This is a rather late entry as the thesis was examined in 2006. I’m posting it now as Nicola has recently updated her website to make the work more accessible. It’s a very engaging piece of work that has value whether you are interested in practice-led research methods, the use of video and interactive media in research and design or craft skills and how they are learned.

Download full thesis from Nicola’s website which contains a great deal of other interesting material as well. The site is also a good example for any academic or professional who wants to build their public profile.

I’ve been very interested in the subject of public right of access to research publications for a long time but the wider implications of this topic came to the fore for me recently through a debate in a different arena.

Through my enthusiasm for cycling and the Brompton folding bicycle in particular I’m a member of an online forum for Brompton owners who take a more than usually passionate interest in these bikes.

Since the patents expired on the original design of the Brompton an Asian manufacturer has started producing a cheaper copy that is very close to the original in appearance and construction although not of the same high quality of manufacture and detail. Some members of the Bromptontalk forum noticed that this copy uses an early design of luggage rack that they felt was more attractive than the current design made by Brompton and were thinking of buying this rack to fit on their bikes.

This led to a heated debate about the ethics involved. Although the copy may not be infringing any current patent or design right several people felt that the producer was morally wrong to sell it and profit from the work of the original designer and we would be morally wrong to buy it. Others said that if a producer discarded a design they have no right to prevent other people from making it or buying it.

As I am a designer with a few patents and other original designs to my name you might expect me to agree with the moral objectors, however I think one has to be careful. The copy bike is not particularly ethical, just a cheap copy to cash in on the success of Brompton, and I don’t want to defend them.

But the point about discarded designs is important. If somebody decides that they don’t want to produce a design and goes on to produce something different, I don’t feel they can continue to retain a moral right over the old design.

It’s like a publisher who decides not to continue printing a book, which happens often. We might want to read that book but they have decided for their own reasons that we can’t even if the original author would like us to. I have taken the initiative to archive a number of academic papers on the web despite not having permission of the copyright holder, for example the work by Bruce Archer and Henrik Gedenryd listed on this blog.  I did it because I feel that the original publishers have abandoned their moral right by not continuing to make these papers available and there is a danger that the good work of the authors will be lost to us. (Archer & Gedenryd have died and can’t stand up for their own work)

So if some of us like an earlier version of a Brompton product and Brompton don’t want to make it, I feel we have a right to find somebody else to make it for us. This can be quite a serious problem as products get older, I have a Volkswagen T25 camper (the last of the rear-engined VWs) and a lot of parts are no longer available from VW, but people have decided to go into production on their own account. I don’t think VW care much and they understand the iconic value of their old products still being cherished and seen on the road, but strictly speaking some of those parts might still be protected by patent or design right* and I feel it would be ethically wrong for them to enforce their rights.

Similarly, back in 1984, I designed a bicycle pump for the Bluemels company. It was a very original and successful product but the company were taken over and the new owners swapped the handle of the pump, which was functionally and visually an essential part of the design. The new handle looked very odd and lost several ergonomic advantages so I was not happy and could no longer point to the design as my work, or buy one to show people. As the designer, even though I had signed over my patent rights, I feel I had a moral right to produce the original handle if I chose, or help somebody else to do so and it would have been in my interests. I was paid a modest wage as a junior designer to do the work which was OK but my future career depended on people seeing the quality of my past work.

So I believe that a producer who abandons a product – book, academic paper, music, movie, industrial product whatever – abandons their moral claim to that work.

*Yes I know the T25 is more than 25 years old but VW are prepared to discontinue parts less than 25 years old so there was a time when T25 owners were breaching patents or design rights by copying components.

PS. Incidentally the concept of ownership can take some very strange twists in the hands of the charlatan. Here in Sheffield we have had a big dispute over the right of access to the footbridge across our local railway station. The train operating company wanted to restrict access to train ticket-holders but the bridge is also the only easy access between the city and the housing beyond the station and also the nearest tram stop.

The bridge was built with funds from taxpayers and is owned by Network Rail, a state-owned company who look after rail infrastructure in Britain. Network Rail lease the station and bridge to the train company, East Midlands Trains, but the government can take it away any time they think EMT are failing to deliver the services they promised.

