Ilpo Koskinen

Prototyping Social Interaction

Introduction Recent changes in information technology have made social interaction an increasingly important topic for interaction design and technology development. Mobile phones, PDAs, games, and laptops have eased interpersonal communication and brought it into new contexts such as bus stops, trains, cars, and city streets—in fact everywhere people find themselves and move about. In these situations, the old paradigms of one person interacting with technology, or a group at work in an office or collaborating over a shared system, are inadequate for guiding the design of such systems. For interaction design, these technologies represent new kinds of challenges. Interaction design has inherited its methodic baggage mainly from three sources, none of which specifically focuses on how ordinary people use social technologies. Usability research and human-computer interaction (HCI) seldom quote sociological theory in their premises.1 While research in computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) increasingly has focused on questions outside of the workplace, the basis of this field of study still stems from studies of the workplace, in which social organization is devised to support work rather than ordinary activities.2 New articulations of methods and frameworks are required for designing interactive technologies for social interaction in ordinary activities. This paper describes a series of studies conducted in Helsinki that focused on prototyping how people interact with each other using mobile multimedia. The central claim is that a prototype is not only a representation of a product or technology—such as a paper prototype, a software prototype, or a physical mock-up—but that it consists of both the representation and the social interaction the participants create together. For convenience, we talk about “prototyping social interaction.” The argument of this paper applies in particular to small communication devices meant for everyday life, but it also can be used with other products and services. Social processes inevitably affect the way in which technology is perceived, accepted, and used. If these processes are neglected, designs face risks. In our opinion, there ought to be ways to anticipate at least some of them. 1 Jenny Preece, Human-Computer Interaction (Harlow, England: AddisonWesley, 1994). 2 See Andy Crabtree, Designing Collaborative Systems: A Practical Guide to Ethnography (London: Springer, 2003). Acknowledgement We would like to thank the Ministry of Trade and Industry for funding Mobile Image, Radiolinja for continuous cooperation and support, and Nokia Mobile Phones for funding Mobile Album.

What Happened to Empathic Design

Introduction At the end of the 1990s, designers began to encounter new types of challenges. Designers, design researchers, and industry wanted to explore feelings and moods and their links to design solutions. This brought along an interest for new approaches to design— approaches that were able to dive into more ambiguous topics, such as experiences, meaningful everyday practices, and emotions, and to connect them to innovative solutions. There were no established constructions to build upon, and concepts from ergonomics and user-centered design were too inflexible. This state of affairs created the need to find new ways to, on the one hand, make sense of people and, on the other, to create openings for design. As an answer to this call, Leonard and Rayport suggested “spark[ing] innovation through empathic design.” They proposed that empathic design would especially entail “techniques (that) require unusual collaborative skills,” “open-mindedness, observational skills, and curiosity,” and the use of visual information as well as an understanding of companies’ existing capabilities combined with “the eyes of a fresh observer” in the users’ own contexts. The suggested mindset of combining subjective and objective approaches and design competence in field studies was thus adopted and elaborated by many practitioners and researchers.1 This paper tells the story of how a group of design researchers in Helsinki have constructed an interpretive approach to empathic design. Empathic design has its roots in design practice. It is interpretive but, in contrast to ethnographic research, focuses on everyday life experiences, and on individual desires, moods, and emotions in human activities, turning such experiences and emotions into inspiration. This paper shows how empathic ideas can turn into a long-lasting research program—one that develops around a few key ideas, is able to respond to many kinds of new challenges, and maintains the core key ideas around which the new applications of the program are built. To describe this development, we illustrate how research has produced contribution in three key areas: research practices, methods, and topics. The program’s evolution shows how the roles and relationships of both designers and 1 Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey F. Rayport, “Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design,” Harvard Business Review 75, no. 6 (Nov-Dec, 1997): 10–13. 2 From Henry Dreyfuss’s Design for People to Tomas Maldonado’s definition of industrial design for ICSID International Council of Societies of Industrial Design in the mid-1950s and Stanford’s adoption of the term, human-centered design slightly later. 3 Leonard and Rayport, “Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design,” Patrick Jordan, Designing Pleasurable Products (London: Taylor and Francis, 2000); Elizabeth B. N. Sanders and Ulau Dandavate, “Design for Experience: New Tools,” Proceedings of the First International Conference on Design and Emotion (Delft, The Netherlands: TU Delft, 1999): 87–92; Jane Fulton, “Physiology and Design: Ideas About Physiological Human Factors and the Consequences for Design Practice,” American Center for Design Journal 7 (1993): 7-15; Alison Black, “Empathic Design: User Focused Strategies for Innovation,” Proceedings of New Product Development (IBC Conferences; Darrel K. Rhea, “A New Perspective on Design: Focusing on Customer Experience,” Design Management Journal (Fall, 1992): 40–48; B. Joseph Pine, II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1999); Jodi Forlizzi and Shannon Ford, “The Building Blocks of Experience: An Early Framework for Interaction Designers,” Proceedings of DIS2000 (New York: ACM Press, 2000): 419-23.

