CROSSING THE LINE

Disasters mostly happen at borders. Borders create points of conflict – from the geophysical, social to political. A border by its nature requires a point, or line, at which one defined region becomes another. However in drawing a line between regions we need to first identify and clearly define these regions. Design research is a relatively new mode of enquiry in the domain of academic research, and hence is less well defined than its neighbouring subjects of engineering, social sciences and humanities.

The processes, methods and practices of Design Research are evolving. As a background to this paper we take the definition that Design Research is a mode of enquiry that engages the world with people and people with the world. Taking this definition, Design Research can take place in any discipline and anywhere that people engage with the world – which by its nature will take design researchers into new territories and landscapes; crossing over lines and engaging with and seeking out new ways of thinking.  This paper presents a study of cross disciplinary design research though the lens of design practice –focused on a  project involving architects, artists, curators, designers and engineers.

At the heart of designing for people is the design of experiences.  Designing for experiences is becoming a central focus for design research (Sanders, 2005). The proposition of this paper is that in order to fully design for experiences we need to approach the design of experiences from first principles. These ‘first principles’ must come from studies of how we sense and perceive the world. Vision, as our primary sense, is highly involved in dictating the kind of experiences we. The visual information we perceive provides some kind of sensation, which then in turn contributes to an experience. This paper in tends to begin to draw a link between perception, sensation and experience in an attempt to bring together visual perception sciences with design practice.

Using techniques drawn from Machine Vision, a design work ‘Lost’ was developed that addressed the experience of being lost in the mist on a Scottish mountain. The work was developed and exhibited as part of the UK’s Designing for the 21st Century research cluster Spatial Imagination in Design (Spatial Imagination, online).  This paper will outline the context, theory, methods and practices of the design work –drawing from computation (for example Mar 1982), ethnography (Fulton-Suri, 2005), experience design (Forlizzi and Ford, 2000), and visual perception (Rogers, Hamilton and Mather,2005). The outcome of this work and its success in linking perception, sensation and experience will be presented, with pointers to future direction and research questions.

References:

Fulton-Suri, J. (2005)  “Thoughtless Acts”, Chronicle Books, 2005
Forlizzi, J., Ford, S. (2000). “The Building Blocks of Experience: An Early Framework for Interaction Designers.” Designing Interactive Systems 2000 Conference Proceedings, New York, NY, 419-423.
Mar, D. (1983), Vision,  WH Freeman
Rogers, J., Hamilton, R. and Mather, G. (2005),  “Art and Design in Visual Motion Perception”,  Perception,34, 90, 2005
Sanders, L., (2005), “Inspiration, Information and Co-creation”, Proceedings of the 6th European Academy of Design, Bremen, 2005