Tools for Co-design: Low Technology and High Technology

Participatory design is becoming an increasingly popular practice in different design disciplines. In his study of participatory practices, Phalen argues that for a successful participation, designers should use strategies to present the problem in a way that makes sense to participants. Participation also requires engaging participants in design activity and making them feel at ease to express their opinion. Even if we have a highly-engaged group of participants that understands the problem very well there is still a major gap that needs to be addressed. Designers work with images, models, and words. People can sort design options, make comments about proposals and share their experiences. However, without making tools they cannot truly participate in the act of designing. How is it possible for ordinary people to acquire the language and tools used by designers without going through the time-consuming design education? We need tools that do not confuse users through their sophisticated interface and at the same time they have potentials for constructing ideas. We can apply the same principles discussed by Phalen to these objects: participatory design tools should engaging and understandable.

Recently, I went to a talk by Jennifer Magnolfi who shared on of her participatory design projects in Las Vegas, NV. The project aimed to introduce coworking spaces to Downtown Las Vegas in order to attract startups and tech companies. Magnolfi and the joint architecture firm who worked on this project asked members of the community to participate in the project. They engaged community members in recognizing potential interest points, conceptualizing coworking spaces. In these sessions, organizers gave simple model making tools (e.g. Lego bricks, papers) and visualization tools (e.g. maps, markers, dot points) to participants in order to envision their ideas and share them with others. Also, many of these participants were business owners around the community who agreed to run a week-long experimental transformation project by adding shade umbrellas and flowers boxes to their store front. Project gradually grow out of this small experiments and turned into a proposal that was not only focused on designing coworking spaces in Downtown area but a vision on how the city can transform its identity from a tourist destination to a tech hub.

Tiltbrush Technology by HTC VIVE

While this project is purposefully focused on low-tech tools for participation, I think with the  advancement of modeling software as well as virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, we will have intuitive hi-tech design tools that will make co-design more engaging and constructive. For instance, VIVE introduced its sculpting tool last year that turns 3-dimensional sketching into a very simple activity. Such technologies can bridge the gap between designers and ordinary people and create more meaningful participatory design activities. These are the tools that more intuitive to learn and more engaging to encourage creativity and participation.

Reference

• Phalen, Kimberly Bosworth. "Evidence-based Approaches to Public Participation in Design Decisions."
• https://www.tedxbarcelona.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Tiltbrush-468x263.gif

Novelty and typicality: A different view to preference

The question of the visual preference is central to the cognitive aesthetics. As information-processing beings, why do we prefer certain images, scenes, objects and spaces over others? A valuable perspective is offered by Kaplan’s theory of environmental preference which suggest that preference is the result of information-processing potentials that an environment presents. A preferred environment is the one that is rich in information (complex) and at the same time well-ordered (coherent). But are there other cognitive factors influencing our preference of objects?

Steel House designed by Robert Bruno 

In the context of aesthetics, Hekkert, Snelders and van Wieringen have proposed another theory based on typicality and novelty of objects. The notion of typicality is adopted from the prototype theory in cognitive science which suggests that some objects are more central (prototypical) of the categories that they represent. For instance, robin is more prototypical of a bird than a penguin. Proposed by Rosch, this theory suggests that we categorize objects based on their similarity to this prototypical objects and not based on the sum of their features. Hekkert et al. researched the role of prototypicality in our preference of objects. Do we prefer objects that are more typical or the ones that present novelty? This question is especially relevant in the domain of design.

Any design project is based on a set of precedents and no one can “invent” radically new forms overnight. However, the question is the extent to which a designer should remain dependent on the previous forms and models. Does prototypicality or novelty of an object determine its popularity? Hekkert et al. studied this question in the context of industrial design. Their study shows that both perceived novelty or typicality of objects have a positive correlation with the preference. However, their study showed some variance on different products. For instance, participants had a higher preference for prototypical cars. If prototypicality and  novelty both positively influence preference of an object, how this two contradictory factors can be reconciled? I think we need to return to Kaplan’s theory of preference for understanding this contradiction. We can easily locate those objects in the network of representations. Prototypicality of an object helps us to read and understand its form and purpose based on our previous experience with that category. Novelty, however, invokes exploration for new information. A novel object is harder to categorize and as a result, it provides opportunities for receiving new information.

