I had great conversations with Jonas Löwgren, Dan Lockton, and Anthony Dunne about one of my main  concerns: how to frame Interaction Design as a cultural project. Interaction Design is more usually thought as a methodology or as a professional practice, but I prefer to think that Interaction Design is a key part of culture development for current societies.

Technology is transforming every kind of cultural values into things. When abstract things get concrete, they are not so easy to change anymore, so culture can become stale, and ultimately die. Interaction Design is the only hope for us to keep culture evolving.

So I gave a short talk about the importance of keeping a dynamic circle between vernacular and lingua franca languages. After the presentation I recorded the speech, so you can have the same content even if you haven’t been at the conference. It’s just 11 minutes.

I cannot agree with that. I believe that participation is key to overcome Brazilian society fundamental contradictions: social inequality, poor education, urban violence. Luckily, I’ve got a good example during my vacation: Underground Art Gallery, a project from Bruna Corso, Olho Wodzynski, and Thiago Syen developed in a Curitiba’s bus terminal.

Bellow the terminal, there is a underground passage to get from one bus lane to another. I have been robbed there 15 years ago. It’s a sinister place, or better, a non-place where nobody dares to stop. Here is how it looked before the project. The photo doesn’t show, but there is a lot of crude graffiti over the walls that are constantly being washed away by maintainers.

The project completely transformed the non-place. Now, we’ve got a very nice art gallery featuring drawings and poems made by passengers themselves.

Each board gather responses to a question made by the artists. The following one is a response for drawing your day-by-day routine. The passenger explicitly emphasized the bus stop as an important step in his  routine.

And that one presented alternative transport means that the passenger used too. Pirocóptero is a lolipop stick that flies. Very funny entry indeed!

One asked the difficult question of “what is art?”. Many interesting entries, but the graffited answer over the question (below the board) took my attention. The passenger went over the limits of participation but not so much as to damage the wall. The answer says: “the graffiti”.

The participation process started when artists mounted a desk inside the passenge. Passengers could sit down and make their contribution in a coloured block. Artists have been very smart in leaving some blank blocks in each board, allowing contributions after the official participation time.

Participation was key to the project’s success. Art galleries have been tried in many decaying places in Brazil but vandals destroyed them very quickly. Including potential vandals into the creative process made them proud and not hostile about the artwork. Plus, people that stopped there to check the artwork made the place safer. Thiefs are not so kind for robbing when there are people looking around.

I must say that the only problem with gallery was not giving the appropriate credits for the passengers. The credits plate mentions only artists and funder. Then, one passenger graffited over it with the word: “Livre” (Free).

If you want to know more about the project and can read Portuguese, I highly recommend cheking the project’s blog, which documented the whole creative process.

Companies, at the other hand, have been very successful on fulfilling these wishes by offering a multitude of brands. Design became instrumental for that mean by its capability of embedding symbolic relationships into things. Lifestyle, age, income, culture were crafted into product’s shape and form. Design has been so effective in that effort that, in some sense, stole the public expectation of novelty from Art.

Today, I see a tendency for Design to advance reification further than the symbolic level. Instead of pointing to ideas, design is increasingly pointing to actions. Thus, broad and diffuse concepts are leaving out space for specific and measurable aspects in design practice. Usability was one of the first aspects that gained attention, followed by emotional and social aspects.

User Experience Honeycomb, Peter Morville

Some people criticize this tendency because it slices up the user experience into manageable parts, fragmenting the gestalt and ultimately killing product aesthetics. I prefer to think that this just is a new kind of aesthetics: an aesthetics that conflates ethics by explicitly shaping human behavior. Such thing must be accountable, either to companies, to users and to public institutions, that’s why Design is getting more grounded onto objective, defined, measurable things.

• lack of proper tools to collaborate over design models with non-design experts
• economic and political costs for scheduling meetings
• over reliance on consensus to move design process forward

My research goal is to come up with collaborative tools that help overcoming these points. I’ll develop tools in the context of the projects that I’m already observing. I cannot define them precisely because I don’t know enough about the context and I expect to have the participation of other people involved into the project. But, because I’m being pressed to tell which kind of outcomes I expect to have from my supervisors, I sketched some rough ideas.

