Blog posts
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Some months ago, I joined Lee Moreau, Lesley-Ann Noel, and Alicia Cheng in the inaugural episodes of the Design As podcast (Apple/Spotify), connected to the Design Observer project. We discussed Design as Culture. The conversation was so rich and dense that we split it into two parts. Luckily, Design Observer published a transcript for those […] - Jun 1, 2024 -
Assembling collective bodies to take care of the commons
As part of the Participatory Design Conference 2022, I joined P.D. Commoners, a self-managed collective of researchers working at the boundaries of commoning and designing, to organize a workshop on Relationality, Commoning, and Designing. After the workshop, we recorded a podcast with Joanna Sad-Sulonen and Giacomo Poderi to summarize and share the workshop experience with […] - Jan 11, 2023 -
Humanity is not a (shopping) center you can design for
Donald Norman is about to release a book on Humanity-Centered Design. I don’t plan to buy or read it, but I can’t ignore it. As I previously wrote, shifting what is at the center of design does little to reconfigure the contradictions cultivated by centralization, which is a core spatial practice of patriarchy, capitalism, and […] - Oct 23, 2022 -
Breaking with oppressive citation patterns
Citation patterns are not natural, neutral, emergent, or involuntary. They reveal the collective biases of a scientific community. Women, Black, Indigenous, disabled, part-time researchers, and people from the Global South receive fewer citations for their works unless the pattern is actively counteracted. There are a few of these authors in most scientific communities because they […] - Oct 8, 2022 -
Design pedagogy, the body, and solidarity in designing commons
Podcast interview for the Commoning Design & Designing Commons show, an initiative from the Interest Group Commons and Commoning of the IT University of Copenhagen. Listen to the podcast on Anchor. Transcript Speaker Key – GP Giacomo Poderi; FA Frederick van Amstel; SM Sanna-Maria Marttila; JS Joanna Saad-Sulonen Speaker Text GP Okay, welcome to this first […] - Apr 12, 2022 -
CFP Design, Oppression, and Liberation
Special issue of Diseña #21 Guest editors: Frederick van Amstel | Federal University of Technology – Paraná Lesley-Ann Noel | North Carolina State University Rodrigo Gonzatto | Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná SUBMISSION DEADLINE: March 30 April 6, 2022 (extended deadline) Expected publication date: August 2022 Design research and practice are responsible for articulating and materializing structural oppression […] - Nov 15, 2021 -
Decolonizing whatever-centered design
Centralization is a spatial practice used by human collectives for thousands of years. It started in the archaic definition of village leaders and evolved to world empires, including their corollary transnational companies. Centralization promises to better organize society through the gathering of resources and information generated in a vast territory in a small space: the […] - Jan 19, 2021 -
What is a contradiction and why it is relevant to design research?
Design research is increasingly concerned with being part of change processes in everyday life, in communities, in organizations, and in large-scale sociotechnical systems. Despite the growing interest, the field is not prepared to deal with this topic. The predominant theories in design research were crafted to understand individuals interacting with products, or groups of people […] - Apr 21, 2020 -
Open Design was initially introduced as an analog to Open Source Software, a concept which explains why software source code should be part of an official product release. The analogy went by stating that electronic drawings and models be released together with physical products, in the hopes of enabling modifications or self-production through digital fabrication. […] - Apr 6, 2020 -
Design ethnography with activity theory
Design ethnography is a field study method which aims at uncovering user needs and innovation opportunities. Through this method, anthropologists can help understand the context, bringing up semantic, emotional, and social issues that may represent innovation opportunities. However, most design ethnographies are not carried out by trained anthropologists. Design ethnography is typically conducted by designers themselves, […] - Oct 28, 2016 -
I have developed for my Design Thinking course a comprehensive explanation on how design can be part of big transformations in society. Instead of making changes to society, as in the paradigm of “social impact”, I teach my students to discover transformations already in course, understand them, and support them. The concept of contradiction is key to my approach: a unite […] - Oct 28, 2016 -
In the first lecture of my Design Thinking course, I gave a historical perspective on the evolution of the design object. According to my thesis work, the object of design expanded in the last century from complex entities to emergent performances, such as experiences, interactions and business. The characteristics of this object are: It includes the user behavior, as […] - Sep 16, 2016 -