Robie House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

The problem remains unsolved: how typical or novel a design should be? There is no definitive answer to this question and it is dependent on multiple factors including industry, context, and culture. Hekkert et al. suggest that people generally prefer novel objects as long as novelty does not affect typicality. However, the question must be addressed in specific context. When we are dealing with highly instrumental objects, typicality plays a major role in quick recognition and functionality of that object. Think about the world in which designers were free to pick any color or pattern for fire extinguishers. Results of such diversion from typicality in design could be fatal in case of emergency. Typicality (recognizability) of design is central to the functionality of fire extinguisher. However, in the context of artistic expression typicality is perceived negatively. Imagine theaters were always showing movies with the same plot. Probably after a while, everybody would stop going to movies. So, it is necessary for designers to understand the context of use of any object to decide on their approach towards design.

Reference

Hekkert, Paul, Dirk Snelders, and Piet CW Wieringen. "‘Most advanced, yet acceptable’: Typicality and novelty as joint predictors of aesthetic preference in industrial design." British journal of psychology 94.1 (2003): 111-124.

Kaplan, Stephen. "Aesthetics, affect, and cognition environmental preference from an evolutionary perspective." Environment and behavior 19.1 (1987): 3-32.

Sustainable Living and RPM: The Elephant in the Room

A recent article in the New York Times entitled "The School of Wants and Needs - and Wood-Fired Showers" detailed the typical day in the life of a private-school in Los Olivos, California called Midland School. Midland is a private school, located in Santa Barbara, California, where "about 50 percent of the produce that students and faculty members eat from the 10 acres of land that they farm organically." The students chop wood for fires that heat water for showers. Each day individual students are appointed as "fire-starters" and take care of each other by assuring there is plenty of wood. However, "if the day's six fire-starters shirk their duties, it is their classmates who suffer." I find this model interesting from an educational standpoint, as an example of sustainable living (albeit, an expensive one) that appears to be working quite well. Unlike other private college preparatory schools, Midland's "facts and numbers" advertises factors beyond acceptance to top-colleges: "35 miles of trails and dirt roads on our campus," "3 hours it takes to hike to the peak of Grass Mountain," and "2,860 acres on which our campus sits."

Midland School, Los Olivos, CA

The merits of sustainable living at Midland aside, the "elephant in the room" in the conversation is at the fringes of the environmental movement. In 1968, Stanford biologist Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s apocalyptic bestseller The Population Bomb (1968), his infamous book on population growth and consumption. The opening passage famously begins with “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich observed, citing consumption and the rise of population inevitably leading to “utter breakdown” – the final nail in humanity’s coffin. At the time, many embraced Ehrich’s viewpoint; traces of his argument exist in “population growth” campaigns, such as the Engendered Species Condoms offered by the Center for Biological Diversity. Disturbingly, Buck v. Bell (1927) is a Supreme Court case still on the books, upholding Virginia statute allowing sterilization of inmates at certain mental institutions, thus preventing childbearing for those deemed “unfit”. 

In the context of the reasonable person model, the IPAT equation reveals the impact that individuals contribute to material culture. It appears that, at least in Western culture, those that are most able to adapt are those with the most resources to do so. Sending one's child to a private school that practices sustainability may be a benefit to society, in re-shaping the manner in which these high schoolers live. However, why shouldn't these same resources be afforded to public education across the country? If so, I believe participation in sustainable living could be taught to a wider variety of students and affect change on a broader scale.

Envisioning

I have been repeatedly required to read Donella Meadows “Envisioning a Sustainable World” throughout various courses in SNRE.  As an information processor, I now know repeated exposure to this material is laying the foundation for new cognitive mapping.  Besides, I always find it fascinating when “the right and perfect information shows up in my life at the right and perfect time”.

   

I knew since the age of five I was going to be a veterinarian.  No doubt about it.  All through my adolescent school years I was only interested in working with and healing animals.  I participated in 4-H Clubs and job-shadowed local veterinarians whenever I could.  My horse, my dog, rabbits, and even guinea pigs were all I cared about.  My formative years were comfortable, secure, extremely familiar, I was encouraged to explore life and supported in many endeavors.

It wasn’t until I began taking steps towards achieving my academic goal I learned there was a world juxtaposed to what I’d been living in.  It was near impossible for me, a high school honor student, to attend college because of financial circumstances.  I remember being told, “You can’t use your ACT Scholarship because it’s based on financial need and your parents’ annual income of $35,000 does not reflect financial hardship”. However, if I were a single mother, had successfully completed a drug rehabilitation program or if both of my parents were deceased, I would easily qualify for financial aid.  Being a reasonable, rational person, I couldn’t bring myself to manifest any of those criteria. And I certainly couldn’t understand it – the criteria were a mystery I couldn’t solve.  I was an independent adult – over the age of eighteen and I didn’t live with my parents!   

Regardless, I wasn’t able to attend college full time until I was 24.  I still had to work – maintaining 2 or 3 animal related jobs to finance classes here and there.  But even after I achieved my Bachelor of Science Degree from MSU, I still wasn’t entirely “happy”.  Why? I was one step away from entering into the Veterinary Medicine program….isn’t that what I wanted? I wasn’t entirely convinced; intuitively, I wasn’t sure about this commitment, so I chose not to pursue Veterinary Medicine.  Mostly, I wanted to focus on “living” and “exploring the meaning of happiness”.  But, in retrospect, I see the main reason for not submitting my application to Vet. School was more likely my state of mental fatigue from struggling-juggling different jobs.  Acute stressors led to chronic stress and I perceived this as a normal lifestyle.

When I read Meadows’ paper <yet again>, it hit me why her writing was resonating with me.  I never envisioned a future without being a veterinarian. I didn’t know what that looked like.  I had narrowed my scope to a single profession-any alternative was considered preposterous and completely unfamiliar. 

It took me many years to realize and accept that I enjoy, and am too passionate about, a variety of opportunities in life to limit myself to one profession…and be ok with it.  I never really asked myself,

“What makes me happy”?  And when I did, I never fully reflected on what the answer(s) were.  I did know that my happiness was intrinsically tied to interaction with Nature.  And I was passionate about portraying Nature’s beauty through art and educating (familiarizing) people about the Natural world around them.

As I enter the last phases of my academia in the School of Natural Resources, I’m asking, as well as many others, what will you do with your degree? Drawing from both my own and Meadows’ experiences, I envision “using my acquired academic knowledge and life experiences to facilitate the shift of environmental degradation from anthropogenic activities to pro environmental behaviors in the wake of energy descent”.  

Now...what, pray tell, does that look like?  

I’m kind of excited to explore that! I envision myself as an environmental educator familiarizing people with the environment to protect, preserve and conserve it. And I’m really excited to engage in effective communication beginning with “What is your environmental vision” and “what can we do to reach that goal”?

Social Work and Information

As a practicing social worker, I am constantly dealing with people and any presenting problem. These presenting problems can vary from having issues with a spouse, peers, relative or personally dealing with a trauma. These presenting issues are not always clear, cut and dry issues; these things have to be discussed through multiple sessions and building rapport. In the initial intake of a client, a clinician must lead the client through a series of questions that allows the clinician to get to know the client. Like when you are at a new doctors office and you go through a series of questions about who you are and what your profession may be. This is an example of how new information about someone is shared through presenting information through one's own cognitive mapping. My series of questions to set up to lead a client to respond in a way to share new information about themselves that I could use in future sessions.


Clients can choose to share any information or any presenting problem that they would like to communicate with you. It is my job as a clinician to use the information that I have learned through school and experience to help resolve or provide comfort. Now there are downfalls to this, clients can choose to withhold vital information necessary to resolve an issue or as a clinician you may not completely understand the gravity of the problem. Sometimes clients might just want a space to talk rather than address an issue which could lead to them rejecting any help or using any information/resources you may provide. The clinicians' way of providing resources or information may be a fit for the client. When I say this, I am referring to the clinical environment, it may not be a restorative environment that fits the client's preference to make them feel comfortable. Clients may not feel mentally or emotional safe to really receive the information you are giving. This takes an empathetic social worker to provide this space.


Information sharing is important in social work because we believe that learning about a client and their social systems it can change behavior through providing information and resources. It is also key to acknowledge that not every client will take the resources and information given, but as long as the opportunity is presented a client has the choice to make the change.

Participation and Development

When I served in the Peace Corps, one of the things that was expounded on in training was the necessity to include local people in any sort of project planning. The tool that we were taught to use is called PACA: Paticipatory Analysis for Community Action. During our lectures on Experts, Sharing, Participation, and Community, I was struck by how much of the material echoed or fit into what we had learned as volunteers. I'll admit, I was 100% skeptical of PACA when we were taught it in Pre-Service training. The book looks like a self-help manual from the 1970s, but the principles are sound. I wish I could have taken Ray's course before entering my service!

