Research By Design

A probe to explore social

encounters, urban space and
mobile ICTs
James Stewart (ISSTI)
Mark Wright (ECA and Edinburgh,
Informatics)
Richard Coyne (Edinburgh, Architecture)
Penny Travlou (ECA)
 Issues
• (Technological) Design as a social science
and humanities research method
• Techniques and issues in conducting
‘Research by Design’
• Investigation of ‘User-designers’
– Empowerment of users/citizens as creators
– Mass customisation - mass configuration
 User innovation
• Innovation and technology studies: the active
user, user as innovator.
– Open Source, Internet model
• Domestication; Appropriation; Innofusion;
Lead user innovators.

• How to make this more than basic

configuration, or take it or leave it in the
market?
• Can we provide a toolkit and support
infrastructure to allow more extensive
innovation by non-technical ‘users’?
 Users in Design methods
• Users usually part of a commercial or policy
process
– Requirements Capture, Product verification
– User-centred design
– Participatory design and co-design
• Ethnographic techniques: study the context and
practice
• Interactive techniques: engage ‘users’ creatively
– Rapid Prototyping
– Cultural Probes and Installations
 Creation, not ‘capture’
• Too much emphasis on ‘need’.
• We wish to emphasise the creative and the
experimental as way of exploring current
state of affairs, and inventing the future.

• (alternative phenomenology)
 Social Science and
Humanities Researchers
• Working for others:
– User research
– Qualitative/ Quantitative method
• User engagement as part of own design work
But SST and SL emphasis way technology
reflects social that created it, and leaves
impression on non-technical.
Thus Another mode of enquiry: study user-
designers working on a design project shaped
by the research agenda
– Research by design
 Our Preliminary case
• Branded Meeting Places Projects
– Interdisciplinary
– Interactions of brand with place and social
encounters
– Changing technological environment for these.
– Privileged access to a new technology: image
matching via picture messaging
– Budget to pay a technical assistant
– Lightweight application development
– Initial case with a group of Digital Design MSc
students, few with many IT skills.
 Mobile Acuity System
• Image matching system - “unlocks
information” on a match.
• Used with low quality images
• Access though a Mobile gateway
• Commercially developed as a marketing tool
e.g. snap2win™ : enhance print media campaigns
• Experimentally developed though game
• Cheap way of providing location information
 Brief outline
• Our research theme
– Explore, through creation of applications using
mobiles and image matching, issues affecting the
design and use of branded spaces, particularly
related to groups and social interaction and action.
• Input to designers
– Minimal Brief
– Some exercises on brands and branded spaces
– Demonstration of use of technology
 Three Teams
• Invisible Art QuickTimeª and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Comera
– Login into branded places and signal social
network (Facebook)
• PhoneTag
– Street game with ‘brands’
 Successes
• Speed of development
• Inspiration
• New directions
• Toolbox
• Knowledge of technical/business
weaknesses
 Failures
• Weakness of some of the designers
• Failure to organise groups
• Could we have done more, faster?
• Technology not prepared
• Designers did not engage with concept of
brand
• Designers struggled with some of the social
relationships, community ideas v. information
and one-way communication.
– still in ‘information’ mode rather than community
and communication mode
 What did we learn?
• No precise answers to anything!
• Opened many doors for exploration
– How does place mediate social interaction and how does
this change with ICT
– How is individual and group identity related to place and
brand? How may this be changed via personal technology?
– Power of imaginary real
– The normalization of online meeting places - how to make it
flow and link more naturally with physical place?
– Branded spaces create distributed virtual space and
communities
– New brands of online ‘place’ v. old brands of real place.
– Linking with online . Second Life experiment
 Issues
• How much conceptual help and prodding
should we give the designers?
• How much help with the iterative design
process and engagement with users do the
designers need?
• Need to engage with interests of designers
• Getting designers to engage with technology
• How ‘radical’ or ‘critical’ should we expect the
designers be?
 Questions
• How to make this a more rigorous method?
• What questions can we ask?
• What questions can be answered?
• How to chose new groups of user-designers?
• How to adapt for use in a living Lab?
• Who else is doing this?