Why Participatory Design?

More often than not, facilities are built or retrofitted with the expectation of accommodating new organizational behaviors, but this change is not always straightforward. Important details can be overlooked by a top-down approach, resulting in work breakdown or poor patient experience. In order to include more perspectives over the change process, design teams organize meetings with peripheral stakeholders at different stages of the project, giving them opportunity to participate into design and decision-making.

Idea #1 Tangible means for collaborative building design

When people are collaborating in meetings, they use only words to express themselves. Visualizations are often used to make a point, but they are not changed in real time. Tangible manipulative models could help them create models together.

Idea #2 Representing the time dimension

Current building visualization techniques focus mainly on representing space properties, but buildings are built to hold events. There are recurring events that should impact directly space planning such as workflow, but because of a lack of visualization techniques to cross these information, some mismatch occurs. Current visualizations that deals with the time dimension are used only for evacuation plans. There might be potential interest on visualizations on the process that keep people inside.

Idea #3 : Asynchronous collaboration with distant stakeholders

Buildings are complex projects where multiple stakeholders must work together. Most of the time, they cooperate with each other by sharing documents. Collaboration happens once-in-a-while through meetings, but meetings are difficult to schedule and sometimes not productive for every partner. There are some online tools for collaboration, but they are not used so much. There are plenty of room for good CSCW tools on Construction Management.

As I said, these are rough sketches that I hope will turn into more feasible proposals!

The platform was designed as part of an ecosystem that will include, in the future, connection to crowdfunding websites, Fab Labs and prototyping tools. Currently, it’s already integrated to Faber-Ludens educational programs.

My role in the project was to conceptualize the ecosystem, manage the community and program the whole infra-structure, based on a customized version of Open Atrium.

In addition to hosting projects, the ecosystem includes a card set with Design Methods made to help planning meetings. Members of the team can organize the cards as a process, using their input/output info. Each card has a QRCode that points to a wiki page where the method is described in details.

I was particularly interested on how to express the time dimension, which is overlooked in current modeling tools.

My friend thought that the external HD was a big flash memory pen drive, because it behaved like one. The case didn’t provide enough safety for hard-disks and even the advertising encouraged incautious handling. I think that if users can see what’s inside, they would probably be more cautious.

By going to real use contexts, we were able to extend our analysis further than the app usability like, for instance, observing how users combined the use of the app with other media.

As I explained in the presentation, Design Livre draws from the cultural cannibalism concept developed by Brazilian modernist artists at the beginning of the XX century. At that time, Brazil was already politically independent, however under strong cultural influence from European countries. When trying to develop an authentic Brazilian identity to cultural production, modernists could only see the image of the pre-colonization indian.

It was Oswald de Andrade that gave a step forward defining Brazilian culture as a mix. The Cannibal Manifesto called for the appropriation of foreign concepts into Brazilian culture, by harsh adaptation to local context.

Andrade’s manifesto inspired artists from the late 60’s Tropicalia movement, mixing elements from the emergent global pop culture and native characteristics. One prominent artist from that movement, Gilberto Gil, became the Brazilian’s Minister of Culture in 2003 and started many programs to support cannibalism over digital media. Free Software, Creative Commons and Collaborative Media became widespread in Brazil then.

The popular practice of gambiarra (kludging) and jeitinho brasileiro (how brazilians call their loose way of solving problems) were resignified in face of hackerism and collaboration from the pervading global digital culture.

At the same time, the growth of national economy allowed many people from low-income communities to have access to the Internet, where they found opportunities to show up their cultural values, neglected by major media. Social networks boosted, specially Google’s Orkut, which Brazilians believe they had “conquered”.

Aiming to support the design of local technologies, Faber-Ludens Institute for Interaction Design was founded in 2007 without any institutional funding. Therefore, first activities were held basically on the Internet, where a website and a discussion list was opened.

Members of the discussion list organized themselves to translate basic texts on Interaction design because most brazilians don’t read English. A wiki was born out of that, including later information about methods, tools, books and movies that members wanted to share.