In PACA, there are a couple key steps to "activating" a community that involve a significant amount of mapping. The first step is to get community members to draw a spatial map of their community. Similar to the 3CM tool learned in class, there is no wrong-way of completing the exercise; the whole point is to see how local people view their village spatially and to derive insights from that (how is the map oriented, what features are highlighted, what areas are left relatively blank, etc). Not only is it a powerful tool for volunteers, but for the local people themselves. Typically, the participants are separated by gender and the different gender groups each draw a map. Then, each map is brought up and presented by the group. The separation can also be done by age (youth, adults). The results usually come as a surprise to both groups and depending on the country, gender roles are very visible in the maps (in our sessions, the men would highlight game halls, soccer fields, transportation hubs, mosques, churches, and bars; the women would highlight markets, wells, streams where clothes were washed, gardens, main roads, homes, churches, and mosques; the main difference in youth and adult maps were the inclusion of schools). Needless to say, the groups were shocked that their maps could be so different for the same community and it served as an important conversation starter.

The second step was to have participants create a generalized Daily Activities schedule, again by
gender, starting from whenever they woke up in the morning until they went to sleep. The differences in gender roles was even more apparent, with the main difference being the sheer amount of leisure time men and boys seemed to have compared to women and girls. The women would almost always be up and working before sunrise, preparing breakfast. This was usually followed by laundry, or gathering firewood, or going to market to buy food for dinner. Girls would often have to come home during their school lunch break (if they went to school) to help with chores. The work would be almost constant until after dinner, with the family generally sitting down together. The men would leave the house a little later and work around half the overall time for the women, with the men's work being inter-spaced with naps or visiting friends. Boys would generally be free of chores (left to their sisters) and would instead play soccer with friends. The daily schedule was also an important conversation starter because people had generally never been given the chance to examine and view their lives in this way. Any hesitancy to discuss in the group was usually completely dispelled at this point.

The third tool used was also temporal, but looked at the entire year. The Seasonal Calendar was meant to highlight availability patterns of food, income, and other resources on a yearly basis. Humans are excellent at pattern recognition. Before the calendar was even done being drawn, local people would already be making connections and pitching ideas to solve the discontinuities that were found.

In the end, the local people would perform a basic SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis for their community using the maps they had drawn. From there, the volunteer would help facilitate project and resource mobilization and fill a role as an information provider.

It was surprising to me how many parallels were found between the lectures and the PACA process, simply because the PACA manual was presented without any fanfare, background, or citations. Seeing now the science that was built into it, I wish the research had been presented alongside the tools; it would have dispelled any hesitancy in using them from the start.

Participation and Environmental Psychology in Corporate Technology Implementations

Prior to graduate school, I worked as a change management consultant focused primarily on technology adoption projects. This means that when a company was adopting a large corporate technology package, I would work alongside technology experts to implement the new technology. I provided communications and training and made sure that the company’s employees were prepared for the changes that would come with this new technology.

For each of these technology implementations, we began with an effort called “visioning sessions.” The goal behind these sessions was to figure out what the needs of the business are so that the technology can be appropriately configured to the business priorities. In order to do this, the team leads representative employees through a review of different capability areas, and participants decide how sophisticated the capability area needs to be based upon the needs of the business.

These visioning sessions are intense. They last for multiple weeks. There are over 10 capability areas that need to be discussed, and sometimes the discussion for each area can last multiple days. Participants are representatives from the business, usually the strongest or most influential employees of their specific function.

From an environmental psychology perspective, there are many advantages to this participatory process, but also many downsides.

1.     The process is based in the rational actor model. Each capability area is meticulously reviewed. Hundreds of decisions are made one-by-one, until the systems is fully designed. However, we know that this is rarely how people make decisions; we often lean instead towards “satisficing.”

2.     While participation is sought from some representatives of the business, there is no way to include everybody. Thus, many others feel as if they are not involved, and when the system is finally rolled out, these are the ones that experience the most pain.

3.     The time-intensive nature of this process is most definitely a tax on the participants’ directed attention. Moreover, they are often asked to participate as an addition to their normal work, so the expectations are even higher. The meetings are not spread out, and participants are not given time off to seek attention restoration. Therefore, it is likely that participants are not contributing in the most effective way towards the end of these sessions.

Looking back on this process, I can’t help but think that there are lot of potential improvements. For instance, perhaps the process should start by just asking “what really matters to you about how this technology works?” This would be much closer to satisficing. Similarly, is there a way to shorten the sessions or at least encourage opportunities for restoration during the sessions? Last, how can we involve more people in the process?