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Design PORTFOLIO Teaching

STUDIO COURSE: 2nd year 2016, Interaction Design – Emily Carr Univ. of Art & Design

In the Spring term of 2016 I developed and co-taught the 4D Core Design Studio III course at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in collaboration with Markus Schilling. This course is the first Interaction Design studio course for 2nd year design students within the Interaction Design major. It is worth mentioning that Markus and I developed the entire curriculum of this course from scratch.

In this course, students will begin to develop an understanding of interaction design and interaction design practice, revisit the design process and develop further their practice as designers-to-be. Students will engage into three consecutive interaction design projects and master techniques and methods including research methods like user research and secondary research, empathy building techniques like personas and scenarios, analysing techniques like Kano analysis and information architecture, design techniques for graphical user interfaces, concept iterations, prototyping techniques, and presentation and evaluation techniques.

There are three studio projects for the course; one is developed individually (application re-design) and two are group-based (tangible interface design & concept design for emerging technologies). Students will work in class to share theory, process, methods, and resources. Each project focuses on a different aspect of interaction design as well as a different part of the design process. This way students will gain an insight into different design disciplines while getting familiar with the single parts of iterative design process.

See the courses syllabus here.

 

Project #1 Re-design an application (GUI)

In this project students were asked to choose a software application (mobile app, web, or on a device with display) and systematically go through the process of re-designing the chosen software. They had to: Create 3 User Personas (in this course students were introduced to all the methods they were asked to use), analyze the software with KANO, Information Architecture, & User flow diagrams, re-design the software (towards 1 or all of their personas) systematically working with the methods introduced (KANO, IA, flow diagrams) and re-working them. Students could for example add a function that wasn’t there before, improve the user experience flow, and they could choose to stick with or also improve the visual layout. They had to create wireframes and iterate on them and finally design a prototype (clickable mock-up with e.g., Marvel, invision etc.).

Specifically, also please check out these two student’s overview/process of this assignment on their web portfolio: Stacie Schatz – ECU-Webmail ; Joachim Zatko – PublicLibrary (also on Medium)

Project #2 Tangible interface design

In this project students were asked to design 3 rotary knobs to control a RGB or HSB color picker visible on a screen. Students had to do sketches, and form explorations with foam, and design and fabricate three knobs align with a simple concept they had to come up with. The knobs were connected to 3 potentiometer that controlled a simple graphical user interface that they also had to design. The project was realized through combining Arduino with processing.

Specifically, also please check out two student’s overview/process of this assignment on their web portfolio: Stacie Schatz – Color ID ; Kelin Kaardal – Spektrum

Project #3 Invention Design/Concept design for emerging technologies/ Setting up an unknown design space

In this project students were pushed to become comfortable with making radical conceptual leaps into envisioning possible future technology applications in an emerging and largely unknown design space. We asked them to pick a technology/technologies from the Gartner hype cycle (a yearly report on emerging technologies), to research the technology, and to pair it with the context of ECU in the near future. Through mind maps and brainstorming activities students were to set up a design space, and create scenarios and use cases of proposed concepts. They had to create user journey maps to refine their concepts and finally create a video to communicate the final concept.

//More images coming soon, but here’s a sneek preview

At the end of the term we organized an exhibition to exhibit student’s works of the course.

… and here is a short video of the exhibition that one of the students (Joachim Zatko) shot.

*Markus and I want to thank HfG and especially Hans Krämer, Jörg Beck, Ralf Dringenberg, and Michael Götte, who have been inspiring the way we teach interaction design.

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PORTFOLIO Teaching

STUDIO COURSE: 4th year 15/16, Interaction Design – Emily Carr Univ. of Art & Design

In the Fall term of 2015 and the Spring term of 2016 I co-taught the 4D Core Design Studio VI course at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in collaboration with Haig Armen. This course is for 4th year design students with an Interaction Design mayor. In this course students are working on their main B.A. thesis projects over the course of two terms. I will share outcomes at the end of the term on this site.

“This team-taught course offers exposure to key aspects (values, concepts and skills) of 2D, 3D, and 4D Design. Students independently engage in design research and methods, analyze, design, present and evaluate ideas to meet required objectives through individual and group projects. Discussion and reflection help students make informed decisions about their personal and professional development. Collaborative and contextual project work is emphasized in order to develop students’ community-based multidisciplinary teamwork, project management and client management skills” (From the ECU course website).

See the courses syllabus here.

Here are some examples of student’s work:

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Design PORTFOLIO Research

RESEARCH AND DESIGN: Design Fiction and Speculative Design – SFU, AGO

Simon Fraser University, SIAT, Everyday Design Studio

I’ve been interested in Design Fiction for a while and worked on several projects around the topic.
 
