Co-design Fiction workshop
This graduation project is an explorative journey of Co-design Fiction workshop, a co-creation method inspired by design fiction to engage the stakeholders, with an emphasis on strategic innovation of internet of things applications in the future context of crisis management.
Introduction
The project is initiated to bring insights for both the content of the design and research challenge and the method to explore it. Thales is interested in the exploration of strategic insights about new types of interaction principles with novel technologies in the context of future crisis management, which are valued for road-mapping and strategy development. Moreover, design fiction, as a new design method, is expected to be explored and used to envision futures vividly, with a sense of realism in which technological and societal trends merge.
To conclude, the project assignment is formulated as: ‘Through a design fiction approach, to explore future interaction scenarios in crisis management for strategic innovation.’ Originally, the planning is to design future interaction scenarios and take the scenarios as triggers to stir discussions with multi-stakeholders in Thales in a workshop.
Theoretical Background
A literature review was conducted as the first step to bridge the background knowledge gap. To specify, three topics, crisis management, internet of things and embodied interaction, were studied to gain the following insights for the project content. It is concluded that information sense-making for situation awareness and emergent collaboration are the two main design themes for interaction and user interface innovation in crisis management. In addition, internet of things is a promising technological environment to ground the design with its connectivity of everyday objects, human beings and virtual data and environments. Three main domains: smart objects, smart environment and empowered human are summarized as the practical applications. Also, several controversial issues around the technologies call for attention for the social impact. Furthermore, embodied interaction was studied as the future interaction style to lower the threshold of technology, characterized by its novel setting, engagement and connection of action and meaning. Three design themes are synthesized as thick practice, spatial interaction and embodied facilitation.
For the proposed approach, design fiction was investigated with a link to future studies as a practice of this subject. As a designerly way of research’, design fiction distinguishes itself with an emphasis on the engagement with multi-stakeholders, social concern for human and context feasibility of an emerging technology, and future-orientation. ‘Diegetic prototypes’ is the technique of design fiction. Technically, it is an iterative experimental process with four phases, idea generation, materialization, narrative and discussions.
Forming “Co-design Fiction”
On the basis of the theoretical insights, a design brief was formed as ‘to envision intelligent objects and future scenarios in crisis management in a fictional world, in which the relationship between the embodied interaction style and paradigms and data-networks are explicated’.
Next, a design strategy framework was formulated to guide the following design practices, including a top-down path as needs and information oriented and a bottom-up path as technology of IoT oriented. Through some ideation activities, both individually and collectively, several initial intelligent objects and scenarios ideas were generated.
Yet, as a side but essential effect, the focus of the project was changed at this phase. Almost all the participants in the ideation sessions mentioned the difficulties to get empathy with the end users, due to lack of real experiences in such situations. However, the proposed design strategy takes current action objects that emergency responders use as the innovation resource. Apparently, the end users have profound first hand experiences and knowledge in terms of objects usage and information communication story in real crisis situations. Obviously, more constructive innovation directions can be created if the subjective user experiences are incorporated in the concept design activities.
On top of that, the generative tool used in the sessions triggered the idea to conduct a co-creation workshop, namely “Co-design Fiction”, with the end users for its immersion and empathy. We believe the twist can bring about more interesting and meaningful insights and design directions. Therefore, the focus of the project was reshaped as: ‘develop a co-design fiction tool and workshop to discover opportunities for internet-of-things applications in crisis management.’
Co-design Fiction Workshop Development
Inspired by the approach of design fiction, co-design fiction is envisioned as a co-creation technique to facilitate generative research practice. The development process started from a preliminary literature study about participatory design. Next, the initial design proposal of workshop process and props design was iterated in four play tests. Also after this phase the aim of the workshop was crystallised to merely bring about insights of user needs in crisis situations.
Final Workshop Design
In-house emergency response team (BHV) in TU Delft was chosen as the participants of the upcoming actual co-design fiction workshop, considering the feasibility to conduct an evaluation test with the end users. Accordingly, the final workshop process and props design were tailored to the BHVers’ experiences and knowledge. The research aim of the workshop is threefold: firstly, as ‘experts of crisis situations’, the participants are expected to bring insights on user needs, including shared concerns of situation awareness, interdependencies between people and between working tools in emergent collaboration; secondly, they should be engaged to express their thoughts smoothly and share their experiences both individually and collectively; thirdly, the workshop results should serve as a set-up for further design fiction practices in crisis management.
For the design process, firstly, a fictional story was constructed to facilitate the props design, as a big fire crisis happening before the upcoming IO festival in the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. Next, the final design proposal was detailed and refined. To specify, the workshop contains four main phases, which are facilitated by various generative tool elements.
- Welcome & introductions and Stage setting
At the beginning, facilitator introduces the general information and schedule of the workshop. In addition, the overarching story setting is demonstrated in an act-out live play with storytelling tool examples, including the stage, character, object and information clouds, etc.
- Task 1: Personal story telling
Participants tell nested stories to reflect on their personal experiences, conclude several shared concerns collectively, and also bring about the working objects they normally use in similar situations.
- Task 2: Story remix
Participants vote for the most important shared concerns first. Next they take each shared concern as a lens to discuss the relevance with each nested story on the story timeline. As such, the create stories can be explored extensively and connected with each other, thereby generate the interdependencies.
- Wrap-up
To wrap up the session, facilitator explains to the participants that their contribution will serve as a starting point for further development of intelligent objects and future scenarios as internet of things applications in crisis management.
Evaluation Workshop
A final co-design fiction workshop was conducted with the BHV’ers in TU Delft. It holds twofold goal to validate the workshop process and props design and to gain insights about the user needs. Generally speaking, the participants could finish most of the task requirements and most tool elements worked as expected to trigger experience recalling and discussion. Yet, the actual workshop did reveal some unnoticed problems, together with unexpected surprises, which were not found in previous play tests. Besides, the group dynamic was influenced a bit due to the small group size of participants. An overview of stories constructed in the workshop, as well as the concerns and bottlenecks they proposed were demonstrated as the user insights conclusion.
Xijin Zhong
www.xijinzhong.com
Rozendaal, M.C., Vegt, N.J.H., Varkevisser, M.
master thesis, May 2015
