Things are getting very busy as CHI gets close. I hope to see many of you there, come and look for me at the Student Volunteer room (109/110) I’ll be there much of the time.
Here’s a countdown timer until CHI2011 (hopefully it will work!)
Oh man onlineclock.net has let me down… their cut and past java script doesn’t work.
Only 37 days 1 hour and 22 minutes until it starts.
The very first course I ever attended as a graduate student was this bastardized hybrid of a course taught by two professors, one from the humanities as self-proclaimed ethnographer of cyberspace (remember when we used to say that? yah, not so much anymore), and the other a professor from the natural sciences, training in Chemistry and much of his work at the time about the study of complex networks. The first was David Hakken, the second Santiago Schnell. Both characters, generally memorable people. The class was held in a large lecture hall in the fine arts building: capacity 250. Our class size however was around 70, which consisted of every single first year student of human-computer interaction design (it was a required course) as well as a every other first year graduate student that year in the school of Informatics, this was including PhD students. The idea was noble, expose the students to two very different points of view of what counted as science, data, proof, and rigor. It was almost all “sage on a stage” and in a room like that how could it be anything other than that?
I took quite a few cultural anthrop0logy courses as an undergrad, hoping for a year or two to make it a double major… but I never deeply engaged with the ideas beyond how they gave me increased explanatory power to talk about certain concepts. In essence they gave me clear ways of talking about certain phenomena. Really it was during this time that I began to start to really understand and engage with the idea of ethnography, and in many ways I took it as the basis for understanding humans on their own terms.
As I’ve come of age as PhD researcher, crossing the 1.5 year mark not too long ago I see quite clearly I’ve taken ethnography in, and made it my friend, my constant companion. At first ours was a friendship of chance. I arrived in a culture quite different from my own, not just in terms of corporate culture and the fact that Philips is a huge place, billions in revenues, but in a different country. I quite naturally wanted to understand so many of those differences, to wrap my arms around the idea of innovation which is almost limitless by some definitions. What began as just a process of making sense of my environment became instead the foundation of my methodology for my PhD work. As I came close to hitting the one year mark I had to seriously reflect on my progress and I began to code some of the ethnographic data I’d collected in order to give it more rigor. Patterns started to emerge, though some of those findings weren’t very welcome.
In January I attended the Participatory Innovation Conference in Denmark. The last keynote was Dori (Elizabeth) Tunstall. She was simply amazing, by far the most captivating of the keynote speakers. It reminded me a bit of what some of us affectionately called the Hakken dance. It’s part of what happens when the person on stage gets so excited about what they are talking about that they can’t help but move around up there. Dori gave several good reference and I needed to have them.
More recently I’ve had to really seriously sit down and write out my methodology for the remainder of my PhD study, and so I’ve done that and realized how much I’m relying on ethnography. So of course it makes sense to go back and read what I already had and add some new things to my library. So I’m reading several books now like Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography, and Ethnography: Principles in Practice. Also since January I’ve connected to the anthrodesign mailing list. I have NO idea why I wasn’t on that list for years. It’s a fantastic resource and it’s SO good to connect to others who are doing similar work.
So I’m drinking deeply and it’s delicious.
I just downloaded my first app for Google Chrome, the NYTimes app, it’s an almost identical copy of the iPad app, which is a good thing. When I started thinking about why I appreciated the app there were several reasons. It’s cleaner, it’s simpler, and in some ways it’s more like reading a newspaper, without all the dead trees and ink that gets on your fingers. Really in an appreciable way it afforded the creators of the application to really rethink what the experience of reading the paper is and then attempt, not to copy it, but to transform some aspects of it that really worked into a new medium. Why didn’t think happen with NYTimes.com, especially in the early years? The medium was too new, we still didn’t know what could be done, and like almost all attempts to move content from one medium to another it was pretty much copy/paste, not finding what really works for that medium and taking advantage of it. The current version of NYTimes.com IS quite a bit more like a newspaper, but it has a lot of holdouts from what the web was and has become. The app eschews much of that for something cleaner and simpler with ads in a context that make sense instead of randomly placed highly distracting banners and other things.
I’d like to expand on this more later, but what I’m saying is that, in the words of my professor Marty Siegel it’s computer imaginative, or more precisely it it’s a better appropriation of new media (Thanks Lev Manovich for you fabulous book).
Similarly if you have an iPad I strongly suggest you download the KayakHD app, it’s free and provides the best experience I’ve ever had for searching for airfares. While it still falls WAY short on the booking process (you generally have to book through other places) the search experience is as sublime as such a task can be. It remembers history, shows destinations on a map, and of course it bypasses all the BS and searches more websites and carriers than almost anyplace else. The history function in particular is nice, I think we’ve all been through 20 different searches and then you can’t remember what you did. Just check out your history and you see the various date/airport combinations that you tried (We live close to three different airport so we never know which will be the best to fly out of).
If applications for various platforms really can give us the opportunity to rethink the way we design interactions, information, and services then I for one welcome it. We’ve been too often stuck in old paradigms and not really taking advantage of the medium we are in.
John Gero
Computational models of creative designing
Creativity- what is it? We’re not going to define it, as there are SO many definitions, but we’ll see as we go.
If you want to model something you have to assume it’s a process. What is computation? It’s Representation and a process. When we’re trying to solve a problem we often end up in a subset of solutions
Lunch and now:
Creativity and the Development of Interactive Systems
Sara Jones from the Center for HCI Design at the Centre for Creativity
S-creativity is what they were interes`ted in (Situated, new to that domain)
Creativity types: combinatorial, exploratory, transformational (Boder)
Types of creativity: Inspirationalist, Structuralist, Situationalist (Schneiderman, 2000)
Inspirationalist Creative Processes from Henri Poincare: 1) Preparation 2)Incubation 3) Illumination 4) Verification.