A Sustainable Design Fiction: Green Practices

In 2012 we began writing a journal article called “A Sustainable Design Fiction: Green Practices” in which we propose opportunities for designers to co-design with DIY enthusiasts, targeted as practitioners in their own right, designing toward or within a design fiction. We see design fiction as a possible means to bridge sustainable practices, interaction design, and practice-oriented design and as a source for interpretation and adaptation. Designers can take on an intermediary (or what we call hybrid) role between design fictions and sustainable DIY practices. For example, Malthus is a DIY home version of aquaponic farming (see images). It was designed by the firm Conceptual Devices. The project aims to show how to build an aquaponic farm with accessible and easy to assemble materials. In this case, the designer is not presenting a design fiction in itself, but a plausible prototype of a proximate future. Below see the published journal article and the project page about the Green DIY study. This project was done in collaboration with Ron Wakkary, Audrey Desjardins, and Leah Maestri.

Wakkary, R., Desjardins, A., Hauser, S. & Maestri, L. (2013) A Sustainable Design Fiction: Green Practices. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI). 20, 4, Article 23 (2013). (34pgs)

See also the project page about the Green DIY study.
 

SFUture – A Sustainable SFU in 2065

In the Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 terms I took a class called ChangeLab and the final project of my project team was to envision and share what SFU (our University) could look like in the future, considering sustainability issues. We created a design fiction of SFU in 2065 in form of documentary-style videos from the future. There is a Youtube Channel, a tumblr blog, and a publication about this project. We had several probes that were things in our design fiction like the unscissors and the nogfobber (see images). My project partners were Audrey Desjardins, Kashif Pasta, and Mike Funergy.

 

See the four other fun SFUture videos HERE.
 

Material Speculations

The latest work around design fiction and speculative design has been an article that I wrote together with Ron Wakkary, Will Odom, Garnet Hertz, and Henry Lin. It is called ‘Material Speculations’ and we submitted a paper to the fifth decennial Aarhus Conference. More on how this submission turns out will be coming soon.
 

Speculative Design for the AGO

See also our project for the AGO that involves design fiction.
The featured image of this article from HERE.

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PORTFOLIO Teaching

COURSE DEVELOPMENT: Materials for IAT333 IxD Methods – SFU

Simon Fraser University, SIAT, Research Assistant, Course Material Development, Fall 2014, advised by Prof. Ron Wakkary.

In fall 2014 I worked on course materials for Professor Ron Wakkary’s class IAT 333 D100 Interaction Design Methods, which involves a design project following a participatory design process throughout the course.

The material I put together are guidelines for working with a partner in a participatory design project. The guidelines are directed at both parties, the student teams and the company or partner they work with throughout the course.

To get an idea what that looked like, here the Table of Content of the guidelines I developed.

 

1. WORKING WITH A PARTNER
– Participatory design and the importance of working with a partner.

2. PROCESS
– Organization
– User involvement

3. FIND A PARTNER

4. DEFINE YOUR DESIGN PROJECT

5. HOW TO WORK WITH A PARTNER
Data Capturing
How to design PD activities

6. THE AGREEMENT WITH YOUR CHOSEN PARTNER

7. GET STARTED
First-hand experience

8. Say vs. do
Guidelines of observations. Capture and document user’s experiences and understandings.

This is a process graphic showing students that there are several stages PD methods and techniques can take part of the design process and that the involvement of the ‘user’ should go beyond an informing role at the beginning of the design process and instead cover several stages of the design process.

 iat333

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COURSES IN DEVELOPMENT: Repository of Possible Future Courses

As I would like to teach more in the future I have been thinking about some topics of courses that would be really interesting to me to teach. This site serves as a repository of sketches of courses I have been thinking about, but does not mean I wouldn’t teach other courses.

 

Philosophy of Technology and Design

Philosophy of Technology, how it relates to design, and how we can make use of it in design is an interesting intersection. A framework for this is presented by contemporary philosopher Peter-Paul Verbeek, who has taken a turn towards design in his philosophical investigations proposing an interesting perspective that designers could benefit from.

A course could involve an introduction to design students about PofT and Verbeeks work, following a design approach that will foster the design of more engaging artefacts. This relates to my PhD thesis work.

 

Designing with human involvement

A studio course that focuses on and embraces the design of artefacts that rely on human interaction to function. An example are human-powered artefacts like bikes, wind-up flashlights, or the rocking chairs that either shine light, knit or unknit when a person is rocking. This relates to my PhD thesis research.

