In innovation work that spans various professional contexts, there is an overreliance upon verbal explanations and one-way presentations, as opposed to demonstrating, trying and performing. Organizing project teams across organizations and professional competencies relies upon creating active collaborative activities that allow participants to both move forward with the project, while reflecting upon how they work together. Innovation work involves not only discovering what could be possible, but also bringing novel solutions into practice, and driving the business to get them there. This contribution seeks to explore how staged role-play activities can raise practice-specific issues. The authors argue that by staging prospective project trajectories, especially at the outset of a project, the partner team members have the opportunity to orient their future actions according to potential desired and undesired futures.

Within user-centred design and topics such as persuasive design, pleasurable products, and design for sustainable behaviour, there is a danger of over-determining, pacifying or reducing people’s diversity. Taking the case of sustainable food, we have looked into the social aspects of cooking at home, in specific related to the type of food that is purchased. This paper describes what it means for people to make more sustainable choices in food shopping and how that can be mediated while taking different ‘food values’ that household members have into account. In a design experiment, we developed a service for selecting daily dinner meals while supporting choices of sustainable food which reported on environmental impact, health and nutrition values, and purchase data. Through visualizations of alternative food choices, the experiment provided a space for households to negotiate food values, while opening up possibilities for changing cooking practices.

In our research, we have been expanding our conceptual and methodological frames of reference as designers, in order to explore the complexity of factors involved in environmental sustainability and the consequent challenges posed for design research. In this paper, we discuss some of these issues in user-centered and sustainable design, drawing out and developing relations to concepts from other fields of study, such as the sociology of consumption and material culture. In order to better understand the role that (sustainable) design products might play within people’s everyday lives and lifestyles, we interpret and discuss notions of ‘socio-cultural practices’ of consumption and frame an approach to studying people’s ‘ways of doing’ with artifacts. We point to two examples from our previous research on designing for energy awareness and for sustainable bathing practices. A current study is presented in depth, in which families and singles, resident in The Netherlands but originating from different countries, have been observed and interviewed during preparation of a meal, eating and clearing up afterwards. Through studying and reflecting on the different ‘ways of doing’ cooking, we gained insights into how cooking and a range of associated practices and artifacts are deeply embedded in traditions, meanings and aspirations. Issues of environmental consumption, such as water, energy and waste, are at stake in such design research but, as we argue, so is attention and sensitivity to how these are interwoven in meaningful socio-cultural practices. The setup and findings are presented, as a point of departure for raising conceptual and methodological questions to be developed in future work.

In the project Sonic City, we have developed a system that enables users to create electronic music in real time by walking through and interacting with the urban environment. We explore the use of public space and everyday behaviours for creative purposes, in particular the city as an interface and mobility as an interaction model for electronic music making. A multi-disciplinary design process resulted in the implementation of a wearable, context-aware prototype. The system produces music by retrieving information about context and user action and mapping it to real-time processing of urban sounds. Potentials, constraints, and implications of this type of music creation are discussed.

Sustainablility poses profound challenges to society – and to the architecture and design disciplines. Design has conventionally been applied to expand the market for things that (over)consume material and natural resources. For those that consume design – that is, for all of us – environmental sustainability requires us to question what we produce and consume as a society, and how we impact others and future generations. For those of us that are designers – and often seen as part of the problem within discussions of sustainable development – we need to query what and how we design. This was the question at stake nearly half a century ago for a number of movements within design. Various names for such movements, such as ‘Anti-Design’, ‘Non-Plan’ and ‘Radical Design’ indicate a critique of design, planning and architecture. Radical designers mounted a critique of their own design discipline and of a societal status quo. However, rather than debate articles or academic analyses, their critique took the form of design. The contemporary challenges of sustainable development require just such criticality. Mainstream approaches, predominately based on cleaning up production processes and incentivizing ‘green’ consumption, help to mitigate the negative environmental effects of behaviors entrenched in industrialized Western societies. However, besides incremental improvements to our lives in these societies – and looking ahead to the next 50 years – we need to be able to relate to others, alternatives and futures that may be radically different than us, here and now. Today, a multitude of socially and politically-engaged designers are taking on such issues, rapidly growing beyond a minority within architectural and design disciplines – and the questions raised are relevant to the 99% of society. As in Radical Design, criticality does not have to end in polemics, in utopias or dystopias, but in giving form to critical questions: Which – or who’s – interests should be represented in design and society? Who benefits – and who profits? What might be alternatives and futures? Who designs these futures, for whom?

