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Creativity Design processes Publications Research

The Productive Role of Material Design Artefacts in Participatory Design Events

Another paper here at the Nordichi conference, this time presented by my colleague Nicolai Brodersen Hansen: The Productive Role of Material Design Artefacts in Participatory Design Events.
Physical design artefacts are employed in a wide range of participatory design events, yet there are few comprehensive discussions of the properties and qualities of them in the literature of the field. In our work, we examine the productive role of material design artefacts in participatory design events. By productive, we refer to the ways in which participants in design events employ physical materials and artefacts to create momentum and move forward in the design process. We offer a theoretical foundation for understanding material artefacts in design, on the basis of pragmatist philosophy. Then, we employ this theoretical perspective to analyse a case in which a range of physical design materials was employed to envision and explore a future building, the Urban Mediaspace in Aarhus, Denmark. We use examples from this case to articulate a series of design considerations for employing material design artefacts in collaborative design events.

The Productive Role of Material Design Artefacts in Participatory Design Events from Nicolai Brodersen Hansen

Hansen, N. B., Dalsgaard, P. (2012): “The Productive Role of Material Design Artefacts in Participatory Design Events”. In Proceedings of NordiCHI 2012, Copenhagen, Danmark.

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Creativity Design processes Interaction design Research

Pragmatism, constraints and design creativity

Currently in Glasgow for the International Conference on Design Creativity, at which Michael Biskjaer and I have just given a talk about our paper Toward A Constraint-Oriented Pragmatist Understanding Of Design Creativity (PDF). The paper explores the potentials of pragmatist philosophy to enrich the discourse on design creativity in general and the concept of constraints specifically. We argue that pragmatism can inspire and inform the study of constraints in design creativity by offering a coherent and well-developed frame of understanding how designerly inquiry unfolds as a complex interplay between the designer and the resources at hand in the situation, which may continuously alternate between constraining and enabling roles, or even take on both roles simultaneously.

The slides from our talk are embedded below: