The week before last, I was at the Designing Interactive Systems conference. I was there as one of the organizers of a one day workshop on the topic of ‘Materialities Influencing the Design Process’. We haven’t managed to make much of a synthesis of the outcomes of the workshop yet, but I have got the documentation for the day up on line:
And here’s the abstract from the workshop website:
The use of material artefacts within the design process is a long-standing and continuing characteristic of interaction design. Established methods, such as prototyping, which have been widely adopted by educators and practitioners, are seeing renewed research interest and being reconsidered in light of the evolving needs of the field. Alongside this, the past decade has seen the introduction and adoption of a diverse range of novel design methods into interaction design, such as cultural probes, technology probes, context mapping, and provotypes. Yet, interaction design does not have a cohesive framework for understanding this diverse range of practices. Such a framework would assist practitioners in comparing and choosing between methods across the different stages, contexts and stakeholder relations within a design process. It seems that one fruitful place to start in addressing this lack is to focus in on the common characteristic that these practices share of _materialities_ influencing the design process. This workshop proposes to bring together practitioners, educators, and researchers to discuss and begin the development of a shared understanding around this theme.