CO-EXPERIENCE: PRODUCT EXPERIENCE AS SOCIAL INTERACTION

Publisher Summary This chapter describes some works on the notion of user experience. It elaborates the concept by situating it in social interaction. It relates the work discussed in it to other work in this area as a brief theoretical excursus. It illustrates the work through two examples. The first is more research-focused, intended to illustrate conceptual aspects of the work. The second is more design-oriented, illustrating how sensitivity to social aspects of experience can be taken into account in interpreting user research and integrating it into actual design work. Throughout the work, it takes it as an axiom that experience takes place in a social setting. It coins the term coexperience as convenient shorthand for this feature. In theoretical terms, this term is an elaboration of the user experience model introduced by Forlizzi and Ford (2000) , which is mainly indebted to the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey (1934) . However, since its aim has been to push the social grounds of experience to the forefront, we have built primarily on Herbert Blumer’s thinking (1968) in our attempt to understand coexperience as social action. Shifting attention to the social grounds of experience has an additional methodological benefit. Unlike cognitive states, social action is directly observable. It can be studied by simple means without recourse to complex, contested theories of, say, how the brain functions or wearable technological devices for measuring and monitoring the body’s various states.

Morphome: a constructive field study of proactive information technology in the home

This paper presents the main results of a three-year long field and design study of proactive information technology in the home. This technology uses sensors to track human activities in order to proactively anticipate the direction of human activity. With it, it could be possible to build an environment without buttons and remote controls. However, the home represents a series of design challenges for proactive technology. This paper describes how we have identified suitable areas for proactive designs with user research, how we built several minidesigns and experience prototypes, and how we tested them in a series of five field studies in the Tampere and Helsinki regions in Finland. The paper ends with a section in which we outline some of the main design principles learned in these studies, and point directions for studies in the future.

Billions of interaction designers

This paper takes up notions of and a vision for interaction design education. The basis of the paper includes reflection based on combined years of teaching experience by the authors both in design schools and in HCI-oriented programs of study and in hybrids of the two, as well as classification of two such programs in terms of a frame we describe and attribute in what follows. The larger intended goal is to overcome the guild-like thinking of much of design pedagogy, in order to make design learning a foundational form of learning and mode of being at great scale, in the interest of broad societal benefits. The more modest goal is to share notions of curriculum, with the intention of creating a basis for shared understanding of how interaction design may be taught.

Agonistic, Convivial, and Conceptual Aesthetics in New Social Design

This paper explores aesthetics in what it calls new social design. It asks, “How can designers work with aesthetics when the main design object is social, and traditional object-bound aesthetic concepts lose their validity.” It describes three approaches to aesthetics: agonistic, which sees aesthetics as a way to lure people to interact with controversial content; convivial, which finds aesthetics in community interactions; and conceptual, which does away with aesthetics. All these have precedents in art.

Transdisciplinary Interaction Design in Design Education

Transdisciplinary design which is the idea of design that transcends disciplinary boundaries has been proposed as a fourth design paradigm of interaction design education, scholarship, and practice alongside the technical, cognitive, and ethnographic paradigms. As an educational concern in particular, its aim is to teach students how to bring a values orientation to interaction design. Its focuses are design frameworks, values and ethics, design for important themes such as sustainability, equity, adaptation, justice, and social responsibility. This panel maps the state of the art in transdisciplinary interaction design education, considering also design scholarship and practice in relation to design education. The panel collects together a group of educators from chosen to provide a global perspective, with panelists from Canada, Denmark, Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan.

Dwelling with Design

Abstract Most studies of design focus on designers in their studios, in industry or in the commercial phase of design. In contrast, this paper looks at what happens to design after it leaves the shop. The paper reviews literature on art and design in everyday life, builds on Herbert Blumer’s interactionism, and reports the key results of a longitudinal study done between 2004 and 2007 in Helsinki, Finland. It describes how people define design, how they relate to it, and how their definition of their home creates the environment in which design is either foregrounded or backgrounded.

Living in metamorphosis: proactive computing in the home environment

The Finnish Academy of Sciences is funding a three year research programme [1] on proactive computing. The programme integrates technological innovations in hardware and software with psychological and social science research. The fourteen funded projects span the wide field of proactive computing ranging from modelling the user’s behaviour to proactive health care systems to controlling the environment via a direct brain interface. The programme is organised in co-operation with the National Technology Agency of Finland and the French Ministry of Research.

‘It’s From My Grandma.’ How Jewellery Becomes Singular

Abstract Most objects in our lives are barely noticed and not much more than consumer goods. Some objects, however, become so important to people that they start to shape their understanding of their self. This paper looks at how some pieces of jewellery become parts of what we call the core self. The study collected stories about jewellery in Helsinki and Chicago between 2008 and 2010. The key process that transforms some pieces of jewellery to constituent parts of the self is family history and connections that some pieces create between generations of women. We close the paper by arguing that design researchers need to pay more attention to social processes that turn some objects into heirlooms, rather than focus on consumption only.