I went to a workshop last week titled ‘HOW TO INVENT! Pink Diggers, Rude Signs and Driving on the Wrong Side’, given by Professor Tom Barker from the London Royal College of Art (RCA). The blurb form the workshop flyer:
As companies increasingly compete in giant global markets, innovation and design is gaining greater value than ever before. The role of the designer has become pivotal not just to a company’s success, but also in terms of social responsibility, ethics and sustainability. Good design gives competitive advantage and builds brand value. However, the process of designing truly innovative products that succeed has always been a difficult and risky task. How can the designer respond to these new challenges? Why is experimental design and research so important in all of this? What is the contemporary role of design academia?
Tom described how products and design ideas go through a “constant path of evolution” and a highly productive way of working involves “colloborative non-disciplinary” partnerships. In his presentation Tom showed a table that outlined the incubation of future design ideas for marketable products which he called “bottom draw technology”:
5 years - Products that are available now but are generally expensive and not working well.
10 years - Held in the research and development departments of commercial companies.
15 years - University research
He stressed that design briefs need to be “stretched and tested into something else.” The term “experimental design” was used to describe design that is informed by a “creative, artistic process”. The results of these experiments are recorded and reviewed with the idea of working out how they may be used.
In regards to University research he is reluctant to get caught up in pure consultancy work that does not allow for costs to have “time to think.” The paperwork can overwhelm the research. An ideal industry link allows for “process; research and innovation”.
“Project Migration” involves re-packaging research projects to test industry interest.
In the presentation of RCA student work I was intrigued by the way video was used to document design projects - Tom talked about the need for designers to understand how to use narrative in this documentation. A lot of animation, maps, sketches and illustrations where used by students to explain the design process.
References:
http://www.smartslab.co.uk/
Today, I presented the ‘Glasshouse Birdman’ prototype in a MCD studio postgraduate session. Many people present where not aware of my research topic. I decided not to provide any context to see what people thought I was researching. Initially there seemed to be some frustration with how the prototype was presented, especially if as I described the plan was to present VD for use in real-life scenarios. People suggested that the prototype looked to polished and finished rather than being a work-in-progress. A version that looked more like a sketch (drawn in crayon) with other supporting visual diagrams was the suggested alternative. Something that showed the process and behind the skin structure.
With the floor open for what this specific practice was researching there was some discussion about exploring non-linear narrative with a point made that this was not necessarily a new area of research. Therefore, where was the research going to be taken? A question that instigated some ideas on what the practice was exploring in terms of new territories. Classification, Tagging, Folksonomy emerged as one tangent - social media. The semantic web another. The idea of looking at how narrative is being compressed led to thinking about new types of audiovisual literacies. I mentioned that one thing I found myself doing is comparing production processes. These are the differences between how I would have recorded and post-produced a work like this for a linear montage edit. There was a suggestion to look at how this content would be structured in a linear version which I have been planning.
I pointed out the difficulty of working with so many new fields of study like interaction design, design research, software development and how none of these fields are where I come from in terms of prior knowledge. One idea was to find a specific theoretical model to bring all these together as way of critiquing and theorising the research. Experience Design was one suggestion. The session was useful particulary in terms of thinking about a revision of the research focus and questions. The original research topic is very broad but has influenced the resulting practice as a form of critique on online video practice. But, the topic could be revised along with the research questions in terms of shifting the focus at this stage to a focus on a new emerging territory.
Reference: Bill Buxton, Sketching User Experiences,: Getting the design right and the right design, San Francisco, Morgan and Kaufmann, 2007.