Yet EMT have the cheek to say publicly that the bridge and station are “Private Property”

stillpoint link

Originally posted to the PhD-Design email discussion list on 20 November 2008

image from Graham Whiteley’s PhD thesis

David Balkwill’s comments (in a previous message to PhD-Design) about students missing the point of their task, which is designing not drawing, is very relevant to research and doctoral studies. One of the key issues to be resolved in any “practice-led” project is how the quality and validity of the methods are to be made clear and we have to work on making explicit how any practical work is part of a process of exploration and reasoning directed towards the research aims.

This does not apply only to what we think of as “practice-led” research* in design. I remember a design management PhD which had the aim of developing a systematic approach to a particular problem. The conclusions of the work were embodied in a complex diagram and the student made a good case for his method which included working through a series of such diagrams to evaluate possible scenarios. Unfortunately the thesis contained only two diagrams – the first tentative proposition and the last, fully resolved operational method.

In the examination, he was asked whether he had a collection of working sketches/diagrams that showed how he had worked through the problem. His reply was that yes he did “but I wanted to show you the best one.”

Luckily he still had all the working material, his revised thesis included a selection of the working diagrams which showed very clearly how he had examined and tested the possibilities, forming a vital part of the validation of the conclusions.

This is not just about “showing your stuff”. Or rather the act of showing your stuff is to do with being aware of your methods, the need to attend to and demonstrate quality of execution (of the research not the drawing etc) and being clear about where your conclusions have come from. In a PhD the conclusions are less important than the process since you are being examined on your ability to conduct research rather than the significance or intrinsic persuasiveness of your contribution. By extension, your conclusions must draw together the story of how your process has worked to deliver that conclusion.

*I use the quotations around “practice-led” because I feel that the term is no longer valid or necessary but I realise that some of us are still attached to it

RUST. C, (2009) In the Eating: Grounding the validation of investigative designing in the experience of stakeholders, International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference, Seoul, Korea, October 2009

I wrote and presented this paper as part of a special session at the IASDR conference, organised by Stella Boess of TU Delft. Stella wished to explore the question of how knowledge arising from the use of designed artefacts in research might be validated.

Abstract

This paper describes an approach to practice-led inquiry that puts the tacit knowledge of stakeholders at the centre of the research process as a research instrument but also as an important resource for validating the results. I will describe how this was done in several projects conducted over the past 10 years and how evaluation with relatively small groups of people who have relevant tacit knowledge might be justified.

The research that I examine here addresses questions that may not be suitable for more analytical or quantifiable research, for example because they cannot be atomised into manageable components, because they explore ill-defined or “wicked” problems or because the most relevant reference point for evaluation is tacit rather than explicit knowledge. Such problems may be addressed by methods designed to employ tacit knowledge but validating the methods is often challenging, given that practice-led research in design is a relatively new field of activity so there is a limited amount of prior research to draw on for methodology.

However theories of tacit knowledge and wicked problems can provide a starting point for the methodological framework required and this paper will seek to develop some ideas that might contribute to such a methodology. In particular it will examine how experts with rich tacit knowledge might play a part and why it would be valid to work with very small numbers of such people, how the tacit moves of designers might form valid ways of processing the data that they encounter and how the artefacts of the research, in themselves, might be an important source of validation, for example by allowing assessment of the techniques employed.

Key words: Tacit Knowledge, Artefact, Practice-led

Download full paper from archive.org

RUST, C.  BLYTHE, M. MCKAY, A. BAGGOTT, J. WRIGHT, P.  (2009) Designing with Values: A designer’s framework for delivering personalised media in an unencumbered interactive environment. International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference, Seoul, Korea, October 2009

Abstract

This paper describes the evolution of a design and development process for a museum exhibit that delivered unencumbered or ambient interactive media using personal values as the main framework for customising interaction and thus for selecting and developing content. The context of the work is the developing field of products and systems that incorporate rich digital content.

The work took place as part of an interdisciplinary research project that explored how people might interact with rich digital media in an unencumbered computing environment. An examination of the historical content of the planned exhibition, and the different stakeholders who influence that content led us to identify a set of ideas based on the different values at work, for example the different motivations and professional focus of the two main curators. This was then used as a reflective framework for the production of visual, video and audio material that could be incorporated. At the same time technical concepts were developed to define the opportunities for interaction and presentation of content in ways that emphasised unencumbered interaction using body movement and sensors rather than explicit computer devices.

