All entries for Tuesday 01 June 2010

Researching by Design, Wolfson Research Exchange May 28th 2010

Follow-up to Wolfson Research Exchange presentation May 28th from Inspires Learning - Robert O'Toole

Here are the slides from my Researching by Design presentation. It was presented to a mixed audience of researchers including several scientists and a GP, as well as a librarian and a researcher from Warwick Institute of Education.

In the following slide I suggested that there have been significant changes in the nature of research funding, demanding that we reconsider the design of research activities. The audience seemed to agree that this is a sound conjecture. This slide came much later in the presentation. On reflection, it should go at the start.

To begin with, I defined the presentation explicitly as a lo-fi prototyping session...

I then talked about the Open-space Learning project, and how I am learning about new possibilities for designing research and research-based learning activities (mentioning how the separation of research and learning has been challenged).

I then talked about the history of design science and design thinking, through three books. Norman's The Design of Everyday Things had focussed upon usability and functionality that conforms to human expectations, such that utile objects present enabling constraints and affordances to reduce the cognitive complexity required when using them. This also presented an opportunity to talk about manufacturing design and Six Sigma. An environmental approach is encouraged by Jonathan Chapman, looking at how manufactured objects relate to human emotion and attachments, so that they may become emotionally sustainable (and hence more long lived). Finally, I talked about Latour's arguments on the importance of design as a means of promoting collective thinking and questioning, turning matters of fact into matters of concern.

We then read the Theory Roulette research-learning design from the Handbook of Open-space Learning Technology.

Theory Roulette

(a learning design prototype based upon an original installation by Catherine Allen and Lauren Cameron)

Slowly moving from the bright and informal foyer, we pass through two sets of doors, each in turn filtering-out a degree of chattering, confidence and expectation. Into the dark, cavernous and unfamiliar space of the Studio. A little thread of light at the edges guides us into position, strung out along the black-curtained wall.

A few seconds of settled silence, then a crackle of sound coming from somewhere above and near to, we guess, the centre of the room. A second audio source comes to life, just to the side of the first: again just a crackle. Then a screen flickers on, it’s position matching that of the first sound, followed by a second screen with it’s accompanying sound source, followed by a third, a fourth and a fifth, each displaying tuned-out white noise, spiralling around in aerial suspension.

“Hi, I’m Garry from Illinois. Do you wanna chat?”

Garry’s face stares at us from the first screen, fitted-out with a dumbly quizzical expression. A few vacant seconds later, he’s replaced by Monika from Derby. Garry’s performance continues further around the spiral. Monika moves along. Daniel from Frankfurt is next. Ephemeral and disturbing video sequences captured from the strange distributed online world of Chat Roulette, looping around and drawing the line of spectators along and dispersing: examining, making sense of, whispering to each other observations, instant theorisations and refutations, all dimly lit and lo-fi.

A few minutes into the session, and two wall-sized screens fire up at opposite ends of the space, boxing-in the spiral of suspended screens. Each big screen shows a Google Earth sequence plotting the exact locations of the Chat Roulette participants (to street level), along with the available biographical data. The video sequence zooms in and out to examine each participant and their socio-economic and cultural context. The sequence comes to a halt, replaced by an un-recorded, interactive Google Earth interface pin-pointing each chat participant. The experience is transformed away from passive spectacle to active participation and collaborative exploration, as we use the touch screen to control and explore the information displayed.

By now the audience, or more precisely the explorers, have started taking notes: snapshots and voice memos recorded directly into small portable wifi enabled devices. Each note is tagged to identify it’s context (creator, location, event, time, theme, purpose etc). A third wall-sized touch screen has appeared, displaying an interactive timeline, upon which our notes are plotted, as well as a spatial representation of the room and its contents. We can instantly see each-other’s responses, or return to them later when reflecting upon the experience. We can also add our own materials (images, sounds, texts, videos) collected from other places and times and carried into the space digitally.

After some time exploring and discovering unguided, a fourth interactive wall appears, completing the box. This time it’s a wall of books: key sociological texts on technology and community. We can open each book, spread out selected pages across the screen, annotate and draw around them. Furthermore, we can add to them from the opposite wall, containing our notes and digital recordings. The challenge is obvious: place our own observations and theories in relation to the academic works, build a theory and test it against the empirical evidence that we have explored.

Finally, the session ends with an invitation to summarize and reflect upon our theories and the experience of collaboratively constructing them. We can record these reflections as text, audio or video (or all three), added to our collective timeline or recordings and events (for our later use). But the discussion doesn’t end there, spilling out into blogs, forums and future events, all connected back to the event, and informing future writing and research.

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We then considered the nature of technology, as a definition of the set of affordances and constraints with which our designs can work:

Considering the difference between commercial design and learning design:

And what we can do with learning design:

We then moved on to considering the IDEO approach to design activities, with 3 distinct types of activity taking place in 3 types of space using distinct techniques and tools:

Considering "ideation", "build to think" in more depth. I briefly talked about prototyping, linking Andy Clark's extended cognition hypothesis with the concept of lo-fi prototyping from IDEO's Tom Kelley:

Finally, we watched a video presenting an example of the new breed of research projects. Professor Carol Rutter of English and Comparative Literature at Warwick, working with the actor Jon Trenchard to create a video documenting a Shakespearian performance experiment. Carol and Jon were interviewed about how they used the film making process as a mechanism of "building to think":

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Robert O'Toole : 01 Jun 2010 06:57 |  Tags: Ideation |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem