The Designing for Engaged Experience Workshop series (DfEE)
This workshop series explores translating understandings, arising from products created by collecting data about people’s experience of place, into prototypes; and, in particular, ways to engage in the shaping of a design space that conveys a sense of ‘being there’.
Experience-centred design and designing for affective interactions often includes video, audio or photographic records of activities. Our interactions during interpretation of such data form a bricolage that illuminates the underlying logics of the social practice under review. What we see, as designers, is reflective and always grounded in a cultural perspective from which we describe our interpretation of practices, and the cultural perspective of our audience. So, watching a video of a participant’s visit to a natural place might cue reflection on the interaction as a ‘view from somewhere’, but it also has the potential as a ‘view from somewhere else’. The recorded data itself becomes a site of continued interaction. Importantly, this interaction adds to the original material and potentially inspires design.
Consider the example of drawing upon recordings of a visitor’s familiar experience of a local beauty spot to inspire designing a technology to mediate others’ experiences of that or another special places. We have found that Egocentric POV video of a wilderness park in the north Australian tropics depicts visitors’ memories and meanings visitors and the ways in which people recreate and augment these in subsequent visits. Whilst digital technology might never transfer the sense of embodiment in a place to those who have no in situ experience, it can be used to considerably augment the otherwise often flat and sterile depictions of place, that are found, for example, in tourist guides. Reflecting on such material grounds our design knowledge and values in our interpretation of others’ perspective of that place.
Forthcoming Workshops:
- Interact ‘09 in Uppsala, Sweden – August 24-25, 2009 – Preconference: Tutorials, Workshops
- Nordes ‘09 in Oslo, Norway – August 30 – September 1, 2009
Previous Workshops
- OZCHI ‘08 in Cairns, Australia – Pictures and videos
- Willem de Kooning Academy, 2009, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands
- hAAi, 2009, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands
DfEE Group
The DfEE workshop series is run by a group of Interaction Design practitioners and researchs from many different countries – a list of DfEE workshop providers is available under the DfEE Workshop page.
We welcome new members – contact us or join our Facebook group