A second review allowed the value framework to be re-evaluated in the light of the content that had been created and the content was coded against that framework. An algorithm was developed that allowed a database to track visitors’ interactions and maintain a developing profile of each visitor, with the content that they saw both responding to and testing that value profile.

The result was tested in a live exhibition with members of the public and was found to provide an engaging experience. However the main findings presented in this paper will be in the process of development and how it allowed the design group to work with values while accepting that these were provisional rather than definitive. This will be discussed in the light of existing theories that govern the design of museums and their content and also theories of designing including recent thinking which draws on Polanyi’s theories of tacit knowledge to describe a role for designers in tacitly processing experience rather than explicitly executing a brief.

Key words: Interactive Media, Museum, Unencumbered, Personalised, Values.

Download full paper from archive.org

This book chapter described the interdisciplinary collaboration that developed in this project, the complexity of the work might be seen in this diagram

Download pre-print from archive.org

NB the preprint copy incorrectly shows Chris Rust as sole author, the correct authors are given in the citation above

Wood, N. Rust, C. Horne, G. (2009) A Tacit Understanding: The designer’s role in capturing and passing on the skilled knowledge of master craftsmen International Journal of Design (online) 3.3

Download full paper from The International Journal of Design

From 2007 to 2009 Nicola and Grace explored the practical application of methods and theories developed in Nicola’s doctoral research into transmitting craft knowledge

Nicola’s 7-year research into tacit learning and multimedia has led to an understanding of how craft skills may be elicited and embodied in learning resources. The most recent project has developed and evaluated a practical system for designers who wish to undertake this work. By engaging with master craftsmen, expert learners and novices to create and use a web-based learning resource it was found that well-motivated learners,working in physical isolation but supported by an online community, could acquire difficult new skills and use them in creative ways. The paper also outlines key theory from the preceding research to explain how this is achieved. It also indicates how the focus of the research has moved from the production of highly structured conventional multimedia materials to the use of web 2.0 resources that invite participation and exchange by learners.

The research was supported by a grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) without which the work would not have been possible.

More information and illustrations of the research can be found on the project website

Abstract

Over the past 7 years we have investigated how craft skills may be elicited and embodied in multimedia learning resources. This led to an understanding of the principles of eliciting and transmitting such knowledge (Wood, 2006). The most recent project has developed and evaluated a practical system for designers who wish to undertake this work. By engaging with master craftsmen, expert learners and novices to create and use a web-based learning resource it was found that well-motivated learners, working in physical isolation but supported by an online community, could acquire difficult new skills and use them in creative ways. The paper also outlines key theory from the preceding research to explain how this is achieved. It indicates how the focus of the research has moved from the production of highly structured conventional multimedia materials to the use of web 2.0 resources that invite participation and exchange by learners.

A Critical Artefact Methodology: Using Provocative Conceptual Designs to Foster Human-centred Innovation

available online at http://www.simon-bowen.com/?page_id=40

Simon’s work explores some practical implications of the critical design methods developed by Dunn and Raby, Bill Gaver and others. He has synthesised and evaluated ways for designers to use provocative concepts, “Crazy Ideas” as he describes them, to stimulate stakeholders to engage in productive speculation about aspirations and needs that might not be revealed by more conventional user research techniques. The magic part of Simon’s work is that it allows a proper place for the designer as a ‘processor’ of people’s ideas and experiences – not doing analysis as a market researcher would, but allowing engagement with stakeholders to feed directly into new cycles of creative thinking.

To support this Simon has developed a description of such processing based on Michael Polanyi’s theories of tacit knowledge in action. I find this a most useful building block in the body of work being done here at Sheffield Hallam by myself and Nicola Wood as well as Simon, with more to come from Rizal Rahman and Cigdem Kaya whose PhD studies are extending it in different directions. You can find this description on pages 171-173 of the thesis: 6.2.4 Designing as ‘processing’ and Polanyi’s indwelling

I’ve developed a short account of how Simon’s work has stimulated my own thinking on how Rittel and Webber’s work on wicked problems might be a basis for design methods, prompted by members of this discussion list who have suggested that wicked problems might be interesting but don’t seem to provide help with methods.

Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine – “Intelligent, Unbiased and Instant Assessment of Photos“
Science, snake oil or just a bit of fun?

stillpointlink

Last week Terry Love alerted the PhD-Design community to the ACQUINE web tool for rating the “aesthetic” quality of images. Obviously this kind of thing is a red rag to most of us in the art school tradition but it does point to some serious questions. My reactions went from having a bit of fun with the tool, to questioning its credentials and finally to a feeling that it pointed to a valid direction for science to explore as a long term inquiry but also a rich well of snake oil right now for those out to make money from gullible businesses. Most of what I’ve said below was originally posted in four recent messages to the PhD-Design discussion list at JISCmail.ac.uk

Round 1 – Having fun with Acquine

I started out by trying the online tool to assess my personal beauty.

First I tried two images, one of me in my office with a green chair and grey table and the same photo cropped to just show head and shoulders.

The complete photo received 43.1% but the cropped one 31.4%  indicating that my office furniture may be better looking than me. Or maybe that we should take some office furniture along as an accessory when going on a blind date to improve that vital first impression.

I then tried a different head and shoulders shot and a very close crop where my face completely fills the photo.

This time the head and shoulders was rated 36.6% but the “in your face” shot received a thumping 60.9%. So maybe I should stand very close to people if I want them to find me attractive.

A cartoon of me drawn by a student (Reuben Wu, last heard of in Boston Massachusetts in a band called Ladytron) who was bored in one of my lectures received a measly 12.3% and a 1983 photo of my fellow students at Coventry Polytechnic, laughing on the top deck of a tram at a transport museum was rated 18.1%.

Back in the real world, both of these aesthetically challenged items evoke very warm feelings in me.

I felt that this very entertaining gadget reveals far more about some scientists than it does about aesthetics.

Round 2 – So what’s the problem?

Following my rather facetious comment, Bengi Turgan posted a helpful explanation of some of the thinking behind ACQUINE so I thought I should say something more serious about this interesting project

In recent years a great deal of attention has been paid to the possibility of treating affect as something that can be engineered. Those who try to do this, often using the most carefully considered psychological and statistical principles, sometimes suffer from a fundamental misapprehension that “aesthetics” is something material and fixed like hydraulics whose behaviour can be predicted reliably from past performance and fairly simple basic principles.

What I had hoped to say in a humorous way was that the affect of complex artefacts,  what my film-making colleagues might call our ‘visceral’ response to an experience, is dependent on a context which is constantly changing and subject to an enormous number of factors. The ACQUINE project seems to be attempting to predict the future based on a limited sampling of individual responses taken out of context, it has some of the characteristics of those stock market trading programs that all make the same judgement at the same time and therefore all contribute to mutual collapse when the system tips out of balance. An early paper from the ACQUINE team (there are three available on their website) indicates that they looked at some theoretical discussions of aesthetics and concluded that the picture was too confusing, in their most recent publication they say simply that

We leave aside subjectivity for now and consider aesthetic attributes to be a consensus measure over the entire population (Datta et al 2008)

So although they acknowledged early on that semantics play a part, they do not seem to be worried about the dynamic nature of semantics, or the quite profound differences that can exist between the perceptions of different groups and individuals, seeing these as secondary factors that might modify the ‘big picture’ but not invalidate it.

Meanwhile I’m not saying this work has no value, I just think it needs a hugely complex and powerful artificial intelligence machine, capable of monitoring and modelling the whole of human society and its material activities and making valid predictions for all of that stuff before it could hope to make reliable predictions for affect. Even then it would have to be capable of modelling and rating all the possible combinations of possible designs and other developments in the relevant future before it could be reliable. The social implications of such a machine go well beyond the minor concerns of designing appealing gadgets.

Of course such systems are already used for fine tuning immediate affect in established designs, such as the colour or typography of a package. But they are no defence against somebody coming up with a fresh idea that makes the whole proposition of the old idea look stale.

Round 3 – So does it have any value at all?

