Thinking Clearly
Between the Everyday and the Everything: Designing as a Praxis of Community Flow View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Peter Martin
In Politics of the Everyday, Ezio Manzini, refers to our increasingly common condition of “connected solitude” in which we live in loose social networks and collections of people organized around individualistic ideas and neoliberal economies. Although many past community structures reinforced colonial and inequitable societies, simply transcending these with individuals empowered with technologies for having a voice and networks seems not to provide us with substantial formative agency for community. The paradox of “connected solitude” centers on the critical issue of the interstitials among the individuals, institutions, environments, and occupations of daily living. Here we find dysfunctional connections between everyday activities and the whole of society leaving us with little knowing of how to act beyond the consumer pathways defined by designed products and services. There is a dearth of method, energy, and space to participate in a community of reciprocal living. Our economic, governance, and social structures and processes resist alternatives and leave room for design initiative to either reinforce them or simply provide critique of our living in gathering crisis. Inspired by perspectives of ontological design theory this paper offers a framework of interrelated functions, processes, and flows to serve as a point of departure in constructing alternative practices of designing as a praxis of community flow. The paper illustrates the application of this framework with imagined scenarios based upon existing organizational and social innovation initiatives. This consideration of design is summarized into a set of formative principles of how design practice can activate the interstitials among us.
Transdisciplinary Projects for a Design Thinking Mindset: The Impact on Students in the Creative Disciplines
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Clarice Sim, Mark Lu
This paper documents our experience with transdisciplinary project-based modules and their impact on students’ mindsets. In our institute, a new creative school in 2020 merged eight creative disciplines (e.g., animation, games, music, marketing communications) into one common diploma. After going into their respective specialisations, students take two project-based modules in year two and three where they work on client projects in groups consisting of students from different creative disciplines. A design-led creative process is used to facilitate cross-learning, deepening and integration of their skills. The project-based modules were designed to cultivate a design thinking mindset in students. We conducted a longitudinal study that tracked the same cohort of students across two years. Thirteen dimensions of the design thinking mindset (Dosi et. al, 2018) were identified to be important for creative students. Students answered a survey at three points: i. before their year two project module, ii. after the year two module, and, iii. after the year three project module. The survey findings revealed that students developed in their design thinking mindset in the year two module, especially in the dimensions of being comfortable with ambiguity, embracing risk, and mindfulness of the process. The growth in their mindsets plateaued in year three, suggesting that one module is sufficient to help students develop the appropriate design thinking mindsets. Students’ qualitative feedback further highlighted how beneficial it was to work with students from different specializations. Our experience with transdisciplinary project-based modules in a common creative diploma would be useful to other design educators.
Addressing Technology's Unintentional Consequences: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Scott Dunay
The product design process focuses on features that engage and retain people (users) whose needs are at the heart of the design initiative. The workflow includes precise budgets, schedules, and dedicated design teams to engineer requirements. The design process aims to combine business and user objectives that drive the workflow to a user-centric product. This enthusiasm for featurism inevitably nudges designers to develop superfluous functions for users' prescribed behaviors. The drive to create an abundance of functions is to have a competitive advantage; instead, it furthers technological misuse, abuse, and subversion. A product’s function can exceed utility, efficiency, and optimization into unintended use and exploitation of its intention. The function can be dynamic and dependent on social contexts. This article provides a potential solution to technological misuse by applying Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as a paradigm for developing products and services. A translation of Maslow's Hierarchy in product design called the Design Hierarchy of Needs centers on progressive, creative enhancements. The framework in this paper is a new integration of a needs model that prioritizes people's well-being. The new structure will better predict a product's diverse usage based on human capabilities. The rearrangement of Maslow's Hierarchy may be necessary to address the Hierarchy's universal generalizations that all people are the same. Three case studies are reviewed to illustrate how Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs impacts the unintended consequences of technology: Airtag's coercive control implications, the long scroll's replacement of the next button, and Instagram’s Face Filters.
