7th international conference on Design and Emotion
The Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Design & Emotion Society are pleased to invite you to participate in the 7th International Conference on Design & Emotion in Chicago. The International Conference on Design & Emotion is a forum held every other year where practitioners, researchers and industry leaders meet and exchange knowledge and insights concerning the cross-disciplinary field of design and emotion. The conference will offer workshops, research paper presentations, design case presentations, and poster presentations.
This conference covers various issues including Design for Environments, Service Design, Strategic Design and Business, and Foundation for Design and Emotion. I presented my work on context-dependent design evaluations.
I was pleased to have conversations with many creative designers as well as insightful design researchers. In particular, four presentation excited me. Two of them discuss new product development and the other two discuss product design.
1. “Improvisational Comedy and Product Design Ideation: Making Non-Obvious Connections between Seemingly Unrelated Thing”
Barry Kudrowitz and David Wallace from MIT try to identify those who are good at developing new products. Inspired by the procedural similarity between making a comedy and developing a new product, they propose that comedians are good new product developers. Then, they support their hypothesis by demonstrating that the quantity and the quality of cartoon captions made by comedians are greater and better than those made by non-comedians.
2. “User Research Methods: Distinctive Need Expressions from an In-depth Interview and a Generative Method Market Research”
Hyesun Hwang and Ki-Ok Kim from Sungkyunkwan University compare two user research methods, in-depth interviews and generative methods (prototyping). They argue that the two methods collect different consumer needs. An empirical study suggests that the in-depth interview produces concrete, negative and past-oriented problems, whereas the generative method produces abstract, positive and future-oriented ideas.
3. “The Cute Look: Baby-Schema Effects in Product Design”
Linda Miesler from University of St. Gallen investigates whether face-like features of the car fronts (head lights and air intake) are processed analog to human faces (eyes and mouth). She demonstrates in an experiment that enlarging the headlights (“larger eyes”) and increasing the size of the air intake (“thicker lips”) led people to perceive the car fronts cuter.
4. “The Relationship between Eco Design and Emotional Experiences”
Heesook Jung from Seoul National University proposes that ecofriendly behavior requires effort and, therefore, some motivation such as playfulness should be employed to help consumers behave ecofriendly. She presents a case of Lohas, an ecofriendly Japanese bottled water. According to her, the sound that an empty bottle creates when squeezed leads consumers to behave more ecofriendly (e.g., squeezing bottles) (see Lohas commercial).
Human Factors symposium
I attended a Human Factors symposium at the University of Toronto. It was organized by the HFIG (Human Factors Interest Group) and titled as Celebration of Applied Human Factors Research, in Honour of Prof. John W. Senders’ 90th Birthday.
At the symposium, I noticed an interesting connection between decision-making and Human Factors. Research in decision-making studies decision biases and provides prescriptions to eliminate or mitigate them. Similarly, HF researchers study errors from the real-life examples and suggest practical recommendations to overcome those errors.
For instance, John Senders and his colleagues studied errors of train drivers, vehicle drivers, airplane drivers, and medical practitioners in terms of their processing visual information. (In 1960s, John drove in Boston wearing a helmet and a visor that occluded his vision to find how often drivers need to see front!) Then, they provided recommendations to the city of Toronto, simulate trainings for pilots, or even develop devices for doctors such as Head Mounted Display).
Since Human Factors research investigates human behavior issues elegantly, which has a great potential to business. Shumin Zhai, for instance, presented his business which was developed from a research project. About 10 years ago, his team developed an innovative text input system for a touch screen device. It does not simply improve a conventional keypad to make it easy to use (e.g., laying out keys differently). Rather, it allows users to use their gestures to input texts. It is now called as ShapeWriter.
To me, Don Norman‘s call for Human Factors researchers to work with business people sounds right. I believe designers need business education to communicate with business people effectively. I found a wide variety of business-able issues were discussed in the symposium but hardly found any people with business background.
I hope to find more business students working at Human Factors community in the future.
Design thinking
In 2006, what was design thinking? (see more at Luke Wroblewsky‘s blog)
Roger Martin
When it comes to innovation, business has much to learn from design. The philosophy in design shops is, ‘try it, prototype it, and improve it’. Designers learn by doing. The style of thinking in traditional firms is largely inductive – proving that something actually operates – and deductive – proving that something must be. Design shops add abductive reasoning to the fray – which involves suggesting that something may be, and reaching out to explore it.
Tim Brown
Because it’s pictorial, design describes the world in a way that’s not open to many interpretations. Designers, by making a film, scenario, or prototype, can help people emotionally experience the thing that the strategy seeks to describe.
Jeanne Liedtka
Design thinking is synthetic. Out of the often-disparate demands presented by sub-units’ requirements, a coherent overall design must emerge. Design thinking is abductive in nature. It is primarily concerned with the process of visualizing what might be, some desired future state and creating a blueprint for realizing that intention. Design thinking is opportunistic: the designer seeks new and emergent possibilities. Design thinking is dialectical. The designer lives at the intersection of often-conflicting demands – recognizing the constraints of today’s materials and the uncertainties that cannot be defined away, while envisioning tomorrow’s possibilities.
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Now in 2010, what is design thinking?
I recently came across a carefully written post at Core 77 about design thinking. It was done by Kevin McCullagh and titled as “Design thinking: Everywhere and Nowhere, Reflections on The Big Re-Think.”
In fact, design thinking always meant different things to different players. For some it was about teaching managers how to think like designers; for others, it was about designers tackling problems that used to be the preserve of managers and civil servants; and for others still, it was anything said on the subject of design that sounded smart. To most, it is was merely a new spin on design. All its proponents were, however, united by their ambition for design to play a more strategic role in the world than ‘making pretty.’ Who could argue with that?
Teaching Business in Colleges and Universities
In the course titled as Teaching Business in Colleges and Universities, Professor David Dunne and Professor Uli Menzefricke taught how to teach business from course development and teaching methods to teaching devices, student assessment and feedback.
NSF Design Workshop: Driving Innovation through Design (1)
I leave for Chicago to attend a design workshop, “Driving Innovation through Design: Engineering in the 21st Century.” According to the website, goals of the workshop are as follows:
The one and an half day workshop will bring together a group of university administrators (Deans/department heads), faculty, researchers, and industrial practitioners across a variety of disciplines such as engineering, business, economics, journalism, arts and architecture, education and social policy.
The goals are (1) to reach a deeper understanding of the transdisciplinary issues faced in university and the world of design, (2) to foster interactions and facilitate dialogue by collectively sharing experiences of creating, cultivating, and sustaining successful interdisciplinary research and education programs, and (3) to seek synergistic research and educational efforts towards establishing Design as a path towards innovation and transdisciplinary cross-connection.
A wide variety of interactions are expected to take place including presentations, panel discussions, group discussions, and a design event, Design: Chicago.
