Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Reflection in action

Is a good design process a reflective practice? Reflection in action is not only what design practioners and others do in a design process (Schön, The Reflective Practitioner). Csikszentmihalyi and Halton (1981) describe "the self in the context of cultivation", a process of interpretation and self-control motivated by goals. This is a "self-corrective process". Thus, a similar approach to reflection-in-action is already happening in everyday activities (ibid). Thus, this not necessarily unique for a work situation, only applied in a different context and more articulated? ...

Some work practices are very dependent on practice-based knowledge, such as in healtcare. Staff may face very different situations. Here reflection, as well as critical thinking, may support people to handle these and also become more skilfull in what they do (Price, 2003) .

I find it very interesting to understand what it is that we are refelcting on in a design process and why.... Designers are trained to "questions the question" but how is it for other professionals and others that are engaged in design processes? How can we make the most of different skills and experiences in a reflective design process?


To be continued...

Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Halton, E. (1981). The meaning of things: Domestic symbols and the self. Cambridge University Press.
Price, A (2003). "Encouraging reflection and critical thinking in practice". Nursing Standard 18 (47). 
Schön, D. A. (1984). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action (Vol. 5126). Basic Books.



Thursday, January 3, 2013

Designing interactions

The desktop metaphor is a way of interacting that once upon a time was transferred from how publishers were working with documents.  A tangible practice informing a digital practice, not intented only for publishers. This and other things is presented in Designing interactions (either as video or text):

http://www.designinginteractions.com/download

I believe that there will be much more that we can sucessfully transfer from practices. There are digital properties that we are missing in the physical world.... and vice versa.

I have previously been working with  how to enable digtial properties for more physical paper-based practices. A few years ago we studied the Gothenburg film festival, and investigated how to keep their paper-based practice  - yet giving it some digital properties.  This was then investigated with the Pin&Play technology, that today has been taken much further by Nocholas Villar among others.











Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Taking part of research

After some studies and a workshop with people that have disability in their hands and arms, and designers, I hope that to find more ways of engaging both users and designers in reserach.

This is a nice initiative to take inspiration from:

http://www.hso.se/intressepolitik/forskning/Projektet-Fran-forskningsobjekt-till-medaktor1/