The Expansive Design thesis relies on a historical analysis method supported by an IBIS with graphical maps (Compendium). The graphical maps used for data collection and analysis are available online. Some parts of the maps are not included to preserve the identity of the participants and the organizations involved. Alternatively, you can download the research data [ZIP] and […] - Feb 15, 2016 -
Representing contradictions without trying to solve them
Design-oriented ethnography seeks to find opportunities for innovation in social activities. Disturbances, tensions, and conflicts are sometimes used to ground or justify these opportunities, as if they could be avoided by an innovation. Ethnographers know that social contradictions cannot be resolved by design since they depend on collective endeavors; however, they still need to provide […] - Nov 20, 2015 -
Expansive design is a concept initially defined by psychologist Yrjö Engeström which I developed further in my PhD thesis. It means expanding the design activity towards the use activity, or in other words, connecting them together. This connection is characterized by co-creation; instead of merely producing objects for users, designers co-create objects with the users. […] - Nov 20, 2015 -
The Conceal and Show Game (2015)
The way Facebook conceals or shows up messages in the news feed is a mystery to most users. Facebook gives the impression that if a user posts a status update, all of her friends receive it in the timeline, but that is not always true. The Edgerank algorithm decides what is shown in the timeline based on three variables: This abstract […] - Jul 31, 2015 -
The boundaries between humans and collective association of humans are one of the most dynamic resources for work and development. Nature generated physical affordances that hinder human movement, but humans barely ever accept them. Humans open pathways through jungles, build bridges across rivers, and fly over the ocean. Nevertheless, humans draw their own boundaries too […] - Jul 18, 2015 -
The homogenization of differences
The competition for exchange value has shaped the space of capitalist societies. In order to compete in the global market, the land, the cities, and the homes are becoming more alike across the world. People are trying to use space in similar ways due to the possibility of surviving from exchanges in the global market. This phenomenon […] - Jul 17, 2015 -
The collaboration for use value
The basic assumption of capitalism that companies make money from valuable products is being challenged by recent market changes. Products are no longer considered valuable only for sales’ performance. They must perform well after the sales, i.e. in use, otherwise sales may drop. The use value (a.k.a. value in use) corresponds to the product applications found […] - Jun 10, 2015 -
The competition for exchange value
Value is an expected outcome or the effective outcome of using an object. If the object is useful, the value should be higher, however, that is not the case in a capitalist economy. If many people possess the object and are willing to exchange it, the value is lower, no matter how useful the object […] - May 5, 2015 -
The spatialization of workflow
At the beginning of the industrial revolution, workspaces were scattered over factory plans in no rational order. They naturally emerged around stationary large products, machines, and tool sets. The rise of the assembly line brought a new strategy for factory space: the spatialization of the workflow, i.e. to ascribe tasks to certain spaces and to […] - Mar 25, 2015 -
The flexibilization of workspaces
The organizations interested in the co-creation of knowledge are making workspaces more flexible to enable temporary project-specific adaptations, casual encounters, and unplanned team work. However, the flexibilization of workspaces is pursued by organizations interested in the optimization of work processes too, with a different motivation: they want to shrink or grow the employee base at the […] - Mar 24, 2015 -
The optimization of work processes
Work has been a traditional human activity for millennia, evolving into the many directions that needs and curiosity brings about. Since the industrial revolution, though, work is being channeled towards one direction: maximizing the collective productivity. The first implication of this redirection is the split between the worker and the work process, which is then […] - Mar 22, 2015 -
Knowledge production in ancient Greece was the privilege of a few men. They had slaves of their own or they benefit indirectly from slave labor. By handling the basic activities of survival to slaves, they could concentrate on the higher activity of thinking. Already in Greece, there was a divide between those who possess knowledge […] - Mar 18, 2015 -
The alienation of design possibilities