In partnership with a Colombian University, Faber-Ludens started to offer a graduate course on Interaction Design in Curitiba, South of Brazil. The curriculum was structured to offer a strong social background, emphasizing Interaction Design role in culture production. Each theoretical course was accompanied by an experimental design project. All assignments required students to publish their works on Faber-Ludens website, where non-students community members could comment. The same for teaching materials.

Non-student members reported learning by following published projects. Although projects were published under a Creative Commons License, some ideas were copied by non-members without giving any credit. Instead of trying to regulate that cannibal practice, Faber-Ludens stimulated even more its students to publish their projects, documenting the design process step-by-step. Faber-Ludens had the hard task of pioneering Interaction Design in Brazil, so we believed that spreading the practice was more important than being credited. The benefit for us would come later, when the whole area was stronger.

Of course we stimulated cannibalism among our students. One good example is Pulse, a bracelet that vibrates to help hearing impaired enjoy sound. Pulse is currently shortlisted in 2012 IxDA Awards.

PULSE: an assistive technology for hearing impaired from mpossel on Vimeo.

Apart from borrowing the aesthetics of sound equalizers and sport watches, the interaction itself was inspired by previous student project named Visual Ear, which featured a Lego Mindstorms puppet robot that moved according to audio stimuli.

Cannibalism avoid good ideas to die in non-fertile terrain. It was not until Apple “visited” the Xerox Parc labs that the Graphic User Interface have developed into a viable product. Apple profited not from the idea, but from the digestion of the idea, which came out in the form of the Macintosh. However, if Apple kept Macintosh in their labs like Xerox was doing, none of subsequent innovations developed from the GUI metaphor would be possible. Ideas must be free to profit from them.

We can already see the result of the Design Livre approach from Faber-Ludens. Interaction Design community in Brasil is growing very quickly. Since 2007, DesInterac mail list had grown to more than 1.100 participants. Many graduate courses had started in other Universities. Companies started to sell Interaction Design as a recognized service. Brazil even has a cannibalized version of the IxDA Interaction event: Interaction South America.

If you want to see cultural innovation from Interaction Design, keep a look on Brazil right now.

Design Thinking is usually presented as a set of general practices that could be useful to areas other than Design itself. Design practices are imported and adapted to current process, without considering much the situated design knowledge the organization already have. The following mind map from Tim Brown summarize the concepts introduced:

Visualizing what they know

At Faber-Ludens we believe that not everyone is a designer, but everyone do design eventually. Our Design Thinking approach is to let people be conscious about design knowledge they already have and collaborate with others who have different design knowledge to share.

Our students have developed a very nice method for kicking off Design Thinking workshops.

1. People are separate into groups according to their departments
2. They choose 5 among a set of 30 verbs that are commonly associated to design like planning, solving, improving, innovate, analyzing
3. Each chosen verb is written down in a post-it, followed by descriptions of the last situation the team used the verb
4. Post-its are arranged in a shared display and it’s discussed what is common and what’s is different about Design Thinking between the departments

This is what we got from Rede Globo post-production, engineering and creative departments:

Mapping activities

By the end of the discussion, we asked for activities that connected the departments. More often than not, conflicts arise in these connections and we wanted to discuss them. According to Activity Theory, contradiction is the source of innovation, so we wanted to heat things up.

Participants used Engeström Activity System as a template for mapping two connected activities: scenario set-up and studio engineering.

We didn’t asked them to look for contradictions at first, because that’s a difficult concept to understand. Contradictions are not simple problems that can be solved by technical solutions. Contradictions are historically accumulated tensions between social relationships, characterized by opposite forces that cannot be removed. The struggle between these opposite forces is what makes activity systems evolves, so they are neither good nor bad for activities.

The activity system was employed to situate them onto existing process and elicit their knowledge about them.

Problematizing

If we asked them to look for contradictions in the activity system, they would find problems instead, which is not the same concept. A problem, in design sense, is the identification of a shortcoming in a situation that can be overcome by changing one objective aspect of that situation, usually by introducing a new technology. The change is usually called a solution and that’s what is expected from designers to deliver.

It’s not strange that solving was the single word that all three departments chose during first exercise and none mentioned problematizing. I asked workshop participants why and they answered that problems were external to their work, either coming from the objective reality, like a machine breakdown, or from other departments, like a design task. They didn’t pay much effort on thinking about problems.