Following that second comment Keith Russell wrote:

While I agree with the general thrust of your comments about “treating affect as something that can be engineered”… I am concerned that the proving of the difficulty might also be used as a general excuse for designers to slip into fine art mode. I argue that there is much more than can be known about affect than we culturally allow.

Of course he’s right. I think I am responding to the hubris of the (quite large number of) examples that I have seen where people make extremely facile assumptions about how quickly you can move from a valid scientific exploration of affect to developing practical tools.

So my ideal all-knowing artificial intelligence may be an overstatement but it is also a challenge and maybe even an optimistic prediction (I’m a fan of Ian M. Banks). I’d be interested to see an argument for how something that is less than all-knowing could make useful predictions.

At the moment I believe there are techniques which allow marketeers to work out which shade of red might persuade somebody to buy a particular bottle of gin this week. However these techniques do not cope with the effect of the almost endless range of possibilities for new designs of bottles and labels that your competitors might throw at you the week after. And that doesn’t go anywhere near the altered perceptions that might be induced by future changes in supermarket decor, the typography of new government health warnings, a popular movie about a gin-swilling terrorist or any of a squillion other possible influences that we might not be able to predict right now.

Meanwhile I was talking only yesterday to a marketeer who was very persuasive on the point that business people really like the apparently reliable numbers that come out of affective engineering studies. He didn’t really understand the methodologies involved but he was impressed by the academic credentials of the affect engineers and the way their work made it easier to sell design and marketing advice to industry.

So let’s do the science by all means but right now there’s too much close-to-market snake oil for my liking. These days, every time an engineer uses the word “aesthetics” I’m strongly inclined to reach for my gun.

Round 4 – What about the science?

After I had made these comments, Don Norman responded with a strong defence of the value of the ACQUINE project as well as strong criticisms of the way that I had used the term “visceral”. (I subsequently added the caveat above about my usage following that of my film-making colleagues rather than Don’s usage from psychology)

Don included the statement: “But the work itself is solid. Someday, research of this sort, will be very useful.” I feel uncomfortable with this. I agree that research of this sort will be useful but the solidity of this particular project has to be questioned. I am sure it has some real strength in the way it is developing machine vision and artificial intelligence techniques but there are some flaws in the basic assumptions about aesthetics, revealed in the ACQUINE publications.

First, as I’ve indicated above, they adopt a key concept, that it is possible to isolate some kind of universal aesthetic value not dependent on ‘semantics’. Don Norman points out that humans do have some universal responses like “fear of heights, darkness, crowds” but I expect he would also agree that these influences can be moderated by context, we have a capacity to completely reverse our response and, in some circumstances, value images that, for example, convey fear. This is quite evident in many of the images on the project website. I can’t help feeling that the ACQUINE approach has been to just ignore the non-universal factors.

There is internal evidence to support this in one of their papers (Datta et al 2006). The website, photo.net, used by professional and amateur photographers, includes aesthetic ratings provided by its members reviewing each other’s work and these ratings were used to develop the ACQUINE engine. The first problem is in their assertion that while the professional photographers might focus on technical detail the amateurs represent “the general population”. No arguments or evidence are presented for this and I feel that it is equally valid to suggest that, while the mass-market membership of flickr.com might represent a general population, the participants in photo.net are a specialist group. There is a long history of serious amateur photography based on the kind of “professional” values and institutions characterised by Richard Sennett (2008, 24-27) in his discussion of craftsmanship among the open-source software development community and I would expect the judgements of the photo.net community to be moderated by these professional concerns.

In fact that can be seen in the data. The assessments on photo.net actually use two factors, “Aesthetics” and “Originality”. The ACQUINE team report a strong correlation between the two. Given that we would expect an artistic community to put a high value on originality it seems that the photographers may not be able to separate aesthetics from originality, possibly because they have no strong separate concept of aesthetics. This correlation implies that the photo.net amateurs, as members of a specialist artistic community, may not be a good guide to the general population.  Datta et al note that this correlation also implies a strong semantic factor in the aesthetic judgements which makes it extremely difficult to isolate their ‘universal’ aesthetics from the other kind. Having noted that problem, they appear to have moved on regardless.

