The Ultimate Measure of Success for Speculative Design is to Disappear Completely

Paper@IxD&A Journal

Published in a special issue of the Interaction Design & Architectures Journal, this paper The Ultimate Measure of Success for Speculative Design is to Disappear Completely is a substantial position piece that reflects the first 12 months of Design Research works’ mission to understand what the world can gain from Design Research.

We argue that, in 10, 15, or 20 years time, if Design Research is successful, then, it will in fact begin to disappear, blend into the background, and won’t need special projects such as ours to promote it any more.

The full paper is open access and can be downloaded here.

This is the abstract:

In this paper, we discuss how the increasing prevalence of Speculative Design in educational, research and commercial contexts may reflect and nurture a challenge to the dominance of ‘scientism’. The successes associated with 20th-century modernism are now, in the 21st-century, key factors in the intractability and complexity of 21st-century challenges. Speculative and Design-led approaches offer practical means to break down such intractability but do so over relatively short timeframes. We argue that, if we adopt a longer-term perspective, then disrupting the dominance of scientism so that the benefits of Speculative Design are ‘built in’ rather than ‘added on’ is realistic and desirable. In exploring this proposition, we come to reason that the ultimate measure of Speculative Design’s success is to disappear completely.

Bright Club

Comedy@Bright Club Lancaster

There is plenty of swearing in the video, so watch with discretion.

Bright Club is a comedy event where, for one night, researchers, scientists, designers, and academics try to make their work funny. Here is Joe giving it his best to make some of Design Research Works mission as funny as possible.

Shout out to excellent mentorship from Steve Cross and thanks for organising and facilitating to Dee Hennessy. Mainly, thanks to all the other performers and the audience for putting on a great night!

VC Prize for Participatory Research

Project@Lancaster University & Research England

In December 2021, the Vice-Chancellor of Lancaster University announced a new prize to fund innovative participatory research in an initiative funded by Research England. We secured funding of £25,000 to support a project that uses participatory design research processes to co-design audio games with the blind and partially sighted community.

We are partnered with Sight Advice South Lakes on this project, which is being led by Design Research Works’ Senior Researcher David Philip Green, and is also part of PhD candidate Zach Mason’s doctoral research.

There are many aspects to the project, but central among them is gaming. The gaming industry is huge, but currently largely excludes those with visual impairments. In order to start addressing this and explore the potential of audio games, the team is collaborating with research participants who have visual impairments to understand what we can learn by trying to create an audio-first game.

QuBr

Interactive Documentary@Online

Do you have questions or opinions about Design Research? If so, please go and take part!

QuBr is an interactive and dynamic discussion about Design Research.

It was inspired by the documentary ‘Question Bridge’ (hence the name Question Bridge).

When you visit the site you will be presented with all of the contributions so far, each contribution includes an answer to a previously asked question, and a brand new question as well. The idea is to explore the Design Research landscape to better understand both the value of Design Research but also what the current challenges and opportunities are.

The Revolution Will (Sort Of) Be Televised

Talk@Design Informatics

In this Design Informatics Webinar Joe and Dave discuss the high level aims for Design Research Works, as well as delving into some greater detail about how Research through Documentary is being used through the project. Here’s the blurb:

Industrialisation and digitisation have resulted in a dynamic, globalised, highly technological world; now we must figure out how to make sense of it. Because they’re inherently future-focused, naturally interdisciplinary, and can consider both social and technological phenomenon, Design-led Research approaches (things like Research through Design, Design Fiction, and Critical Design) are particularly good at making sense of the rapidly changing realities of the 21st century. Design Research Works is a 4-year mission to understand and promote these approaches. In this talk, Joseph Lindley will introduce Design Research Works before David Philip Green outlines how documentary-inspired approaches will be leveraged to support the project’s research and leadership objectives.

DI Webinar - Joseph and David from Design Informatics on Vimeo.

Trust Me? I'm an Autonomous Machine

Project@EPSRC Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub

Find out more about this project via the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems research hub project page. The work 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.

Uncanny AI: How To Spot a Mutant Algorithm

Event@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.

Room For Improvement in Video Conferencing

Paper@Association of Internet Researchers Conference

The Covid-19 pandemic led to a dramatic shift in the nature of work and collaboration for our design-led research group. In this paper, we describe the experimental use of the Gather Town platform for a variety of communication and collaboration activities. This alternative to standard video conferencing software uses spatial metaphors and attempts to regain some of the affordances of physical co-location such as serendipity and a sense of presence. In creating custom Gather spaces for our team, we found that it brought positive benefits to informal collaboration in work environment.

You can download the paper here.

Ambiguity and Design Research

Paper@European Academy of Design

This paper explores the inherent ambiguity of Design Research. It is a field which is broad and contested. 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. 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.

You can download the paper here and here is the accompanying conference presentation.

Much of this research was based on some interviews in early 2020, summarised in this teaser for our QuBr project:

Machine Learning vs Digital Portraits

Paper@International Association of Societies of Design Research

In this pictorial, we explore the interactions between machine learning and the human face. 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 paper was presented at 2021 International Associate of Societies of Design Research conference.

You can download the paper here and here is the accompanying conference presentation.

This is not a paper

Paper@alt.CHI conference

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

An Experimental Murmuration

Event@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.

An AI's view of Design Research

Project@Twitter

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.

Documenting Design Research

Workshop@PETRAS

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

Research through Documentary

Talk@University College London

Ways of doing documentary research: research into, for and through documentary

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