Before Ezio Manzini was the sustainable design guy, he was the materials guy. His 1989 book The Material of Invention captures the beginning of materials era that we now take for granted. Continue reading
What do designers know? In What Designers Know, Brian Lawson’s 2007 follow up to “How Designers Think”, he claims they use language a lot more than we give them credit for.
Nigel Cross’s Designerly Ways of Knowing is one of those books that is quoted more than read. Myself included. This is ironic because, like Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension, it is in reality a remarkably slim and easy to read paper-meets-book. Continue reading
What with all the attention on user-centred design and the like, it seems at times that researchers have forgotten about companies that just design (apart from the obvious Apple cliché). Vergati was part of a research group that investigated design companies in Italy, and came up with conclusions that what he calls ‘design-driven innovation’ is tied the meanings created and understood within a network of players, and that they can be compared to the innovations happening in the technology world.
“Methodology refers to more than a simple set of methods; rather it refers to the rationale and the philosophical assumptions that underlie a particular study, it consists of an analysis of the principles of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline or within a particular study. Research methods, according to Bernard (2000) can be discussed at three different levels: epistemology, strategy and execution. The first level, epistemology, relates to the study of the nature of knowledge, particularly its foundations, scope and validity. One of the founding considerations of any epistemological standpoint is an associated ontological stance and questions raised regarding either field are highly inter-related. The second level refers to strategic choices; which methods or structure of methods would be best suited to the research topic, ensure rigour, validity and consistency and how these methods and organising structures might relate to anticipated outcomes. The third level is used to describe the execution of particular methods and refers to the specific techniques being employed. Decisions at all three levels will influence the quality and significance of the research outcome.”Bernard, H.R.
—–
Bernard, H.R. (2000) Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
One of the key papers that I keep coming back to is Jeffery Bardzell’s work on interaction criticism (most recently discussed in his 2011 Interacting With Computers paper Interaction Criticism: An Introduction to the Practice). His background is in the humanities, so (along with doing a lot of cool studies on the edges of HCI), he is able to bring a understanding of people to HCI that’s also relevant more generally in design (he notes that notes that current work on HCI aesthetics pits it against mainstream aesthetics, when in fact they might feed each other.)
Wine and Conversation
While the title of the book makes it sound like a breezy coffee-table book, Wine and Conversation by Adrienne Lehrer is in fact an honest-to-goodness linguistic study of the language of wine critique. Below are my notes from the book. Continue reading