Transforming Grounds

Ok, yesterday Lars-Erik Janlert and I sent our final edits to the proofs of our forthcoming book "Things That Keep Us Busy - The Elements of Interaction". If everything goes well the book will be out in August/September. The 'book' is already available on Amazon . And you can preorder it!

Today I carefully read an article that I wrote with Mikael Wiberg and published in 2010 in the HCI journal. The article is titled " Concept-driven interaction design research ". It is not always fun to read something you have written a while back, but in this case I was pleasantly surprised. I really liked it! One reason why I liked it is that since we published the article the field of HCI research has developed and it seems as if the article and its contributions are better suited for today than when it was published. I also really like the basic idea in the article, that is, that it is possible to use a concept-driven design approach with the purpose of theoretical advancements.   (I think you can download the paper here) Here is the abstract of the paper: "In this article, we explore a concept-driven approach to interaction design research with a specific focus on theoretical advancements. We introduce this approach as a complementary approach to more tradit...

One of the most exciting reactions I get when I talk to professional designers about the design process is when I mention what I call the practicalities of designing. With this notion I try to capture all those seemingly 'trivial' aspects of designing that are so easy to forget when we talk about design thinking. The practicalities of designing can briefly be listed as: Time (not having enough) Resources (not having enough) -------------------------------------- Information (not having enough) Knowledge (not having enough) Competence (not having enough) Every design process and designer lives with these practicalities. The first two are the most concrete and also the ones that are most often forgotten and neglected. Designing is about projects. A project has some kind of a starting point and some kind of an end point. The process is to a large extent defined in time and by resources. In most cases, time and resources are decided without any deep understanding of the pa...

Working with students and professionals over the years have helped me understand what aspects of the design process that makes designers stressed and insecure. One factor is the role of methods and tools in designing. Common questions I get are "what are the best methods and tools to use in designing?" and "can you do human centered design while being 'agile'?" or "can 'personas' be used when working with highly specialized products?", etc. The basic assumption underlying all these and similar questions is that a method and tool to some extent can function as a 'guarantor', that is, that the use of the method or tool can promise successful outcomes. It is possible to see this assumption as a hope for increased 'predictability' in the design process. Predictability in this case means a hope that if we use 'method A' then we can with higher certainty predict that the outcome of the process will score higher on some m...

I am just back after a full day workshop on "Designerly Thinking and Doing" in Chicago last week. It was a great day with wonderful participants who contributed with a lot of insights, comments and questions. It is as always fascinating to hear the stories from individual designers about their professional experiences in widely diverse organizational environments. The stress and frustation of not being understood, the importance of everyday practicalities related to design practice, the philosophical differences between professional groups, the misconceptions about what the design process requires, etc. But also experiencing the enormous energy and willingness among these professionals to learn more, to keep developing, to take the next step. There is a passion about design that in many cases goes far beyond professional need and organizational loyalty. These professionals not only want to do good design work, they are to some extent addicted to it and need to know how to g...