They run creativity workshops over two days using a kind of converge, diverge model. So after one of these things there are tons of post-it notes and a lot of energy, but then what?
In Jones et al 2008 they evaluated S-creativity with domain experts after the workshop and then 6 months later.
Guilford’s definition of flexibility and fluency Sustar (2010) they analysed the creative process and count number of ideas, different types of ideas, stimuli used and blocks encountered.
We are going to now reflect and talk about: What have we seen before, and what would you like to see more of?
I’ve certainly seen diverge-converge and some of these models, but I’d be very interested in seeing other measurements of the output of the workshop, measured in market impact or organizational impact.
Shon quotes I didn’t quite catch, but design should create a common language and reflection among others.
Some useful tools are already out there. Google wonder wheel, Compendium.
Arias et al 2000 collaboration to create shared understanding, boundary objects etc.
The morning poster discussion session was quite good. Stefan and Joao coordinated a session where people would go around and put comments and chances for collaboration on each others posters, then we had a chance to digest a bit the things that were put oni our posters then we had a kind of unconference style discussion on topics proposed, two sessions of 20 minutes each. I tip my hat to Stefan for making it all work.
After the coffee break we’re coming into the next session given by Joao on Qualitative Analysis: Structure locations. The why and how choices of desire. Qualitative research is the method of inquiry that invetigates the why and how of desig, choices, decision making, not just what, where, and when. Smaller but focused samples are more often needed, rather an large samples. The results of such are only hypotheses says Joao, not real conclusions, and I would agree that is true if they are taken outside of the context originally being studied.
What approach will we take in qualitative research? A grounded theory practice, ethnography, organizational narratives, shadowing, etc.
The why and how, while dealing wand collecting data from people with different backgrounds. We use words in different ways, use different words for the same concepts etc. A context for this, the vocabulary/language issue. A Design Dictionary by Michael Erlholf and Tim Marshall is a very interesting attempt to make a kind of universal set of meanings.
Analyzing enormous amounts of data: use systematic terminlogy, then validation, and we’re going to talk more about structural common places and isotopes. Isotopes, from the greek, “at the same place” The research from Raquel Antunes (who presented her work here at the summer school via a poster and with whom I think my project may have some interesting overlap is studying this. It’s a case study of 26 medium and large companies that make decorative ceramics. Structural Common places is an idea talked about by Salana and Albarello et al (in pratiques et methodes de rescherche en sciences sociales) Finding these structure common places may be better according to Joao because the “original meaning” of the person interviewed may be lost in codes and the inexperienced researcher may have a hard time.
From the slides “However we may assume, that a possible path is that the interpretation of data is a process of translation. The terminology used for those structural locations comes not from the specific vocabulary used byu the interviewed/researcher, instead comes form the terminology used by the stakeholders of the field of knowledge in discussion. at the same time that new structural locations are added, they are by inherence shaped by the previous ones. A collection of interdependent structural locations shape an isotope.
Now a picture of the isotope of design engineers a 3d hill plot of various terms such as product development, aesthetic, product quality etc. Each of these terms has a consistent place across various isotopes like designers, creative managers etc.
The audience is fairly confused on why the 3d plot is used, as it doesn’t seem to add any layer of meaning, and 2d would be clearer. I’m also quite confused on what the difference is between these isotopes and coding is, how it really helps in the way described. Joao says we’ll see as we go along.
The 3d plot “Fails the law of parsimony” says Erin, and I agree, Stefan Sloegl is agreeing with this as well and trying to explain that it’s just kind of confusing. Joao says that this is a kind of stepping stone, part of a work in progress.
Now we’re seeing a stratified representation of the structural locations of design management definitions by all interviewees. It has a number of different layers with the various terms listed by frequency in various layers.
He’s now giving us a kind of “homework” to use a more traditional coding method and this method.
This seems to be the end of the session, and we’re heading to lunch soon.
Now up is Alan Dix, he’s talking about what he won’t talk about, but are his other interests. From conceptual to computational models. What do I mean by computation model?
1) I don’t know just a title
2) A model of a phenomenon (creativity!) that can run on a computer.
3) using a computation analogy to understand creativity.
150 years ago we used electricity to understand our world, 300 years ago it was steam, now it’s computation, none are better, but it’s helpful to understand things. The moment we think we truly understand something that’s when we’re on dangerous ground.
Ways of using computation model?
Simulation: The example of rabbits on an island and how populations relate to grass on the island and how they alternate between across years. so while the simulation is quantitative you can get qualitative ideas from it too. Hilliard, a syntax of space. They model people going from one intersection to another in a city and individual behaviour is not realistic, aggregate behavior is.
Inspiration from computation. Finding good/creative ideas, it’s a bit like optimization/solution finding. Lots of algorithms in AI and operation search. So if you have similar problems you often have similar solutions. Generate and test.
Prediction: Prototyping as hill-climbing, you need to start at a good point, you need to understand what is wrong. a clever person will look at the map. Genetic algorithms.
Is all of this reallyt like human creativity? What’s different?
Guided, not blind. I.e. we can step back, look outside of the process and evaluate, understand the territory. So we’re better. ’Best’ design, or some design? Evaluation: hard, word suggests a fixed context but there is co-evolution of problem and solution space. From evaluation to en-valuation: in what context does it have value, what are the values in it?
Modeling regret
It’s modal/counterfactual ‘what if’ analysis, it’s worst when you ‘nearly’ averted disaster, it seems to be about learning. So how do we learn…?
Now a break then a workshop, no notes on the workshop for now.