We wanted them to deliberately think about problems. When accepting the problem as a given, the solution can eventually not meet the requirements because problem was not well specified. Also, solutions can bring new problems.

We proposed the PSP game to generate problems and solutions at the connections between two mapped activities. The method asks for problems, then solutions, then problems of the solutions.

Our game’s goal was not to generate feasible solutions, which would require much more work on it. Our goal was to make participants reflect on the importance of problematization. I take the notion from Paulo Freire, the famous Brazilian educator who taught illiterate adults. He picked up what students knew about reality and challenged them to go further than common-sense.

Instead of giving them problems to solve, he helped students to create their own problems by asking questions about underlying assumptions. He wanted to make them perceive hidden contradictions in everyday situations and develop tactics to deal with them in a pro-active way. The contradictions his students found were usually related to their social status, being disrespected or underestimated, for instance. They could not solve these social issues, but they could learn how to deal with that.

Living with contradictions

As usual with the PSP game, we got some threads of recursive problems and solutions, like this one:

• Problem: studio setup time takes longer than expected
• Solution: enforce the plan
• Problem: too rigid
• Solution: increase timescale for studio setup
• Problem: recording would have not enough time
• Solution: increase studios space area

As we can see, none of above solutions are final. No imported best practices would give them final solutions, because they are tied to the limits of the situation. Donald Schön observed that designers, instead of developing their solutions by isolated insights, they engage into a conversation with the situation, trying different arrangements before deciding the best fit. When dealing with not yet reified social relationships, however, designers find it difficult to grasp the boundaries of the situation.

When discussing the problems and solutions they generated, Rede Globo employees realized that they don’t have clear work process but everything works like a charm because everyone knows what to do. Every worker has a very specialized task to do and no one dares to assume other’s responsibility. At the other hand, they improvise a lot for having the work done.

This was the first contradiction they found, which should not be “solved” because it’s both weakness and strength of the team. After that, other contradictions popped up from the situation, in a ripple effect. We’ve made a star diagram to visualize them:

Zone of Proximal Development

Vygotski observed that interaction with a a more capable adult helped children on solving problems. Adult interaction expanded the range of possible things to learn by connecting what the child know with that he/she could learn. He called that range of possibilities Zone of Proximal Development. Often, artifacts are used to mediate these interactions, like the abacus. The artifact is internalized until the child doesn’t need it anymore. He can count on his own, using an internal artifact he built for himself.

Inside an organization of adults, there is hardly anyone that could be considered as “more capable”. But, every adult have a different notion that could be shared and learnt by interacting with his peers. Interacting with the single purpose of sharing knowledge doesn’t work for everyone because not everyone can grasp the motive of such an activity. So, how can we expand the Zone of Proximal Development of an organization?

I believe Design Thinking has a very nice contribution to that: organizing people around projects. Projects creates the appropriate context for focused knowledge sharing. It creates a temporary power structure that is more horizontal, facilitating peer collaboration. The organization can test new ways of organizing people, new tools for working, new business models.

By the end of the workshop, we advised Rede Globo on two things:

1. Capture design knowledge that are dispersed across the organization and systematize that into practical tools that can be used during actual work practices
2. Create a lab for pilot projects that test these tools before disseminating them across the whole organization

Instead of devising a strategic plan for changing the organization culture to a Design Thinking mindset, Faber-Ludens helps organization to move from change management to portfolio management, as Dave Gray cleverly expressed in his diagrams.

The need for situated Design Thinking

There are many Design Thinking consultancy going around without any theoretical foundations. I presented here one possible framework for backing Design Thinking fostering activities. I don’t think it’s practitioners flaw not using theories. If you look at academic studies made about Design Thinking, you’ll will find mostly accounts of individual designer practice, discussion of abstract design process, cognitive models that doesn’t match the organizational change practitioners need to face. Academics often criticize practitioners for not having clear methodologies, but I think it’s a characteristic of the job not relying too much on generalizations.

I believe there is a great opportunity for situated accounts of Design Thinking. If you know anything like that, please drop a comment bellow.