One of the aims of the residency was also to resolve issues with the existing website, built in Flash, so difficult to update, slow to download and temperamental in terms of navigation. This is the new site made in iWeb and detailing all projects, with links to papers and including a blog taking over from this one.
www.sarahkettleydesign.co.uk
After the fantastic success of the Scotland Girl Geeks Dinner launch in
Dundee, we are proud to announce the launch of Edinburgh Girl Geeks Dinners!
Details are listed below. But be quick – we’re expecting the event to be a
fantastic night!
14th May 2009, 7pm – 10pm, Mini-Forum 2, Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton
Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB
Cost – £10 including hot buffet and soft drinks
Girl Geeks Dinners has arrived in Edinburgh! Come to our launch night, where we hope to gather the region’s brightest female computer scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs and techies for good food and good company. The evening will be chilled, friendly and informal. We hope to attract students, as well as professionals across the Lothians.
There will be 2 speakers on the night – Danielle Wilde (bio below) and another TBC. But there will be plenty of time available to mingle and chat throughout the evening. We hope you can join us in the first ever Edinburgh GGD!
Tickets are limited (40 available), so please book soon to avoid disappointment.
Tickets available at:
https://www.epay.ed.ac.uk/events/eventdetails.asp?eventid=114
Confirmed Speaker:
Danielle Wilde is an artist and design researcher at Monash University Faculty of Art and Design (Melbourne, Australia) and the CSIRO Division of Materials Science and Engineering (Belmont, near Geelong). She is engaged in practice-based doctoral research, at the nexus of performance, fashion, fine art, critical (technology) and interaction design. Her projects include highly visible, extended and extending interfaces in addition to “invisible”, embedded and distributed systems, which allow the wearer to actuate and control changes in sound, colour, light, shape and form. She is currently travelling through Europe on a series of visiting fellowships, working in collaboration with the Open University’s Pervasive Interaction Lab, STEIM in Amsterdam, and the Technical Textiles Research Group at Nottingham Trent University.
Girl Geeks Scotland and Space & Place are thrilled to welcome Stephen Barrass to Dundee. Bring a mug and hear him talk:
Monday 6th April 11am
Lower Foyer Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art
Assoc. Prof. Stephen Barrass lead research on Advanced Audio Interfaces at the CSIRO ICT Centre in Canberra from 2000-2004, before joining the University of Canberra. His creative research interests include mixed reality, interaction design, interactive museum exhibits, wearable interfaces, data sonification, and generative art. His Welcome Dancers is a permanent exhibit at the National Museum of Australia, and Zizi the Affectionate Couch (pictured above) is in the private collection of the Museum of Old and New Art. Other works have appeared at the National Gallery of Australia, the Sydney Opera House, the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, ISEA in Singapore, and the Seoul Digital City Biennale.
Only two or three weeks left! I have been offered a chance to talk at DJCAD’s regular Space and Place on the 1st April, 12.30 – 1.30. Although there’s not much time to prepare, it will be a valuable opportunity to tie together these various strands that have characterised the placement. There is an element of risk in this of course, given that I chose to pursue a handful of projects simultaneously, and all remain ongoing.
Here is the blurb that is being used, as at the CraftResearch blog:
Sarah has been attached to the AHRC Past, Present and Future Crafts project since January through the pilot SAC Crafts Development Bursary scheme. In this talk she will reflect on her time in the Masters of Design studio at DJCAD with reference to the original aims of the residency, outlining the ‘Little Stories’, or strands of research, that she has been pursuing. Funding was awarded to support “a practice led investigation of craft through engagement with the emerging needs of critical and functional interaction design”, and the subsequent demonstration of craft as a discipline to other fields of creative practice.
The Little Stories that have emerged include Early Moves, the design of attachments for body worn sensor networks for pre school children in a project investigating rich motor control development, and Migration, starting points for a lo-tech formal design method for working with state change materials. In addition, the residency has provided a valuable space for reflection on the development of a new area of practice, and Sarah will take the opportunity here to pull out some of the commonalities in her work in fashion and textiles, jewellery and interaction design, to create new directions for research and creative outputs, and to create a positive narrative of an interdisciplinary and experimental practice.
