On Friday, I presented my master’s capstone project, which in a symbolic sense concluded and summed up my design school experience. Putting together the presentation gave me a chance to reflect on the type of work I did this year: my approach, my process and the tacit knowledge gained. I came up with a few concepts that I think especially characterize this capstone project, and also synthesize much of my learning experience from the last two years.
Chief among them is the notion of design as service. In their book, the Design Way, Nelson and Stolterman write that design is about creating intentional change in the real world. As such, a designer must always work within limited time, resources and knowledge. And furthermore, design is never solitary, but is rather defined by dynamic relationships, working in service of others. Continue »
This essay is about the challenge of making environmental sustainability a focus of HCI research and practice. While environmental concerns have been around for a long time and have been considered important in other design disciplines like architecture and product design, the topic has only recently been recognized in the HCI community. It is also a very complex topic, posing a number of difficult theoretical questions. For example, it demands that we first understand the complex issue of how HCI design is currently impacting the environment. Second, we need to understand how concerns for these impacts can be effectively integrated into the design process. Finally, we need to develop insights and concepts for designing more sustainable interactive products. In this paper I look to the literature of design theory to provide insights into these three problems. Sustainability can and has been considered from many perspectives: political, economic, biological, technical, spiritual. My goal here is to describe my understanding of the issue of sustainability through the lens of design theory. Continue »
I am currently reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan’s illuminating account of the industrial food system. The book provides an excellent explanation of where food comes from and the journey it travels before we eat it. What makes the book so powerful is that Pollan really connects all the dots; he manages to examine every piece of a long and complex chain connecting the farmer’s field to our dinner plates. This kind of analysis + synthesis is rare in our modern era as we tend to want to separate issues and deal with them in isolation. Pollan’s writing reveals the contradictory nature of such compartmentalized thinking: Continue »