The progressive contraction of design representations is synchronized with the alienation of design possibilities. Alienation means that some of the design possibilities are taken out of the design space and, therefore, never considered. These possibilities are put aside for being unacceptable, unthinkable, or unknown. This can happen by many reasons. In the socialization of the […] - Mar 16, 2015 -
The socialization of the design space
The expansion of the design object from materials to experiences is synchronized with the socialization of the design space. The design space can be understood in three ways: Saying that, I believe there is a strong link between the physical, the social and the mental, one feeding the other. In that sense, the design space […] - Mar 16, 2015 -
The contraction of design representations
In the last post, I described the expansion of the design object in the last centuries. This process is followed by another historical change in the opposite direction. Instead of expanding together with the object, the design representations are becoming smaller and more precise. The representations are being contracted in the hopes of corralling the […] - Mar 12, 2015 -
The expansion of the design object: from materials to experiences
The object of design was once easy to grasp. If we look at the first Bauhaus curriculum, we see the prominent role the building materials played in the designer’s formation. The aspiring designer was supposed to master these materials and tranform them into aesthetical compositions. At this time, the materials were the design object: concrete, […] - Mar 9, 2015 -
Reductionism and expansionism in design theory
In the readings of my PhD research, I came across the term reductionism a lot. This term is used to criticize or warn against the trap of analyzing social phenomena in a somewhat restricted way, with no clear definition of its own. After years of reading those uses, I got a tacit understanding of what […] - Feb 23, 2015 -
Prof. Pelle Ehn from Malmö University gave a Masterclass (45 hours) at the University of Twente about the latest advances in his research group from the 2nd of February to the 17th of April of 2015, as part of the initial activities of the UT DesignLab. This course was based on a book called Making Futures. Frederick assisted […] - Jan 19, 2015 -
Sketching an expansive design definition
While writing my thesis, I make visual and textual sketches. Most of the times, these sketches are replaced later by a well-thought text, typically without the pictures. The sketches are removed because they cannot withstand scientific criticism, but they might be useful to communicate to a broader audience. With that in mind, I’m publishing the […] - Jan 12, 2015 -
How to represent contradictions
Contradictions are social tensions that accumulate in the history of a society. When they reach the peak, conflicts come to the surface and society has to take action to change what is feeding the contradiction. In simple words, it is necessary to attack the root of the problem. There are design approaches that try to […] - Jan 5, 2015 -
Double stimulation experiments
For my PhD research, I had to do some experiments in design education. Design education is characterized by a learning-by-doing approach when the learner is pushed to take the lead of experimentation. This represents a problem for design educators who also want to test the research hypothesis within teaching activities since it is not easy […] - Dec 20, 2014 -
The World Usability Day was for the first time organized here at the University of Twente. In this event, I shared a practical output of my PhD research: a method to gather user data using low-tech materials. The method consists of collecting data through low-tech visualization and using the data to build high-tech visualizations, following […] - Nov 25, 2014 -
I read the reports from the Change by Design workshops in Brazil, Kenya and Ecuador and decide to join the next in the UK. These workshops are organized by Architecture Sans Frontières UK, a non-profit that aims to bring forth community engagement in architecture practice and teaching. The workshops are based on participatory design sessions […] - Sep 18, 2014 -
I’m developing a concept to understand how board games are employed to produce a social space among the players where conflict is enacted and worked out. Game spatiality is the sense of being in a space produced by playing a particular game. This sense is gradually developed through the bodily actions of players trying to […] - Aug 14, 2014 -
Participation and transdisciplinarity
Participation is an issue that crosses the boundaries of a single discipline. Its fundamental assumption is that people can make better decisions together than led by a single discipline. To approach participation in the renovation of healthcare facilities, it is important to consider disciplines concerned with the built environment – Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC), […] - May 15, 2014 -
