1,720,982 research outputs found
Know-about, know-that, know-how: A model for moving between theory and design practice
Get PDFThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2023Everything is designed. From the fork you hold in your hand, to the car you drive, to the public transportation you use, to the mechanisms for justice within a society, to the process of designing itself. Embedded in these designs are the assumptions that underlie the design methods and toolkits used in the design process. In practice, design happens through the application of methods (processes that result in design outcomes), toolkits (materials that support the implementation of methods), and heuristics (the skillful application of methods and toolkits) (Friedman & Hendry, 2019; Hendry, Friedman & Ballard, 2021; Nelson & Stolterman, 2012). Methods and toolkits originate within particular worldviews (Ansari, 2019) and carry with them the assumptions of those worldviews. For example, journey maps, a design method that originated and is used in industry, assume linear time and often ignore the material aspects of the experience at hand. Conversely, traditional methods for making coconut milk developed in Papua New Guinea, outside the dominant Western interpretations of time, allow for spending time together but take longer to enact (Wajcman, 2015). But there are always different ways of doing things, different worldviews, and different assumptions to bring to bear in a design situation. Designers can bring those different assumptions into a design situation by adapting design methods to account for new theoretical constructs. But in what ways does theory inform design methods and toolkits? How can this relationship be modeled? Can a model of the relationship between theory and design methods and toolkits be used to help translate specific theoretical constructs into established design methods and toolkits? If so, then could this model and the associated skills be taught to novice designers as they adapt design methods? In this dissertation, to gain traction on these questions, I begin by developing a bi-directional model of knowledge types – know-about, know-that, know-how – in design to describe how theory informs design practice and vice versa. While the model of knowledge types in design is bi-directional, to contain the scope of this dissertation I focus the remaining work on only one direction: from theory to practice. To demonstrate how the model of knowledge types in design could be used to guide the adaptation of design methods, I apply it to eight theoretical constructs (four about materiality and four about temporality) to translate theory-to-practice commitments for each construct and then use those commitments to adapt one established method, journey maps, and one established toolkit, Envisioning Cards. Then, I report on a brief educational case study, demonstrating how novice designers can use the model to adapt established design methods. Then, drawing on the above, I offer heuristics to guide others as they adapt design methods and toolkits. Finally, I reflect on the work of adapting design methods and toolkits as a design process and the flexibility of design methods and toolkits as a lever for incorporating theoretical constructs into design practice. This dissertation makes the following contributions: 1) a bi-directional model of knowledge types in design to describe how theory can inform design practice and vice versa; 2) one adapted design method; 3) one adapted design toolkit; 4) an educational case study exploring the use of the model of knowledge types in design as a tool for teaching method adaptation; and 5) heuristics that novice designers, design researchers, and practitioners can use to adapt other design methods and toolkits
Exploring Material Imaginaries: Action and Possibility in Everyday Artifacts
Get PDFThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2023Materials are made. So much so, and at such a scale, that researchers estimate that in 2020 the entire mass of human made things surpassed that of all living biomass (Elhacham et al. 2020). A world in which our materials are transformed into finished things, used and then discarded, pushes human and natural systems to the limit. A world in which materials remain in the foreground, visible and available, transforms inert and finished waste into sites of imagination and opportunity. In my dissertation, I investigate how we define and navigate the dynamic field of possibilities around materials. In Part I, I present a theoretical account of materials and imaginaries; explore how metaphor shapes our imaginations and technical practices; and propose a framework for generating new visions for materials. In Part II, I report on a design workshop I conducted with middle school students where they explored consumer electronics through the lens of material imaginaries–disassembling printers, identifying parts, exploring new ways of using the parts, and designing new resources. In Part III, I draw on the findings from Parts I and II to propose four design criteria researchers can use to further interrogate material imaginaries. My work offers five contributions: (1) A conceptual account of material imaginaries; (2) a workshop format for investigating material imaginaries in general; (3) findings from my fieldwork with young people and printers; (4) design work envisioning how interventions can reshape imaginaries; and (5) design criteria to evaluate and generate material practices. Taken together, my dissertation offers theoretical and practical tools for reimagining our relationship with materials
Designing with (Political) Complexity: Understanding Stakeholders, Emotion, Time, and Technology in the Case of Medical Aid-in-Dying
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2018In today’s increasingly technological society, human activity cannot be properly understood without referencing computing artifacts. As we interact with and through these artifacts in everyday life, they affect our emotions and sensibilities, our thinking and decisions, and how we act individually and collectively. Designers of artifacts, on reflection, inevitably take part in shaping the sociopolitical fabric our society. With this dissertation my overarching goal is to support, or rather cultivate and transform, the ways people understand, communicate, and act upon sociopolitical issues through design. I conducted investigations on stakeholders, emotion, time, and technology in the case of medical aid-in-dying. Medical aid-in-dying invokes diverse (and often conflicting) perspectives among stakeholders, providing a rich context for investigating how to design technology vis-à-vis a complex, multi-faceted process of social change. Specifically, I conducted semi-structured and task-based interviews with 27 professionals (15 health care workers and 12 NGO volunteers), who worked with patients considering medical aid-in-dying. I examined communication media and challenges, sensitive keywords and terminology, and stakeholders. Entangled in the web of complex social dynamics, my work raises methodological and ethical challenges, and calls for new design methods and frameworks. Methodologically, my dissertation contributes two new design methods—Stakeholder Tokens for eliciting diverse stakeholders and their interaction dynamics, and Meanings and Emotions for addressing participants’ emotions and sensibilities around controversial topics. Theoretically, the findings from this dissertation broaden human-computer interaction (HCI)’s understanding of publics by conceptualizing publics as a sociopolitical process of evolving public consciousness rather than as embodied persons who are somehow parallel to the concept of users. In addition, the findings extend value sensitive design’s conceptualization of stakeholders to include frameworks for excluded stakeholders, core and peripheral stakeholders, and difficult stakeholders. The findings also extend multi-lifepsan design by introducing a new category of multi-lifespan problem—which I call “slowly evolving public consciousness.” At the broadest level, my dissertation contributes to a fuller understanding of and richer discussion around what it means to design with publics in complex sociopolitical contexts
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Reflections on Usable Privacy for Location-Awareness Systems
No full textFor the past decade, the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab now at the University of Washington has been investigating privacy in public in relation to information technologies. More recently, we have begun collaborations with the Intel Research Seattle lab to extend those investigations to location-awareness technologies. In this brief paper, I offer ten propositions for privacy in the context of location-awareness technologies that have emerged from our work and continue to guide it. Finally, I end with a “deign to think with” for usable privacy.This material is based, in part, upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. IIS-0325035, IIS-0102558, IIS-9911185 and, in part, by a gift from Intel Corporation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or of Intel Corporation
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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