 

Purposeful Purposeless Design

A studio course that engages in a Purposeful Purposeless Design approach. The idea is to design an interactive artefact without a particular use goal (purpose), but still design it in a designerly manner (purposeful). In other words, purposeful purposeless designs can be understood as interaction design artifacts that are designed with non-existent or weak use goals while being designed in purposeful matter (designerly). The result is a highly ‘finished’ looking artefact, which challenges people to find uses for.

 

Practice-oriented Design.

My current idea of a studio course involving research and design parts targets practice-oriented design. The idea would be to look at a practice that humans do (for instance Green DIY), analyzing elements of that practice (material, competences, and meaning [this framework comes from Shove, Pantzar, and Watson’s book ‘The Dynamics of Social Practice – Everyday Life and how it Changes’] and then designing towards that practice or an element of that practice.

This approach is inspired by our Green DIY study, in which as a result from our studies and theoretical advancements using a practice lens, we propose a practice-oriented design approach. Images below are from the paper we wrote on the study.

 

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PORTFOLIO Research

RESEARCH STUDY: DIY Tutorials & the role of designers – SFU

Simon Fraser University, SIAT, Everyday Design Studio, Summer 2013 – Summer 2014

Aiming to examine the quality of DIY tutorials, we put ourselves in the position of DIY enthusiasts, attempting to build ten DIY projects by following their tutorials. We documented this process and analyzed our experiences and observations. In the context of our study, we believe that the process of following the tutorials ourselves is a straightforward way to investigate the challenges and opportunities of DIY instructions.

We will be presenting a paper using findings from this study at CHI 2015:

Wakkary, R., Schlling, M., Dalton, M., Hauser, S., Desjardins, A., Zhang, X., & Lin, H. (2015). Tutorial Authorship and Hybrid Designers: The Joy (and Frustration) of DIY Tutorials. In Proceedings of the conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, (forthcoming, April 2015). (10pgs).

Here is the abstract:

Tutorials are critical to the success and vitality of DIY practices. In this paper, we elevate the importance of tutorial authorship as one way to maintain and improve the quality of tutorials in DIY. We discuss the role interaction designers can play as hybrid designers, mediating between author and audience to contribute to the improvement of practices of tutorial authorship in DIY. We examine the quality of tutorials through the building and analysis of ten DIY projects and tutorials. We analyze key issues across three categories: 1) competences, components and tools, 2) sequencing, 3) and communication. We offer findings that are both practical guidelines for detailed improvements of tutorials and structural themes for improving tutorial authorship including the themes of accurate information, competences and tools, and tutorial format. In conclusion, we discuss the potential for interaction designers to simultaneously mediate and shape tutorials and tools in a form of hybrid design

 

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Design PORTFOLIO Research

DESIGN RESEARCH: Interactions of Guide Dog Teams – SFU

Simon Fraser University, SIAT, PhD Studies, Spring 2012 – Fall 2013

The visually impaired have been a longstanding well recognized user group addressed in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Recently, the study of sighted dog owners and their pets has gained interest in HCI. Despite this, there is a noticeable gap in the field of HCI with regards to research on and for visually impaired owners and their dogs (guide dog teams).

This research specifically focuses on guide dog teams, presenting an ethnographic study that explores the interactions of guide dog teams revealing differences between their work and off-work relationship. Some of our findings promote design interventions that address issues of awareness, pride, confidence, and trust present in guide dog teams at work but absent in off-work scenarios. We uncover potential for the design of new computer-mediated technologies that can better support the needs of guide dog owners; specifically, enhanced play-interaction through accessible dog toys utilizing smart sensor technologies and mobile apps.

The study has been an incredible experience and taught me a lot about Guide Dogs and their handlers and ethnographic fieldwork. BC Guide Dogs has been a very helpful partner in this work.

 

We published several works on this project:

Hauser, S., Wakkary, R., & Neustaedter, C., (2014). Understanding guide dog team interactions: design opportunities to support work and play. In Proc. of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS 14). ACM, NY, USA, pp. 295-304.

Hauser, S., Wakkary, R., & Neustaedter, C. (2014). Improving guide dog team play with accessible dog toys. In Proc. of CHI EA‘14. ACM, NY, USA, pp. 1537-1542.

Hauser, S., Wakkary, R., and Neustaedter, C., (2013) Work vs. Play: A Study of Guide Dog Team Interactions, GRAND NCE Conference, Research Notes, Grand’13.

I have picked up this work in my doctoral dissertation work and taken it a step further by using the lens of postphenomenology to complement human-centered ways of studying these human-non-human teams.

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Design PORTFOLIO Research

RESEARCH AND DESIGN: Speculative Design, AGO, Toronto – SFU

Simon Fraser University, SIAT, Everyday Design Studio, Spring 2013 – present

We began working on a project in collaboration with Art Gallery Ontario (AGO) in 2013. The overall longterm goal will be to design futuristic prototypes (design fictions, speculative designs) for the AGO.  So far, we have visited the AGO 4 times and conducted a participants workshop at the AGO, analyzed parts of the workshop data and have engaged in a first part of an rather unconventional design process.

