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Faculty workshop
MOGGILL TANGIBLE SCREEN DESIGN
(and: How theories inform interaction design)

Ipswich Campus, December 6, 2005, 10.00 - 18.00

Invited: Interaction Design Research Division faculty

This workshop brings together two interests: It is a design workshop that aims at creating concepts for the Moggill project, but at the same time it is also a research experiment in which we in concrete ways explore how theories can inform a design process. 

In the Community and Place project the focus is on supporting local initiative in suburban communities like Moggill. A characteristic of the project is the hesitance to resolve to 'quick-fix' technology solutions. This does however also make it vulnerable in IT research funding discussions ('Isn't this simply a web-design project - where's the new technology?'). One of the ideas in the project is to introduce a screen in the local shopping center foyer as a pointer to a local web service. The aim of the workshop is to take a broader view of 'screens' and see if tangible interaction can combine with local content generation.

On the other note, there is an underlying assumption in our field of interaction design research that the results we produce (theories, methods) will somehow 'inform' design practice in real businesses out there. Little theory ever reaches design practice, and I think there is a need to focus more on what 'informing design' actually means. The idea of this workshop is to run a design process 'informed' by three theories: An ethnography, Hutchin's 'distributed cognition' and a tangible interaction framework. And then discuss what happened.

Programme: 
10.00 Introduction, programme, design brief 

10.15 A Moggill Community Ethnography - Margot
An ethnography can be considered a theory of the particular context we are designing for. And a good ethnography challenges designers to think beyond their usual problem-solving focus.

Brainstorming: What role could technology play in this community?

11.30 Distributed Cognition - Jacob
Ed Hutchin's book Cognition in the Wild has attracted much attention. His term 'distributed cognition' can be seen as a theory of how people in general think and act.

More brainstorming: What if Moggill were about collective, distributed cognition?

12.30 Lunch + Sifting through ideas, homing in on concepts, matching concepts to groups

13.30 A Collaborative Tangible Interaction Framework - Jacob
As a result of her recent PhD research in Bremen, Eva Hornecker has proposed a framework for understanding how tangible interfaces can support collaboration. It can be seen as a theory of interaction.

Group design: A tangible, collaborative design for the shopping center.

16.30 Presentation of design concepts

17.00 So, how did the theories 'inform' our designs?

18:00 End