In a way, a great deal of the collaborative work with the Speckled Computing consortium has been an exercise in negotiating expectations of ‘design’. Being trained in a craft discipline rather than straight product design can lead in these situations to some rather tortuous second guessing as to what project stakeholders variously imagine wil be delivered. A recent Knowledge Transfer Network workshop used Technology Readiness Levels to specifiy what funding was being made available for, that is, taking novel technologies from levels 3 (proof of concept) to 7 (pre-production), and seems to be to be potentially useful as a tool for collaboratively arriving at a shared understanding of what roles will be played out, and what resources will be needed. I can imagine it being used to position whole projects and individual tasks with regard to material, function and finish/aesthetics. In turn, Graham Pullin suggests a crude classification of prototypes (the only word more ambiguous than design itself) as being ‘looks like’, ‘works like’ and ‘behaves like’ prototypes. And I’m sure this is what Jordan was writing about back in 2000 in Designing Pleasurable Products – something else to revisit.
So far in Early Moves, we have tested some sketch prototypes for their broad aesthetic appeal with 4 and 5 year olds, for their ability to keep the sensors in place reliably, and for their robustness in the face of throwing activities in the playground. In this way we are trying to unite works like, looks like and behaves like, as well as introducing a higher level of interaction in the form of engaging the children in choosing their wearables and decorating them with stickers. To involve everyone, we plan to provide wearable ‘looks like’ prototypes for the data capture sessions proper, although supplying stickers worked very well this first session. The opportunity to make these other non-working prototypes allows me to explore ideal aesthetics for the technology were it to be redesigned for wearability.
I’ve just got into the studio to hear the masters students have been blowing up balloons again to visualise their design projects. It’s a really interesting concept, to physicalise, and not just visualise, design thinking, and it works to inform the designer herself as well as to act as a focal point in communication with other stakeholders. A fun example from my own experience can be seen in the atelier I took part in at the 2005 European Convivio Interaction Design summer workshop, where prompt questions took the form of large visual dice and completed questionnaires were configured as pyramids, sometimes hanging from an upside down umbrella. Like the clusters of balloons here in Dundee, the use of a large prop changed the studio space itself, and our relationship with the data we were engaging with.
What has been really helpful here, has been the chance to see how such physicalisation and visualisation is encouraged as a part of the teaching and learning process, both in terms of my own immediate management of what often feels like a fragmented practice, and in terms of insights into design pedagogy. Strategies include knowledge swatches (a concept being worked on by Hazel White), visual reviews to draw out persistent threads, and ‘patient’s notes’, bundled records of conversation and and mind maps drawing on the well known HCI affordances of paper in medical practice, where the thickness of the bundle and the markings on the papers in it are immediately telling. I am making use of all of these just now, and can see them continuing to be useful tools – they at once organise multiple interrelated strands of work, and demonstrate work being done when much design activity can be frustratingly intangible. And of course they are particulary important as we grapple with service design and complex collaborative projects rather than the autonomous shiny finished object.
Here is another of the Little Stories I knew would play a part in the residency – a project with the Research Consortium for Speckled Computing to design wearable with a good acceptance level for four different patient groups. One of these is Early Moves, a research project looking at children’s development of rich whole body movement with and without pedagogical intervention. The Speckled nodes will capture the movements of three children over the course ten weeks activity sessions, focusing on throwing. This is one of those projects that could take up as much time as you have to give it, and it’s taken me quite a while to realise that I am not designing the HCI element of this at all, but am to sketch prototype desirable and functional attachments for the existing technology packages. Now I know this, I can enjoy myself, and four year olds are a great age range to design for. This evening I press ganged my own children into playing with fimo clay and began getting my hands dirty with cardboard, sticky tape and other blue peter type materials. Lots of themes from other work is raising its head as I go along – building experience with polymer clays (after Fran Priest’s clay workshop last year, and the precious metal clay jewellery), the feathered elements of Stille, and the perennial design problem of minimising the size of the pieces. PDFs of presentations given in December last year are available on the specknet website here, the most relevant being from the sessions on the 11th.