I just made a pecha-kucha presentation about my PhD research in 6’40”. I try to explain what I mean with Expansive Design, the design approach I’m building up that takes advantage of social contradictions, instead of trying to solve them. Contradictions are social relationships that have a long history and cannot be solved by any […] - Mar 12, 2014
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Using smartboards to enable user participation in architecture
Last week, I demoed my Walking Paths application at 3TU Innovation & Technology conference using a Smartboard that allows touch and pen interaction. To explain how it enables user participation in architecture, I presented a model of the building where the conference was held and asked visitors to draw the path they took across the […] - Dec 9, 2013 -
The validity of user’s activity representation
Last week I attended a conference in Milan about visualizations in Architecture. The conference showcased many objective ways to represent the user perception of space before it is built: maps, simulations, calculations, scatterplots, etc. The represented perceptions ranged from confort to privacy. My own presentation raised the issue of validity of such representations, considering the […] - Oct 7, 2013 -
Movies related to ethnographic user research
I’m currently conducting interviews and observations for my PhD. As I go through them, some images come to my mind: the similar situations that I saw in particular movies. I compiled a list with the movies that I watched along the years related to the task of observing and interviewing users for design purposes. The […] - Jun 9, 2013 -
Making games to communicate research findings
After two years conducting field studies about the participation of healthcare professionals in construction projects, I decided to make a board game based on my findings. The target players are those same professionals I’m studying. The idea is that the construction and healthcare professionals can switch their roles for a while and understand their different […] - Apr 4, 2013 -
Visualizations for Participatory Design
I made a video showing my PhD research progress so far. You can see how I video-record my workshops, analyze them, and develop new visualization tools based on my interpretation of what could be improved. - Dec 12, 2012 -
How to knit spatial layout with workflow
After realizing that the use situation is more complicated than what they thought, the managers from the CMI project organized a second user workshop to check if the current floor plan fits the workflow of scanning patients in machines such as EGG, PET-MRI, MRI, and CT. In the last workshop, a lot of time was […] - Oct 2, 2012 -
Use and design: two points of view
I’m following the CMI-NEN project in my PhD, a healthcare facility that combines research, education, and care services in one place. The project is very innovative because it links medical image research to care demand. The concept is to drive research with the actual use of diagnosing technologies, instead of just exploring what is possible […] - Jul 13, 2012 -
Technology Appropriation Scale
During my Masters I stumbled upon the paper [PDF] from the Abaporu Project, a project that studied mobile technology in Brazil. Instead of a traditional adoption study based on the chart above, the authors decided to go from the other way around. They didn’t tried to track to what extent a specific (foreign) technology was […] - Jun 27, 2012 -
When Participatory Design makes sense
In the course of writing my PhD proposal to the disciplinary council of my faculty, I had to define which kind of project could be appropriate for doing Participatory Design research. Not every project can be participatory or profit from being participatory. There are specific situations where Participatory Design makes sense, but I couldn’t find […] - Jun 4, 2012 -
Spreading participation into the routine
Participatory Design usually happens in ritualized gathering where participants enact their political positions and build things together. The workshop creates an ephemeral horizontal power structure where people from the lowest level can work with medium an top level of the hierarchy. From what I observe so far in the Healthcare Construction Industry, where I conduct […] - Mar 1, 2012 -
Interaction Design as a Cultural Project
I’ve been very lucky to attend Interaction 12 in Dublin last week. Everything was so well organized and still with a human touch. The conference allowed a lot of networking between presentations. There was large corridors and rooms for side conversations, which for me are the best part of going to conferences. On the background […] - Feb 8, 2012 -
Public participation can revitalize decaying places
I’m currently on vacation in Brazil enjoying the time to think on how will I contribute to Brazilian society when I’ll be back from my PhD on Participatory Design in Netherlands. One thing that I often hear is that participation can only work in advanced democracies. It wouldn’t work in Brazil because people wouldn’t make […] - Jan 23, 2012 -
Why measuring design aesthetics?
