Design Research Works

An introduction

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QuBr

A dynamic discussion about Design Research

https://qubr.designresearch.works

QuBr* is a dynamic discussion about Design Research.

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* an abbreviation of ‘question bridge’ - pronounced like ‘Cuba’

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It takes the form of simple, short, ‘talking head’ videos – a.k.a. qubrs.

QuBr has been developed as an experiment for the DRS Festival of Emergence. It is inspired and informed by the interactive documentary project Question Bridge.

We invite users to contribute by recording your own qubr. You can do this from your device. A qubr is a video in two parts: (i) a response to an existing question, and (ii) a new question of your own. We are just as interested in questions as we are in answers and you have 2 minutes (max) to record your qubr.

Find a question you would like to answer, then press 'Record your Answer'. Then - in a single video – answer the question, and - in the same video - pose a question of your own. Your qubr will then form part of a chain of questions and answers, which will grow as the project develops over the course of the festival - and beyond!

Click here to jump straight in!

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Trust Me? I'm an Autonomous Machine

Exploring trust in an age of automation

This project is funded by the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems research hub and it aims to identify master narratives which bridge the gap between lay and expert perspectives on the key themes relating to ‘autonomous systems’. In June 2021 we can an introductory workshop on this theme which was captured in sketchnotes.

Towards the end of 2021 we will be producing a series of Design Fictions based on the workshop.

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Uncanny AI: How To Spot a Mutant Algorithm

Event at the Festival of Social Science

This event at the annual ESRC Festival of Social Science 2020 utilised a set of icons designed to enable legibility of AI systems, these icons were developed based on several in-person workshops.

Because the festival couldn’t happen in person due to Covid-19, our normal offline events were replaced by an interactive online game in order to explore the usability of the icons and then to facilitate a conversation about key issues relating to AI. This work highlights the gap between the common concerns of citizens and research agendas.

The following video was used before the event, but visualises some of the icons which were used at the event.

This event was an outcome from the Uncanny AI project and has resulted in various research publications describing how Design Research is a key tool to understand the socio-technical issues arising from Artificial Intelligence.

This video describes a bit more about the background of this work including the ‘Definitional Dualism’ of AI was used to present this work at the 2020 CHI conference where the paper Researching AI Legibility through Design was published, based on this research.

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Ambiguity and Design Research

A design-led exploration of material interactions between machine learning and digital portraiture

This pictorial (pre-print available here), is included in the proceedings of 2021 European Academy of Design Safe Harbours Conference and was featured in the Safe Harbours for Cultivating Sustainability track.

Abstract: Design Research is powerful, promising and increasingly popular, but it is also ambiguous, broad, and contested. In this paper we draw upon interviews with leading Design Researchers and argue that some facets of this ambiguity hamper Design Research’s maturation. This limits the effectiveness of Design to respond to the 21st century’s entwined and complex problems. We argue that by understanding why this ambiguity exists and, where possible, attenuating its effects, the field will be galvanised and its ability to impact the world amplified. This work establishes that we may benefit from being clearer about what we mean when we talk about Design Research and explores some strategies for achieving this.

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Machine Learning vs Digital Portraits

A design-led exploration of material interactions between machine learning and digital portraiture

Design materials are defined as a combination of what they are, what they do, and the ways they interact with other materials. In this pictorial, we explore the interactions between machine learning (as a design material) and another design material — the human face — in the form of digital portraiture. Employing an exploratory Research through Design approach we consider how machine learning simultaneously enriches and subverts the materiality of the human face. Through a combination of images and text, we offer some considerations and provocations for further research.

The pictorial (pre-print available here), is included in the proceedings of 2021 International Association of Socieites of Design Research conference.

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This is not a paper

alt.chi conference submission

This is the world’s first ever academic paper which is not a paper. Presented at the world’s leading conference on Human-Computer Interaction, this work plays with the very concept of what a research paper actually is.

You can actually walk ‘in’ to this paper. Each room is a section where you can read the text, but you can also actually bump into other conference delegates there.

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused us to reassess many things in life, this work does the same, it’s about collapsing barriers between video chat, research conferences, and publication traditions.

You can visit the work here: https://designresearch.works/thisisnotapaper

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Design Research Bot

Exploring the boundaries of Design Research with AI

Design Research Bot will respond to Tweets with insights and questions about Design Research. It is powered by an AI system that was trained on a huge variety of content. It is intriguing as it demonstrates the huge breadth of what Design and Design Research may represent. Feel free to give it a try, simply send the bot an ‘@’ message on Twitter.

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An Experimental Murmuration

Uroborus Festival

This work was a contribution at the Uroborus Festival - a hybrid festival and community network performing experimental inquiries into the transformative potential of Design Research. It continues our experimentation with the Gather Town platform.

The work was originally a pictorial research paper titled Ways of Seeing Design Research which deployed a Research through Design approach to defining and exploring the boundaries of the Design Research landscape. In this project we made that pictorial into an interactive shared space for discussion and exploration, you can access that space here.

The video below explains the work.

You can also see the work being presented ‘live’ at the conference here.

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Documenting Design Research

A video-making workshop for PETRAS IoT researchers

It is more valuable than ever to tell stories about research (including design research) in ways that connect with various different audiences, from the general public to funders and from publication venues to our peers. Documenting research is, thus, both an art and a science; there is plenty of scope for creativity, as well as quantified standards of good practice. In this 1-day workshop, developed exclusively for PETRAS IoT researchers, we used an example-led approach to explore the breadth of approaches to research documentary-making by outlining some core principles of good research storytelling (story / narrative / audience) as well as practical considerations - from storyboarding and sound recording to using stock footage and choosing the right social media platform. For more information, or if you are interested in gaining access to the workshop materials, please email d.p.green@lancaster.ac.uk

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RtD(ocumentary)

Ways of Doing (Design) Research through Documentary

Ways of doing documentary research: research into, for and through documentary
Dr. David Green.

Wed 31st March 2021, UCLIC Research Seminar Series

Talk abstract: In this invited talk, I discussed my experiences as a researcher and documentary-maker in various professional and research contexts. I described various projects I have been involved in that combine documentary and research in interesting ways (including Design Research Works) and framed the discussion around three approaches to documentary research, inspired by three approaches to design as outlined by Frayling (1994): Research into Documentary (i.e. learning about documentary); Research for Documentary (i.e. developing tools, systems and processes to enable, support and advance documentary) and Research through Documentary (i.e. creating new knowledge through the processes of making documentaries).

Relevant papers:

Green, D. P. et al. (2021) ‘‘You wouldn’t get that from watching TV!’: Exploring audience responses to virtual reality non-fiction in the home’, Convergence. doi: 10.1177/1354856520979966.

Green, D. P. et al (2017) Enabling Polyvocality in Interactive Documentaries through "Structural Participation". In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 6317–6329. DOI: 10.1145/3025453.3025606

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