Human Centered Design & Engineering Blog

Please join the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) in Winter Quarter for a 10-week seminar on current topics in the HCDE field by industry experts. Each 40-minute talk will be followed by a Q&A session. Members of the UW community and the public are welcome. More information about the series is available online at hcde.uw.edu/521.

Title: Contestational Design: Sociotechnical innovation by social movements and advocacy organizations
Date: March 9, 2012
Speaker: Tad Hirsch

When: Fridays, 12:30-1:20 PM
Where: Loew Hall, Room 206, UW Seattle campus

Recent events like the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement have again placed relationships between technology and collective action at the forefront of contemporary discourse. Although timely, the recognition that activists are early and innovative users of communications technology is not new. Social movements and advocacy organizations have long been recognized as hotbeds of innovation. The social movement scholar Alberto Melucci famously called them “laboratories” where participants experiment with social organization, representation, and democratic processes.

Less well-understood are the means through with this innovation comes about. The popular press tends to assume a sort of technological determinism in which “heroic” technologies give rise to new forms of collective action (for example, “The Twitter Revolution”). Conversely, social movement scholarship often describes a process of “appropriation” in which activists creatively repurpose technologies developed by the commercial sector for explicitly social ends.

In this talk, I present a third perspective in which social movements and advocacy organizations participate in sociotechnical innovation involving the simultaneous design of tactics, technologies, and organizational form. Drawing on over a decade’s experience working with social movements and advocacy organizations, I will describe activists as engaging in contestational design, which I describe as a unique form of design practice that responds to the particular context in which activism occurs, and is informed by an explicit recognition of the values and ideological commitments that underpin most advocacy work.

Through several case studies, I will describe the principles and activities that shape contestational design practice, and will discuss relationships between contestational design and commercial design. Finally, I will suggest ways that a contestational design perspective challenges and informs mainstream design practice.
Continue reading ‘Contestational Design: Sociotechnical innovation by social movements and advocacy organizations (3/9)’

Join the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) on Friday, February 24, for a guest lecture by Lora Oehlberg.

Title: “Towards Better Design Teams: Designers’ Information Sharing Behavior and Tool Use”
Speaker: Lora Oehlberg, PhD Candidate, University of California, Berkeley
Date: Friday, February 24, 2012
Time: 10:30-11:30 AM
Location: Electrical Engineering Building, Room 403, UW Seattle campus

Abstract
Developing innovative products and services benefits from collaboration within multidisciplinary design teams. Design teams gather and generate large quantities of information, including user research, information about competing products and applicable technologies, and new design ideas; however, teams often struggle to synthesize this diverse design information. Collaboration can break down if they cannot form a shared understanding of the design problem. My work examines current design practices to construct theoretical models of the design process and to develop new tools to help design teams create, communicate, and collaborate.

In this talk, I will explore how individual information tools are used to support collaborative design processes, and suggest forms for future tools. I will present a series of qualitative research studies, including interviews of individual designers and observations of face-to-face team meetings, that characterize how design teams operate in practice. These studies informed a series of conceptual frameworks that describe information sharing throughout individual and collaborative design tasks. I will also describe the development of Dazzle, an information sharing tool for face-to-face design teams that allows teammates to share, log, and annotate their shared design resources. Finally, I will explore the implications for future design tools, and discuss how we can improve creative practice by strengthening collaborative discussion and and shared understanding.

About the speaker
Lora Oehlberg is a PhD Candidate in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on design theory and methodology, and frequently extends into human-computer interaction and engineering design education. She has worked in product design and development at Apple Inc., Squid Labs, and Autodesk. She has been recognized for her teaching at UC Berkeley with an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award (2009) and a Teaching Effectiveness Award (2010). She is a member of the Berkeley Institute of Design and a former editor-in-chief of Ambidextrous Magazine. She has an MS from UC Berkeley and a BS from Stanford University in Mechanical Engineering.