The aestheticization of politics pioneered by fascist and populist governments is not working so effective as it was in the past. People don’t trust politicians neither the media anymore because, among other factors, they could not keep up with the diversification of identity wishes from the population. Companies, at the other hand, have been very […] - Dec 15, 2011 -
Enabling participation in healthcare construction
After conducting initial observations on two healthcare projects — a new medical image center and a hospital reallocation, I identified three shortcomings for Participatory Design in healthcare construction: 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 […] - Dec 2, 2011 -
Cannibalistic Interaction Design
Last week, I was in Italy for an academic forum about Latin perspectives on Design and I presented our view from Faber-Ludens Institute. I described the context where the Institute emerged and explained our Design Livre approach for project development. Previously, I used the translation Free Design, but from now on I’ll keep the original […] - Nov 9, 2011 -
Using Activity Theory to situate Design Thinking
During my last trip to Brazil, together with Andre Malheiro, I conducted a Design Thinking workshop at Rede Globo, the producer of the famous Brazilian soap operas. I’ve been experimenting using Activity Theory as a framework for Design Thinking in these kind of workshops for a while, but after this, I got an important insight: […] - Oct 31, 2011 -
Last week, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff signed a decree for starting the National Open Government Plan (Portuguese). The main objectives are: Increased availability of governmental activities information, including spending and performance Support for social participation in decision-making New technologies for managing and offering public services Increased public information transparency process and technologies Better accountability and […] - Sep 19, 2011 -
I’ve been in a Summerschool last week entitled Social Shaping of Innovation (PDF), organized by the SPIRE center in Southern Denmark University. The event gathered PhD students from many countries working with social aspects in Innovation Management, Design and Engineering. For me, it was an intense and positive experience. I’ve met a lot of people […] - Aug 26, 2011 -
Issue-Based Information System (IBIS)
Since I started doing my PhD Research, I learnt a lot of new concepts, but I don’t like to write down everything that I find interesting during my research. I find it too boring. I prefer to rely on my memory filter; if it’s relevant, I’ll remember when needed. But, gosh, that’s not always the […] - Aug 12, 2011 -
The next step for social networks: Cycles
Social networking websites offer value by mapping social relationships. As with any map, relationships are represented in a simplified way, a kind of metaphor. First was the connection, now we have the circle, and what I believe to be the next step is the cycle. These relationships are evolving as long as technology companies figure […] - Aug 4, 2011 -
Interaction Design as Mediation
During my Master’s research, I looked for alternative views on Interaction Design that went further than User Interface Design. Most definitions say that the former is broader than the latter, but they didn’t provide clear objects to work with. David Malouf did a good job of extending Dan Saffer’s elements, but his foundations look still […] - Jul 26, 2011 -
The uses of the human body in CAD
Yesterday I was in Germany for a collaborative meeting with some researchers working with computing and spation reasoning. I presented a poster outlining the challenges of my PhD research. Schloss Etelsen, the venue, couldn’t be better for reflecting about space abstract modeling. Look at the site: Coincidence or not, the 19th century castle had been […] - Jul 1, 2011 -
Co-creation tools for Architecture
Today I found a very nice example of what I’m researching in my PhD program. Liz Sanders is a well know practitioner that have written mainly about using expressive tools for users to collaborate in design process. Her papers always have some colorful pictures like that: Today I discovered through a record talk she gave […] - Jun 28, 2011 -
Open Design and weapons of mass destruction
Yesterday I went to the Open Design Now book launch in Amsterdam. People were so excited with the possibilities of openness, that few mentioned potential drawbacks of it. The only potential drawback discussed there was about the possibilities of not making money from it. It’s true that Open Design doesn’t have clear business models right […] - Jun 9, 2011 -
Both Design Thinking business discourse and research relies heavily on the problem-solution dichotomy for explaining what design is. The emphasis is given to go beyond the common-sense notion of design as form shaping and open new spaces for design in science and business. The aesthetics of form shaping is not entirely rejected in this turn, but reduced to an aspect […] - May 13, 2011 -
