen)
Bo Reimer, Professor in Media and Communication Studies, Malmö University
Media Interventionism – presentation of an on-going book project