I am back full-time at K3 / Malmö University, still as a PhD scholar, and also as a coordinator and teacher at the Interaction Design 2-year European master. It is exciting with students from around the world; with collaborations between researchers, teachers, students and other stakeholders; and with the new challenges of coordinating this program I have been teaching at for several years. For more info on this, please check the following more formal and informal sites:

Have a great summer…. Smiles Mette

- Many of the issues addressed there is further explored in my coming thesis.

Comments very welcome!!!

It might seem logical, but only recently I really realized how what we learn as designers in many ways oppose to this – in very material ways! Originally trained as an industrial designer, like many others, I was taught to do (user) research, come up with ideas, visualize concepts and detail proposals, and present or ‘sell’ these to teachers or clients. They are very valuable competences in interdisciplinary collaborations, yet, when really aiming for a co-design practice, who are to make the proposals?!

Analyzing different situations from the projects I have been engaged in, the character and openness of the materials available in co-design situations for example during workshops clearly matters.

In one example from the project PalCom, some of us in the roles of designers had pre-designed different concepts made somewhat concrete with quite rough but hard-foam mock-ups and also with very detailed written and illustrated story-board scenarios – together illustrating our proposals for future practices in this case at a hand surgery rehabilitation ward at a hospital. We brought the mock-ups and scenarios as inputs or focus points for a collaborative workshop with staff and other research colleagues; however, even though we hoped and intended for this to be an exploratory collaboration, this did not really happen.

Of course, among personal, project political, etc reasons, this also depend on how the organizers introduce the intended engagement; yet, the materials made it difficult to get the exploration going. Studying the engaged materials, even though something else was said in words, (indirectly) rather than inviting for a situation of exploratory co-designing, with these models we framed the situation more as a situation of presenting/selling and giving (critical) feedback… Is this a quite general relationship that pre-designed proposals mainly invite for (critical) feedback rather than co-designing?

>>> This is one of the examples and issues discussed further in my coming thesis.

These considerations are for example sparked by working more and more with service thinking and transformation design approaches, and specifically inspired by stories by Sune Kjems from Via Design in Copenhagen. In a couple of talks very personally he has shared his experiences of being a designer in a service design project about the psychological environment in prisons both for inmates and employees. His journey from viewing himself as being someone doing the proposals to being someone – often together with others – facilitating and provoking a process where, in that case inmates and employees, collaboratively developed the proposals by themselves. Read more about their work here: via.design.dk In many ways this calls for different (design) competence like asking naïve questions, leaving your sales-pitching at home and instead of designing proposals designing the formats and staging for others to also be ‘creative’ and engage in co-designing… .

Time is up…Time for thesis-work. Smiles Mette

My posts have gotten longer and longer, and some of my previous writings here do feed into my PhD thesis, but the length also keeps me from adding new posts, so I try another strategy…

about 10 minutes writing, 5 minutes review and then upload.

It’s worth a try….  (The following posts about Mindlab and Bo Westerlund’s work were made this way)

Smiles Mette

On Wednesday November 11^th 2009 I attended an inspiring afternoon co-organized with the Danish Design Association (DDA) about “Can design transform the public service?” 

>One of the interesting insights I brought from there is the growing acknowledgement in the design field that designers does not always have to be the “creative”; but that their job, especially when engaged in transforming public services, is to engage the people involved in providing and using the services, to collaboratively be creative about how their future could be different over time.

 - Interesting…and lots of respect for them aiming to help build bridges for example between designers and the political system.

Read more about Mindlab’s work here: http://www.mind-lab.dk/

 Have a good day!   Smiles Mette

-          This is of course an interesting point of view in relation to my explorations of roles of materials in co-designing, and to me it clearly makes sense not to speak about ‘representations’ when dealing with possible new futures…

Focus on aims rather than goals when exploring your design space in the fuzzy front end of innovation projects, is another of his quite practical arguments. As the title of his thesis indicates, “Design Space Exploration” is his main issue. From his many experiences he has found that in the projects where they too quickly set the goals of what to deliver, the motivation to really explore the design space for the purpose of discovering new grounds and insights were not as strong as in the projects where they initially focused on setting the aims or intensions of the project.

-          Another interesting point supporting my way of working during my PhD project. From my training as an architect, instead of ‘design space’ I use the term ‘program’, but the point is the same to set a framing to work within, which sets some constraints, but which at the same time is flexible and open enough to be explored.

These different insights were some of the points highlighted by Liz Sanders, who was the main opponent during the ceremonial ritual, when Bo Westerlund defended his PhD thesis on Friday November 6^th 2009 at KTH in Stockholm. Bo Westerlund is trained as an industrial designer, has worked as a design researcher for many years, and is already assigned Professor at Kalmar University.

The thesis can be downloaded here: http://www.bowesterlund.se/thesis.html

 Have a nice day.  Smiles Mette

What is happening in my world of working….? I am sitting on my butt reading, writing and making that thesis…

In the office at the Danish Designschool I am surrounded by a colleague, Trine, one of my tutors, Thomas, and lots of piles and papers and books and illustrations and things – all together what I phrase “materials” – and believe me, I have my order in the mess…

In the front, piles of books and articles are carefully organized in various theoretical perspectives, corresponding with perspectives used in the thesis. Underneath the table I keep boxes of documentary “materials” from most of the many co-design situations and workshops I have been engaged in – “materials” waiting to be brought to life again in my analysis of the empirical examples included throughout the thesis.

And to dig into some more detail… some materials are parts of structuring the contents of the thesis. On the wall on my left, with sticky glue I have attached various hand- and computer-sketched illustrations of previous versions of visually organizing the contents. For example inspired by Otto von Busch’s thesis FASHIONable from 2008, I made attempts of making a ‘Map of Contents’ shifting between more practice-based and more theory-based chapters. However, I realized, they were more driven by what I had done and what I was planning to do, than by the claims I am planning to make in the thesis.

It is difficult to structure the argument of a book – at least when you are originally trained as a designer like I am, and not as a person mainly writing. Yet, I found a way. Together with a written quite traditional Table of Contents, the continuously changing map of contents on the large board behind me is my current way of structuring the thesis.

And how has that come to be? Throughout the project I have been giving presentations on my project, and for each presentation the number of slides in the end claiming something like below have increased:

‘Viewing design materials as integrated actors in the organisation…matters’

‘The changes between Materials and Acting with Materials…matters’

‘The amount, character and details of materials…matters’

‘The exemplary attitude particularly of project managers…matters’

‘The sequence and number of situations (Scenes/Acts) during a workshop…matters’

‘The interplay between framings, formats and design materials in every specific co-design situation…matters’ etc…

To make the statements concrete these slides also included one or two underlying images from some of my examples of the specific co-design situations, I have been engaged in. As described in The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing (Fourth edition, p. 400-405), I got inspired by philosopher Stephen Toulmin’s way of viewing and structuring arguments, and I realized that these slides were capturing different claims I wanted – and in the thesis still want – to make about Material Matters in Co-designing.

Yet, it was still challenging to organize and prioritize the claims and the reasons and grounds behind them. Before a tutoring meeting I created a large series of slides, printed and cut those out in miniatures. I also printed and cut out a large collection of additional small 5x5cm images representing the many different extra empirical examples of co-design situations which I have been engaged in, and which potentially could be included in the thesis. During the tutoring meeting in my tutor’s nice garden house, on top of a large piece of paper, together with these different visual claim and example cards and other cards for writing notes, references and titles, the structure emerged.

- A few notes are added or changed almost every day, so it is nice to continuously have my overview of contents visually present.

Time to get back to writing and making that thesis…. Have a nice day. Smiles Mette