This is a response to The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William H. Whyte.
Whyte has done a great service to modern urban planning with his close study of the urban open space, teasing the meaning and reason out fo the often puzzling behaviors of the urban masses. His careful examination of sitting habits and other measures of park use has provided designers with tangible goals and specifications when aiming to create more inviting spaces. I especially enjoyed seeing the narration from Whyte’s video in print form as it is quite hilarious when paired with images and surprisingly readable without.
Of particular importance to our current project is the chapter on “triangulation”, which describes the points of interest that draw strangers together and into a park: views, sculptures, and entertainers (good and bad). While I feel that many of Whyte’s observed behaviors would be absent in today’s parks due to cultural shifts in the city and the nation, I do think that his examples provide a valuable launching point in our exploration into viable options for our instruction sets for strangers project.
This is a response to “Cultural Probes” by Gaver, Dunne, and Pacenti.
The main lesson to be taken away from this reading is: “it depends”. Design is contextual and especially in the case of location-specific design, special care must be paid to the people and special needs of the location and its culture. While Whyte showed us how similar sized open spaces in similar sized cities grapple with similar problems and use issues, Gaver, Dunne, and Pacenti would much rather design with the belief that no two places are governed by the same design challenges.
In order to find out more about the unique problems of the different spaces they undertook to design, they employed an elaborate system wherein they engaged the future recipients of their design project and involved them in certain novel exercises, each designed to reveal different potential design issues. On the whole, the exercises were pretty quirky and quite long winded. However, they did seem to yield some valuable insights. I wonder how my group might be able to gain some insights into the special needs of our space’s inhabitants.
This is a response to “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush.
This was a super long article about the importance of scientists and researchers and offers some speculative thoughts on what the future might hold from the windowsill of 1945. Most of the paper is interesting due to the obviously restrained futurist tone. Still, the ideas about a photography that does not require wet development and a terminal that can store great amounts of written information is especially funny. Of course, Bush does deserve props for envisioning a future of digital photography, personal computers and (the main point of the reading) the internet-like memex. I wonder how much of a role this paper played in the early days of the internet and who else thought, hey maybe, information should be (hyper)linked together.
This is a response to “P2P and the Promise of Internet Equality” by Philip E. Agre.
Agre seeks to write about the idea of architecture, or technology, versus institution, or society, by examining the rise of P2P computing in the frameworks of four thinkers: Veblen, Hayek, North, and Commons. Truthfully, I found the history quite dense and the application of the ideas to the current day model thin and uninspired. According to Agre, Veblen: speculated a society organized and run by professionals, around whom knowledge would continually pool; Hayek: argued no central authority could synthesize the necessary knowledge needed to run a complex market; North: institutions are run with rules like games; Commons: institutions a determined by social roles, which are defined by communities, and so collective bargaining is what moves everything along. Great, except that the way Agre proceeds to talk about the current-day is overly simplified: the Internet will make information available to everyone, the decentralized Internet is run on a protocol that is standardized and thus central, as the Internet evolves its system will need to evolve in response to new threats, & Napster was flawed. Nothing mind blowing here. Read the article twice and now must move on…
This is a response to “Cardboard Computers” by Ehn & Kyng.
I really enjoyed this reading despite forgetting to post a response online last week. Creating and getting physical as an agent of immediacy and instant feedback sounds good and is definitely not what I’m used to. I like thinking things through, sitting around weighing options, and sketching things out. Ehn & Kyng make the important point that prototypes can exist on an extremely simplistic and even abstract level but be very useful to the design process; observing how testers interact and perceive of a prototype can provide valuable insight.
This is a response to “Experience Prototyping” by Buchenau & Suri.
Overtly an examination of design concerns surrounding experience prototyping, I read this article as a defense of prototyping designed experiences. As the scope and realm of design continues to evolve, the popularity of recognizing experience design as a worthwhile endeavor has risen. Buchenau & Suri set out to show, through case studies, that prototyping experiences is worthwhile in that it can immediately reveal to users and clients the set of future conditions that a design may seek to create. It also helps designers by making it easier to brainstorm new ideas. One particularly interesting example is that of prototyping through role playing. By prompting testers to role-play the experience of riding a train, designers were able to identify key problems and possible design solutions. It’s interesting how a purely digital prototype might not as immediately yield such insights.