The workshop was conducted to gather data that can stimulate and inspire the design of future prototypes known in this case as design fictions that will be presented in the AGO as a reflective installation that encourages visitors to construct their own interpretation of the Canadian collection.

 

Design Workshop

The core goal of this workshop (which we named Eclipse) is to shift the focus of workshop participants to the edges of their experience of a known public place. For example, our workshop aims to elicit memories of smell and qualities of light. How mundane objects like furniture, electrical outlets, motion sensors or ceiling textures influence our participants’ experiences of place. How these qualities shape the memories, perceptual experiences, and public and personal stories that people bring to or create within a public place. Our workshop guides the participants to sequentially explore their memories, sensations, sense of place, and stories.

We published a pictorial, in which we explain this workshop we held at the AGO in its Canadian Art Collection with 13 participants.

Wakkary, R., Desjardins, A., Odom, W., Hauser, S., & Aflatoony, L., (2014). Eclipse: eliciting the subjective qualities of public places. In Proc. of DIS 14. ACM, NY, pp. 151-160. (10pgs, Pictorial)

 

Next Phase in the Design Process

For our last visit, I and another team member prepared Non-human storyboards telling the story of something non-human living at the AGO. With those storyboards we began filming footage for short films about those things. A rather unconventional but very interesting and fun process.

 

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PORTFOLIO Research

RESEARCH STUDY: Community & Practices of Skateboarding – SFU

Simon Fraser University, SIAT, PhD Studies, Summer 2012 – Present

As an ex-skateboarder, I’ve been interested in skateboarding for a while. When I came to the Everyday Design Studio in 2011/2012 I was introduced to research studies on everyday design that had been done. Everyday design qualifies and defines the types of actions that people do to creatively transform and adapt objects in their daily lives. It highlights a form of creativity that we all take part in and one that helps us negotiate our daily lives through design-in-use and appropriation. Everyday design also includes the work of hobbyists and amateurs who make and reuse design artifacts in their practice. When it came to picking a first topic to explore from a research and everyday design perspective, I immediately thought about looking at how skateboards have been appropriated. Since then, I conducted two studies.

 

Skateboards and Everyday Design – First Study

My first study was looking at the appropriation of (broken) skateboards surveying how everyday designer reuse, transform, adapt and appropriate (broken or old) skateboards. People, most of them somehow involved in the skateboarding culture, make art, furniture, accessories, jewelry and other things out of old or broken skateboards. See some examples in the images. I interviewed 5 people that were upcycling skateboards to learn about the specifics of their intentions and processes. This study can be seen as a pilot study. We published a WiP (Work-in-Progress paper and poster) about this study. In the paper we used the study findings to reveal a new lens on mobile technology by seeing the skateboard itself as a mobile technology.

Hauser, S., Desjardins, A., & Wakkary, R. (2013). Skateboards as a mobile technology. In Proc. of  CHI EA‘13. ACM, NY, USA, pp. 1419-1424. (5 pgs)

 

The Practice of Skateboarding and Technologies – Second Study

My second study followed up on looking at the skateboard with the developed technology lens. Skateboards can be seen as a personal technology as well and reveal insight into this type of technology as well. Looking also at the practice of skateboarding with this lens reveals interesting facts around technology design and practice-oriented design. In this study I interviewd 12 Skateboarders about their practice and experience of skateboarding, which revealed extremely interesting insight into the phenomenon of skateboarding as a practice, a subculture, an activity, an embodied practice etc. I’m working on another publication with study findings from my second study, in which I interviewed and observed several skateboarders.

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Design PORTFOLIO Research Teaching

RESEARCH & DESIGN PROJECT: CityStudio – Local Foodsteps – SFU, City of Vancouver

CityStudio Cohort Fall 2013, Supervised by Duane Elverum, Janet Moore, Lena Soots.

I was an observing participant of the CityStudio cohort in Fall 2013 investigating different experiential learning models concerned with making practices. CityStudio is a project school and energetic hub of learning and leadership inside Vancouver City Hall and helps students gain hands-on experience with complex real world problems, while co-creating solutions on the ground with City staff.

My project team worked on ‘Local Foodsteps’, a wayfinding project that aims to increase the awareness of local food assets in Vancouver’s neighbourhoods. Signs attached on poles in the city point to a range of places including urban farms, grocery stores, restaurants, and community gardens. See our documentation HERE.

This project was done in collaboration with Colette Cartier, Larry Ho, & Lihwen Hsu.