Design for Interaction

The ID-StudioLab of the Faculty of Industrial Design in Delft organised the symposium ‘designing for, with, and from user experiences’ with the subject contextmapping on Wednesday May 13. We, Inge and Shen, went back to university for a day. Speakers of the morning were Liz Sanders of MakeTools, Jacob Buur of the University of South Denmark, Froukje Sleeswijk Visser of ID-Studiolab, and 10 graduates in a pecha kucha presentation.

Contextmapping

Contextmapping is a method for doing contextual research with users,inwhich knowledge is gained about the user context of products. Both users and stakeholders actively take part in the design process, so design and use of the product will match well. Other then for product design, this method is of course very interesting for doing service design projects. Principles of contextmapping are, among other things, that the context of product use is so divers that a map is needed.

Liz Sanders illustrated this by telling about her experiences at architecture agency NBBJ when designing a hospital campus for veterans. Sanders pointed at the transition from designing for communication, spaces, interior and information to designing for experience, emotion, interaction and transformation. She also distinguishes different forms of design visualisations for selling and telling the story for the client (3D, fly-throughs) and visualisations for taking steps in the design process (personas, experience models). Some examples of co-creation methods:

Visioning workshop

Scoping within in a project by clients and users by means of placing words and images in a collage like fashion in a big circle. Ideas within the bullseye get the highest priority.

Experience timelines

A chronological visualisation of events. For example, nurses who visualise the experience of a patient during a certain timeframe.

2D participatory modeling

Former patients design the layout of a patient room by using scaled 2D models. With visualisations of emotions and extensive toolkits with Velcro.

3D participatory modeling

Playing or making hypothetical scenarios with scaled 3D models. Nurses could express their ideas about the design of the interior of a patients room with furniture for puppets and more abstract parts. Nurses had 8 minutes to design the room and told their story with the puppets in the room.

Lessons learned tha Liz Sanders mentioned were, among others, the importance of a culture in which designers are open to input of users and client, and a matching mindset. Invite the design team for the co-creation sessions, preferably give them a role such as taking notes or making the video. Also involve them in preparations. Communicating to designers who weren’t present at the sessions, can be done by giving them a summary with impact, for example video, and only with results relevant for the team at that moment.

After Liz sanders, Jacob Buur of the SPIRE research centre talked about about ethnographic provocation, one of the 7 areas of research at SPIRE. Jacob told about the field studies that were done for the redesign of the wastewater treatment plants. The biggest obstacle was the differences of opinion on how to do the work at the plants and how the new solutions had to be implemented within the existing work culture. Controllers prefered to walk outside instead working with the control applications in a controlroom.

Grootste obstakel bij het herontwerp was het verschil in inzicht hoe het werk verricht moest worden en hoe nieuwe oplossingen binnen bestaande werkculturen kon worden ingepast. Controleurs wilden liever buiten rondlopen dan de controle applicaties binnen in een controlekamer te bedienen.

Froukje Sleeswijk Visser is the first PhD. in contextmapping at the TU and shortly explained her thesis. To conclude many interesting examples of context mapping passed in the pecha kucha presentation. Ten former students explained their graduate projects and their current jobs in relation to context mapping.

More

More on contextmapping at ID-StudioLab.
The thesis of Froukje Sleeswijk Visser: ‘Bringing the everyday life of people into design