Notions of Design, with an Emphasis on Sustainability-Centered Interaction Design

Speaker
Eli Blevis
School of Informatics, Indiana University - Bloomington

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Everyone is a designer—no one purposefully sets out to create accidents.

Nonetheless, conceptions of what design is about, what design is, and what designs are can vary quite a lot from one individual to another, from one discipline to another. In the computer sciences, Herbert Simon’s pronouncement that “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” is the pervasive notion that serves to underscore a conceptualization of design as a problem-solving activity. More recently, the nascent convergence of design and human-computer interaction (HCI) has created more widespread understanding of the need for an additional conceptualization of design as a problem-setting activity. There are many other important ways to conceptualize design, each with implications for how design with the materials of technologies can be more effectively applied and interpreted. In this talk, I will enumerate, compare, and contrast these various conceptualizations, appealing as often as possible to illustrative examples.

I will emphasize a particular conceptualization of design which concerns the relation between sustainability and interaction design. For a perspective of sustainability, I define design as an act of choosing among or informing choices of future ways of being, a definition which is inspired by several important design authors-principally by Tony Fry’s notion of defuturing in his book “A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing” and as well by Willis’ notion of ontological designing, which itself owes to Winograd & Flores’ “Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design” as well as to Heidegger’s essay “The Question concerning technology”. Alexander’s recent work on structure-preserving transformations6 is also an inspiration. This definition of design from the perspective of sustainability serves as a lens through which design values, design methods, and designs themselves may be evaluated, especially in the context of interaction design.

Speaker's Bio

Eli Blevis is on the faculty of the School of Informatics at Indiana University at Bloomington. His primary arena of teaching and research is Human-Computer Interaction Design (HCI/d), by which is meant the now established confluence of HCI and design. He has a special interest in design theory and sustainability-centered interaction design. Prior to this point in his career, (i) Dr. Blevis has designed and managed the construction of production software in industry (ii) he has designed and managed the construction of learning software at a major “Artificial Intelligence” lab, (iii) he has taught design, especially the design of systems which integrate software, at a professionally-oriented design school, and (iv) he has spent a great deal of his private life pursuing his interests in music and photography at a level no less passionate than any professional. His career is unified by the common theme of design—that is, a passion for being designerly, for understanding the role of design in the world, as a creative endeavor as well as a pervasive social construct with potential for sometimes well-advised, sometimes ill-advised, always well-intended, and oftentimes unanticipated effects on the collective human condition.

Speaker's Website
http://eli.informatics.indiana.edu/index.html

Host
John Zimmerman