User Inspired Design '09

Please note, that in the Presentation file there are two videos embedded on pages 9 (Scenario) and 12 (www.urbanplay.fi). To see the videos you must answer the Adobe Reader’s security alert to trust the content and mouse click on top of the pages 9 and 12.

We hope you’ll enjoy the material.

Brochure_UrbanPlay_download

Presentation_UrbanPlay_download

Group Urban Play: Anna Törrönen, Anna Wallendahl, Barbara Franz, Mikko Juntunen, Yung-Lung Chang

Summary_Article_Jussi Rämänen

UID09 Group 2 – My Public Place: Making public places to My Place. User studies on teenagers.

Here are presentation and brochure in PDF formats

Presentation

Brochure

I added my presentation of the article to the Media section.

For others as lost as me:

To see the attached material log in and from the admin view (not the blog, the view that is opened after logging in) select Media from the navigation bar on the left. All the attached material are there, they are not visible in the blog (at least I didn’t notice them).

-Anna

Switch! Energy Ecologies in Everyday Life

Ramia Mazé and Johan Redström

Switch! is a design research program that by interventions and disrupting existing patterns tries to influence people and their perception of energy. It uses design practises in solving complex issues and provoking people to look those things, that may have been taken for granted, in new ways. Switch! has been carried out as an event-driven process consisting of experiments within smaller teams. This article also describes the six design examples that were created.

There is no single answer to the question of how people should live, nor any silver bullet for solving current ecological problems—and yet, contemporary design must seek ways to think and act in light of emerging environmental challenges.

Design problems might be understood as an open set of issues with many possible resolutions, the design process as reflexive inquiry in which new questions or even problems may be generated along the way, and the product of design as one proposition among many competing ideas

For the reflective practitioner, each move within a design process is the basis for self-reflexive and wider analysis that is allowed to reframe or redirect the whole

Projects that put forward questions as the central tenet of the research, instead of, or as well as solving or resolving problems, tend to produce objects that critically rethink the parameters of the problem itself

Design has, in fact, long moved past a narrow focus on the form of discrete objects, demonstrated by the increasing interest in product-service systems, user experiences and lifestyle values

Design in the end must deal with intervention of the new in material, technical, social—and inevitably environmental—conditions

“It is not so much a product in itself but the interactions within, around, and through many things within a particular setting that must come into focus.”

Consider the effect of introducing, for example, a new piece of clothing or furniture into a wardrobe or household: not only does it add something “new,” it changes the perception of previously existing things as “old”. While a consumer’s lifestyle, values and habits, cannot be designed in totality from above, they can certainly be influenced from the bottom up.

“Electricity raises an interesting issue. Other technologies and products may have a more obvious novelty value, objectified and packaged in ways that more forcefully intervene in the new. However, the structures, objects and actors participating in electricity use—such as grids and infrastructures, plugs and appliances, producers and consumers—are already deeply integrated into the everyday and extensively covered within sustainable development. In fact, the question of energy is not only a matter of introducing something, but a matter of rediscovering it, of uncovering something currently hidden and taken for granted. So, here, we might take another look at when and where design interventions might matter.”

Switch! is a continuation of our ongoing research into how design can promote awareness of energy use in everyday life.

Here, design is not considered as an instrument or tool employed to create interventions—instead, design discourse is the target of our attempt to intervene with new perspectives on how we might relate to environmental issues

-Tommi

-My public place- UID group2 intermediate review

uid_group2

Cristina Bianchi

intro to concept design

summary_designing for experiencing