Kirsikka Vaajakallio

It has to be a group work!: co-design with children

Design researchers are increasingly interested in techniques that support creative teams in various design processes. The methods developed for sharing knowledge and generating solutions are mostly focusing on adults. Creative collaboration with and among children have a specific set of challenges to be considered. In this paper, we describe two design experiments that were conducted with children aged 7 to 9, to explore the applications of co-design methods with children. In those experiments, we observed that children are capable of utilizing make tools but have challenges in group dynamics and reflecting everyday experiences into design ideas.

Storytelling Group – a co-design method for service design

In this article, we will introduce a co-design method called Storytelling Group that has been developed and tested in three service design cases. Storytelling Group combines collaborative scenario building and focus group discussions. It inspires service design by providing different types of user information: a fictive story of a customer journey is created to illustrate a ‘what if’ world, users tell real-life stories about their service experiences, users come up with new service ideas, and they are also asked about their opinions and attitudes in a focus-group type of discussion. The method was developed for service design cases where a longer time perspective has an important role. Moreover, the method is a quick start for actual design work but still includes users in the process.

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.

Design games in codesign: as a tool, a mindset and a structure

The increasing interest in engaging users and other partners in collaborative design has led to an increase in the number of methods for organising collaboration. The aim of these methods is to support collaborative explorations of future opportunities in inspiring atmospheres. In this discourse, design games have become a popular concept that has been widely adopted to describe various design activities, which at first glance do not necessarily share many qualities. This paper aims to provide further understanding about the purposes that design games serve in codesign. The main contribution of the paper is the introduction of a play framework that highlights three perspectives on how design games appear to different people experiencing them: as a tool, as a mindset and as a structure. To clarify the components of design games, the paper reflects on the relations between design and games, the two parts of the concept ‘design games’, and two further qualities embedded in games: play and performance.

The dialogue-labs method: process, space and materials as structuring elements to spark dialogue in co-design events

Facilitating participation has become one of the cornerstones of co-design, and a number of methods, techniques and events intended to inspire design participants and scaffold collaborative ideation and concept development have been developed. However, an aspect that is yet relatively unexplored in co-design literature is how different methods and techniques can be productively combined. This paper presents and discusses the dialogue-labs method, which provides a structured way of generating ideas through a sequence of co-design activities. The analysis of the method during 18 sessions, based on iterative reflection, focuses on its three key structuring aspects: the process of how dialogue-labs sessions are orchestrated, the space in which the sessions unfold and the materials that are employed. In addition to understanding the specific dialogue-labs method, this discussion of process, space and materials may yield insights into how other co-design methods are analysed and further developed or combined.

On designing open-ended interpretations for collaborative design exploration.

User-centred design is a widely acknowledged practice. Much attention has been paid to the methods, tools and processes on how to conduct design research and field studies with and about ‘users’ and existing or possible ‘contexts of use’. The underlying driver is that the design team will be better at designing if they have an empathic understanding of the people to design with and for. Currently, more effort is invested in engaging various stakeholders in collaborative design activities that nurture an attitude of human-centredness as a strategy. Empathic design approaches are essential in such strategies as they value subjective and experiential perspectives in design. The objective of this paper is to illustrate and discuss different kinds of formats that can be used to work with representations of field research findings and insights in ways that can be open-ended. Being open-ended means that they can allow and inspire new individual interpretations for various participants in the collaborative design processes, which include users, designers and other stakeholders. What is argued for here is the value of incompleteness of field study outcomes as it invites sense-making through making new interpretations which lead to empathic understanding and engagement. Rather than communicating the final results, design in supporting collaboration is applied in a process of exploring what it is that will create value for specific people.

Taking design games seriously: re-connecting situated power relations of people and materials

Using design games at Participatory Design (PD) events is well acknowledged as a fruitful way of staging participation. As PD researchers, we have many such experiences, and we have argued that design games connect participants and promote equalizing power relations. However, in this paper, we will (self) critically re-connect and reflect on how people (humans) and materials (non-humans) continually participate and intertwine in various power relations in design game situations. The analysis is of detailed situated actions with one of our recent games, UrbanTransition. Core concepts mainly from Bruno Latours work on Actor-Network-Theory are applied. The aim is to take design games seriously by e.g. exploring how assemblages of humans and non-humans are intertwined in tacitly-but-tactically staging participation, and opening up for or hindering negotiations and decision-making, thus starting to relate research on various PD techniques and power issues more directly.

Co-creative Practices in Service Innovation

This chapter is about co-creative practices that can be used for the purpose of service innovation. It starts with an introduction to our core assumption that innovation is a deliberate activity and can be enabled and triggered through staged co-creative practices. The main reasons for co-creative practices are first, bringing different people together to share, make sense and to collaborate, and secondly, to rethink current and explore future possibilities. In line with Kelley’s ideology, “You can prototype just about anything. What counts is moving the ball forward, achieving some part of your goal”. We highlight the open-ended exploration practices familiar to designers, in which the practice of identifying problems goes hand in hand with creating solutions. The basis for exploration in this chapter is in engaging people in reflective and creative dialogues, and to situate activities in order to set frames for reflection. In practice, the co-creative practices emerge and evolve in a non-linear progress of stages that are partly overlapping and in relation with each other. This chapter, however, is organised through the use of four lenses: (1) insight generation, (2) concept exploration and development, (3) converging towards a specification and (4) transformative and implementation processes. The chapter introduces a number of examples and applied co-creative practices from various fields of service design. They address the co-creative character of many well-known tools such as role playing, context mapping, design games and experience prototyping. Finally, the chapter sums up the main considerations for the applications of co-creative practices, defining the purpose, utilising co-creative characters and developing facilitation capacity.