Doenja Oogjes

Morse Things: A Design Inquiry into the Gap Between Things and Us

Applying a thing-centered, material speculation approach we designed the Morse Things to acknowledge and inquire into the gap between things and us. The Morse Things are sets of ceramic bowls and cups networked together to independently communicate through Morse code in an Internet of Things (IoT). We deployed the Morse Things in the households of six interaction design practitioners and researchers for six weeks. Following the deployment, we conducted a workshop to discuss the role of the Morse Things and ultimately the gap between things and people. We reflect on the nature of living with IoT things and discuss insights into the gap between things and humans that led to the idea of a new type of thing in the home that is neither human-centered technology nor non-digital artifacts.

Videos of Things: Speculating on, Anticipating and Synthesizing Technological Mediations

In this paper we present Videos of Things: videos that portray the mediated, lived world of computational artifacts informed by postphenomenology. In a post-phenomenological understanding, things and us are interdependent in that they mutually shape each other. And as a whole, technology or designed things mediate the relations between our world and us. This can be a challenge for designers. Through the making of design videos, we explored narrative strategies for creating stories featuring technological mediation. These include humanness, patterns in time, and non-human ensembles. We reflect on how the videos at different stages of the design process have helped to a) speculate on technological mediated relationships, b) synthesize and reflect on qualitative data on technological mediation and c) anticipate technological mediation. The paper contributes different narrative strategies for design videos and the role these videos can play within a design process aimed at elaborating the mediated qualities of technologies.

Ideating in Skills: Developing Tools for Embodied Co-Design

In this paper, we show the development of the Ideating in Skills (IiS) toolset: an embodied design tool aimed at supporting co-design processes. The iterative process of developing the toolset was carried out by students. They worked individually at first, exploring their own skills and moods through movement, visualisations and poetry. These explorations were translated into objects that were able to communicate and connect with each other. In each iteration, the design of the qualities of these connections was based on the findings of the previous explorations. After several individual and team-based iterations, a final toolset was collaboratively created and evaluated in various short design sessions. Based on the potential of the first version of the toolset, a second version was created that is currently used and tested in one-on-one settings all over the world and in multi-stakeholder settings in a creative hub in Sweden.

Philosophers Living with the Tilting Bowl

This paper reports on a postphenomenological inquiry of six trained philosophers, who as study participants lived with and reflected on a research product we designed known as the Tilting Bowl: a ceramic bowl that unpredictably but gently tilts multiple times daily. The Tilting Bowl is a counterfactual artifact that is designed specifically for this study as part of a material speculation approach to design research. A postphenomenological inquiry looks to describe and analyze accounts of relationships between humans and technological artifacts, and how each mutually shapes the other through mediations that form the human subjectivity and objectivity of any given situation. This paper contributes an empirical account and analysis of the relations that emerged (background and alterity) and the relativistic views that co-constitute the philosophers, Tilting Bowl, and their specific worlds. The findings demonstrate the relevance of this philosophical framing to fundamentally and broadly understand how people engage digital artifacts.

TaskCam: Designing and Testing an Open Tool for Cultural Probes Studies

TaskCams are simple digital cameras intended to serve as a tool for Cultural Probe studies and made available by the Interaction Research Studio via open-source distribution. In conjunction with an associated website, instructions and videos, they represent a novel strategy for disseminating and facilitating a research methodology. At the same time, they provide a myriad of options for customisation and modification, allowing researchers to adopt and adapt them to their needs. In the first part of this paper, the design team describes the rationale and design of the TaskCams and the tactics developed to make them publicly available. In the second part, the story is taken up by designers from the Everyday Design Studio, who assembled their own TaskCams and customised them extensively for a Cultural Probe study they ran for an ongoing project. Rather than discussing the results of their study, we focus on how their experiences reveal some of the issues both in producing and using open-source products such as these. These suggest the potential of TaskCams to support design-led user studies more generally.

Lyssna: A Design Fiction to Reframe Food Waste

In this paper we propose the design fiction, Lyssna, a diegetic prototype in the form of a hearing aid for your refrigerator that aims at reintegrating lost aspects of food. Lyssna is based on home studies of food practices informed by Mediation Theory and Theories of Practice. Our aim is to explore an alternative framing from behavioral theories for designing for food waste. In the process, we hope to open up the design space for enabling reconfigurations of everyday food practices.

Displacement: Attending to the Role of Things in Theories of Practice Through Design Research

In this chapter, we focus on understanding the role of non-human elements or what we refer to as things in everyday domestic practices through the concept of displacement. Our concept of displacement is informed by design research inquiries known as material speculations and postphenomenological notions of withdrawal and multistability. We use displacement alongside the philosophical concepts and design research to explore our understanding of things in theories of practice. Displacement describes how things are part of practices without us knowing fully what a thing is, its direct use by humans, or the particular practices they are embedded within.

An Annotated Portfolio on Doing Postphenomenology Through Research Products

In this paper, we argue for framing the crafting and studying of research products as doing philosophy through things. We do this by creating an annotated portfolio of such Research through Design (RtD) artifact inquiries as postphenomenological inquiries. In our annotated portfolio, we first provide an account of the postphenomenological commitments of 1) taking empirical work as the basis of the inquiry, 2) analyzing structures of human-technology relations and 3) studying technological mediation. Secondly, we trace these commitments across six RtD artifact inquiries. We conclude with a discussion on how research products can be seen as an experimental way of doing postphenomenology and how HCI design researchers can work with that. As a result, the presented philosophical framing can be leveraged in HCI research to form a deeper and more dimensional understanding of the human-technology relations we craft and study. This also adds a methodological path to moving beyond foci of use, utility, interaction, and human-centeredness.

Videos of Things: The Other Half

We present Videos of Things: videos portraying the lived-with world of our material speculations. We situate the artifact within an ecology and brings into focus the subtleties of everyday life by focusing not on the thing, but on humanness, patterns of time and non-humans and ensebmles. The videos serve as a communication tool for these elements that were previously difficult to represent, as well as a speculative design tool for envisioning long term lived-with experiences the artifacts. The other half features Lyssna: a counterfactual artifact that functions as a hearing aid for your refrigerator. When it is moved across the door of your fridge, you hear the sounds of the food in the fridge. Lyssna creates a unique sound for every food item. The sound changes over time, representing the state of freshness and the accompanying flavor of the food.