So we have two problems in the most basic raw material of the research: The population chosen appear to have a specialised concept of aesthetics, highly influenced by their artistic context; and the researchers have no way of isolating their looked-for universal “consensus measure” from the messy background of semantics. They are optimistically pursuing a convenient, narrow and possible spurious factor that they cannot isolate, apparently because it is too difficult to address the very complex reality they have in front of them. If there were no other way to deal with this scientific problem I might have some sympathy for them but I believe there are many possible avenues to advance knowledge and technique in this area, maybe they are not as appealing to the public or rich in immediate snake oil potential.

Ritendra Datta, Dhiraj Joshi, Jia Li and James Z. Wang (2006) Studying Aesthetics in Photographic Images Using a Computational Approach, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3953, Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision, Part III, pp. 288-301, Graz, Austria, May 2006, available online at http://www-db.stanford.edu/~wangz/project/imsearch/Aesthetics/ECCV06/

Ritendra Datta, Jia Li and James Z. Wang (2008) Algorithmic Inferencing of Aesthetics and Emotion in Natural Images: An Exposition, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Special Session on Image Aesthetics, Mood and Emotion, pp. 105-108, San Diego, California, IEEE, October 2008, available online from http://infolab.stanford.edu/~wangz/project/imsearch/Aesthetics/ICIP08/

Richard Sennett (2008) The Craftsman London, Allen Lane

Last week I spent two days at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) taking part in a workshop on postgraduate design education, the second in a series funded by the US National Science Foundation.

Although there was a broad mix of participants from across the range of design disciplines, the main focus was on engineering design with a sub-text of how design might sit with a science-led agenda. Northwestern have a very interesting set of design programs, including interdisciplinary degrees, with a strong practical component and an emphasis on human-centred design led by Don Norman. While this seemed to demonstrate a balanced view of the opportunities in design education there was also a strong voice, represented by Panos Papalambros of University of Michigan, in favour of a highly quantitative view of design as optimisation.

The workshop started with four presentations drawing on different views of designing:

Human Factors and Ergonomics: Alex Kirlik, University of Illinois Champaign

Engineering Design: Jonathan Cagan, Carnegie Mellon University

Industrial Design: David Weightman, University of Illinois Champaign

Human Centered Design: Don Norman, Northwestern University

We also had a short tour of the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern. The student facilities included:

a large studio-style workshop and studios.

breakout rooms alongside each studio and a “cafe” area for informal work

In the evening of the first day we were also invited to a ‘Design Chicago’ event where four leading designers: Bruce Mau, Walter Herbst, Jerome Caruso and Greg Holderfield addressed the topic of “Design for a Disruptive Economy”.

While they all acknowledged that we were in new times where the old preconceptions about the economy were no longer valid, their proposals were not particularly novel. There was a strong flavour of designing for sustainability but the general message was that designers were imaginative people who would see us through the crisis. The only really interesting contribution was in the introduction from Sunil Chopra of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. He drew attention to the new trend towards open innovation and also the distributed manufacturing model being adopted in India by Tata motors for their new people’s car project.

Meanwhile in the NSF workshop we were wrestling with the needs of postgraduate students in design and attempting to come up with a model for a ‘blue sky’ interdisciplinary postgrad programme, this was slightly undermined by the fact that Northwestern and one or two others present seemed to already have such things so were naturally coloured towards their models. I guess my personal tendency is to work from what we have rather than design in a vacuum so it might have been more interesting to critique and reframe existing provision, however one of the groups did take a progressive, user-led approach by telephoning potential students (from group members’ families) and bringing them into the development process. Again that gave a concrete starting point which shaped the program, avoiding the vacuum.

There seemed to be a general trend towards a project led approach in which students’ personal interests played a very strong role. Coming from a European art school environment I felt that the ideas coming forward did not have a lot to offer us, we seem to have crossed a lot of the hurdles still facing the US community, partly because we seem to have a research culture which is more open to the humanities and arts and the UK approach to doctoral studies seems more open to innovation and individual pursuit of a topic of deep interest to the individual student. The US approach, with a much tighter structure and substantial taught curriculum, seems more like a UK professional doctorate which pursues “research in the service of professional practice”.

But an interesting event. I probably learned a lot more than I realised, and met some very stimulating people from a different spectrum of interest than one normally meets in Design Research circles.