Comment articuler une pensée critique avec les pratiques du design? Comment, à partir de pratiques critiques, forger des alternatives présentes et futures pour les métiers du design? Dans cet article, j'évoquerai quelques aspects propres aux pratiques critiques du design. Je rapellerai brièvement comment sont explorés idéaux et alternatives dans les catégories du ‘design-concept’, du ‘design conceptuel’ et du ‘design critique’. Étroitement liées aux idées du design, ces pratiques éclairent la façon dont les questionnements intellectuels et idéologiques peuvent se construire de l’intérieur au lieu d’être prescrits de l’extérieur. Ceci témoigne d’une évolution importante dans les rapports entre théorie et pratique du design: la critique ne doit pas simplement s’effectuer à côté ou en dehors, elle doit être incorporée aux pratiques et aux formes du design. Cette évolution se manifeste égalment dans la sphère universitaire, où se multiplient les approches d’une recherche sur le design fondée sur la pratique. J’illustrerai quelques-unes de ces approches grâce à des exemples tirés de Switch!, un programme de recherche qui fut mené en Suède a l’Interactive Institute. Suivra un commentaire portant sur les formes à donner à ces pratiques critiques, ainsi que sur les raisons pour lesquelles elles sont appelées à jouer un rôle majeur vis-à-vis d’une discipline en mutation. (The article is written in French, abstract in English: How may criticality take form in relation to design practices? How may critical practices articulate alternatives or futures for the design profession? In this article, I discuss some aspects of critical practices of design. I briefly trace how ideals and alternatives are explored within genres of ‘concept’, ‘conceptual’ or ‘critical’ design. Engaging with the ideas expressed through design practice, such practices illustrate how intellectual and ideological issues might be constructed from within, rather than prescribed from outside. This represents an important shift in relations between theory and practice in design – criticism is not something merely to be done apart from and outside of design but is incorporated within design practices and forms. This shift is also reflected in academia, in which practice-based approaches to design research are expanding. To illustrate some approaches, I present examples from Switch!, a practice-based design research program at the Interactive Institute in Sweden. This anchors a discussion of how critical practices may take form today, and how, or why, they have important role for a discipline in transition.)

As technology pervades our everyday life and material culture, new possibilities and problematics are raised for design. Attention in contemporary design discourse is shifting ‘beyond the object’, to the qualities of processes and experiences. The boxes and screens typically the ‘object’ of interaction and interface design are miniaturizing, even disappearing, as computation is integrated into familiar materials and ordinary objects. This opens possibilities – for example, as computer and materials science converge with fashion and architecture in smart textiles and intelligent environments – even as it turns us back, in new ways, to traditional design disciplines and practices. In this context, design is not only about the spatial or physical form of objects, but the form of interactions that take place – and occupy time – in people’s relations with and through computational and interactive objects. As argued in this thesis, a central, and particular, concern of interaction design must therefore be the ‘temporal form’ of such objects and the ‘form of interaction’ as they are used over time. Furthermore, increasingly pervasive technology means that the temporality of form and interaction is implicated in more widespread changes to the material conditions of design and of society. Challenging conventions – of ‘formalism’ and ‘functionalism’, ‘good’ and ‘total’ design – temporal concerns and implications require new ways of thinking about and working with the materiality, users, and effects of design. Located at an intersection between emerging technologies and design traditions, interaction design is approached in Occupying Time through diverse disciplinary frames and scales of consideration. If focus in interaction design is typically on proximate ‘Use’, here, a discussion of ‘Materials’ scales down to reconsider the more basic spatial and temporal composition of form, and ‘Change’ scales up to examine large-scale and long-term effects. To anchor these themes in established discourse and practice, architecture is a primary frame of reference throughout. Accounts of ‘event’, ‘vernacular’, and ‘non-design’, and concepts of ‘becoming’, ‘in the making’, and ‘futurity’, as treated in architecture, extend a theoretical and practical basis for approaching time in (interaction) design discourse. Implications for practice also emerge and are discussed. Basic to the materiality of interaction design, technology puts time central to ‘Material practice’. ‘Participatory practice’ moves beyond user involvement in design processes to active participation in ongoing formation. Since temporal form extends design more deeply and further into future use, ‘Critical practice’ queries accountability. More specific reflections are situated in relation to my experience in the design research programs ‘IT+Textiles’, ‘Public Play Spaces’, and ‘Static! Energy Awareness’. Drawing from architecture and from my own practice, this thesis maps out and builds up a territory of ideas, relations, and examples as an inquiry into issues of time in interaction design.

In this design exhibit, we describe methods we have used to design a noticeboard interface for an older community in London. Three low-fidelity methods of prototyping interaction provided shared and accessible means for us and our end users to communicate design ideas, explore qualities of the user experience, and evaluate them within situations of use. This approach facilitated the development of an appropriate, innovative and feasible solution for a unique context.

In Interaction Design, we are presented with an opportunity to return to the designed object as a subject of enquiry with a new perspective. We suggest a reconsideration of form as the starting point for developing a deep understanding of computational things and an approach to dealing with their inherent complexity. Understanding the object as composed of both spatial and temporal form, we can use materials to design a ‘surface’ for experience that extends beyond the three-dimensional object. Presenting both theoretical consideration and design examples, we aim to discuss the potentials of a new perspective on form as a basis for design research and education.

'Green Memes' proposes an online social network and local kiosks for people to learn about energy consumption. Based on electricity data collected from smart grids, meters and sensors, data visualizations depict consumption per building, per person and at many other scales. A social networking function is attached to these — text messages, or ‘green memes’, invite users to engage with energy-savings advice, current events and sustainability research. Accessible online, through mobile devices, or installed locally, Green Memes combines ‘hard data’ with the ‘soft power’ of personalized information, public opinion and face- to-face communication. The project is currently seeking partners to further develop the system and interface design.