Open Design and Free Design are not the same
Design is a messy word with many different meanings. When people wants to stay focused on a practical matter, they add a noun to it: Graphic Design, Furniture Design. When they want to qualify Design, for instance, they use an adjective: Industrial Design, Good Design. It´s a simple statement that an adjective can change the […] - May 10, 2011 -
Designer’s role in a Free Design world
At the beginning of the year, I gave a talk with my friend Gonçalo Ferraz at a Design student conference about the future role of the professional designer. We envisioned a big leap in design practice, moving from designing products to designing processes. Going further than Service Design and Co-design approaches, we expect that people […] - May 2, 2011 -
Tools for concrete collaboration
The traditional free meeting model for participation where supposedly every stakeholder can talk about their concerns often doesn’t satisfy the participants, for many reasons. The consensus is built up on participant’s fatigue; when one give up discussing a project stake not because she start to agree, but because she’s too tired to discuss it. This […] - Apr 29, 2011 -
First draft for my PhD Research
Two weeks ago I moved from Curitiba, Brazil, to Enschede, Netherlands, in order to conduct a PhD Research at the University of Twente. I’m now working at the Construction Management & Engineering department. It’s a whole new experience for me: a new country, a new language, and a new research area, of course. Our department […] - Apr 27, 2011 -
Free Design at Faber-Ludens Institute
Free Software communities have developed very efficient methods and tools to share programming code, however, their user interfaces are often difficult to use for people that are aside from this process. Nobody seems to know how to include Interaction Design in Free Software projects, since their development dynamics are very different. Interaction Design on […] - Feb 14, 2011 -
Interaction (Design) is a complex phenomenon
A common reference for defining Interaction Design are Bill Verplank’s drawings, one of the creators of the noun. Bill defines Interaction Design as a question threefolded: How do you do? What sort of ways do you affect the world: poke it, manipulate it, sit on it? How do you feel? What do you sense of […] - Oct 28, 2010 -
Toy Hack for opening the cultural black box
Last saturday, I organized a Toy Hack workshop at the brazilian national design students meetup with the purpose of invinting young designers to open the black box of electronic products, mix it’s components and see what happens. The new frankentoys created by the participants are shown in this video (portuguese): Industrial Designers are commonly not […] - Jul 20, 2010 -
Communal virtualities and complicated pleasures
At the beginning of the Internet, we spoke a lot about virtual communities. We believed that we could create new worlds without borders and conflicts, driven by the information flow and organized by explicit interaction rules. The more the network becomes popular, the more the cyber-utopia gets sallow. What people wants is not information but […] - Jul 9, 2010 -
Trends, cliches and cultural reproduction in Design
Design is sometimes used as synonymous with innovation, creativity, innovation, cutting edge. But how much design is able to bring the new? The society fears and rejects movements that propose radical changes, such as the Landless Movement, hackerism and Punk, but deify changes proposed by design because this changes do not threaten the status quo, […] - Jul 9, 2010 -
Critical games to reflect on violence
Often, videogames are considered the cause of inadequate violent acts. Traditional media prefer to find an easy culprit instead of discussing the broader problem: the origins of urban violence. The gamer that enacts an inadequate violent act would do it by the influence of videogames. To avoid this behavior, the gamer should not be exposed […] - Jul 7, 2010 -
In my Interaction Design Foundations course, I explain to students that tangible interfaces are becoming widespread because they explore the human body as an input device. This makes the interaction more sociable and affective. In one class, I brought a Dance Dance Revolution pad for our students to experiment with and they took it to […] - Jul 7, 2010
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Customer necessity is the mother of invention
The first thing to do when starting a project is defining its goals. Sometimes, the goal can be broken down in sub-goals, but one of them must prevail and, generally, this goal accounts for company needs, not customer needs. For example, the overused goal “increase customer loyalty” emerges from the company need of retaining current […] - Jul 7, 2010 -
After blogging for 6 years in portuguese on Usabilidoido, now I start to talk with the international community. - Jul 7, 2010