Digital Product Design (event)

On Friday 23rd November was the second Product Scotland workshop (supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Methods Network programme). The subject for this workshop was the emerging field of digital product design. It was introduced and led by Jon Rogers and was held at the Visual Research Centre (VRC) at University of Dundee. Following on from the previous workshop, the themes explored were: Future Body, Future Food and Future City. These were explored through augmenting a found or bought object acquired by doing a rapid "city-sample". Basically we all went out and got something and brought it back to the VRC where we spent the afternoon enhancing these objects by embedding a piece of electroluminescent (EL) material into them. Afterwards there was a reception at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) to look at the objects and talk about the day's activities. There was an emphasis on not being intimidated by the technology (in this case it really couldn't have been simpler) and having fun with it. Which we did. Like the previous workshop, the surprising thing was how much can be done in a short period.

The next workshop will be at Gray's School of Art on 6th December, 2007.

Product Scotland (events)

Product Scotland is a collaborative venture between Scottish Higher Education Institutes involved in product design. The aim of Product Scotland is to create a network that is primarily, though not exclusively, open to Scottish based product designers drawn from academic and industrial backgrounds and to achieve research excellence through knowledge pooling. Product Scotland, with the backing of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Methods Network programme, are running 4 workshops between 8 November and 17 December, 2007 to communicate and advance knowledge and skills in product design and development.

To reserve your place or for more information please contact Paul Rodgers on 0131 455 2313 or p.rodgers@napier.ac.uk

Emerging Research Methods for Product Design - Edinburgh
Thursday 8 November, 2007
Workshop Activities 11:00 to 17:00
Workshop Open Evening 18:00 to 19:30

Digital Product Design - Dundee
Friday 23 November, 2007
Workshop Activities 11:00 to 17:00
Workshop Open Evening 18:00 to 19:30

Domestic/Public Rapid Prototyping - Aberdeen
Thursday 6 December, 2007
Workshop Activities 11:00 to 17:00
Workshop Open Evening 18:00 to 19:30

Creativity - Glasgow
Monday 17 December, 2007
Workshop Activities 11:00 to 17:00
Workshop Open Evening 18:00 to 19:30

Research Methods for Design (event)

Yesterday was the first Product Scotland workshop (supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Methods Network programme). The subject for this workshop was the use of ethnography as a research method in design. The schedule and brief were as follows:

Emerging Research Methods for Product Design Workshop
Thursday 8 November, 2007

10:30 – Arrive Napier University, Merchiston Campus and have tea or coffee

11:00 – Meet and Greet – introduce the day’s activities

11:30 – Introductions (between people)

12:00 – Kick off Project

Future Body, Future Food, Future City

What will the future body, food and city look like? How have the things we carry on our body changed during the last decade? What do we regularly carry to and from work? Will our body have to adapt to the pressures of the future?

How have our food consumption patterns changed? How do deal with the transaction of food for cash? What kinds of conversations do we have about food? Do we really enjoy eating or is it a task that we just do to survive?

Are cities of today prepared for tomorrow? How do we exploit the physical man made structures of the city? How do we alter or adapt the purpose or context of things in the city to meet our end needs, wants and desires?

Please remember, that it may be the little things (minutiae) that will reap the real insights into the future body, food or city. Someone once said “The Devil is in the detail”, so perhaps you should focus on the little things and leave the grand phenomena to someone else.

12:30 – Research – explore – investigate - observe

13:30 – Return to studio – Food served - analyse & interpret data collected

14:00 – Analyse & interpret data collected

14:30 – Start presentation

15:00 – Prepare work for presentation

16:00 – Pin up work

16:30 – Reflection and discussion of the day’s activities

17:00 – End of the day’s activities

Move exhibition and materials to Edinburgh College of Art (eca)

18:00 – ‘Open Evening’ opens

19:30 – ‘Open Evening’ closes

There were about 30 participants in the workshop from very diverse backgrounds. After a brief introduction we were all sent out into the city armed with digital cameras to explore aspects of 'user-artefact interaction' and to listen to and observe people doing everyday things. Then it was back to the studio to compile our findings as montages of images and texts. Karen Magazine was indicated as an example of what we were aiming for. One of the reasons we created Product Scotland was to create a network through using our design skills rather than talking about it - as at a typical conference. This was certainly the case. Each participant produced a book within a few hours and we gathered at Edinburgh College of Art to look at these and round off the day with a drink. I think everyone's expectations for these books were surpassed. There are some outstanding individual efforts and collectively they offer up insights about familiar activities. Eventually some of these will appear on the Product Scotland website.

The next workshop will be held at University of Dundee on 23 November 2007.

Sensory Urbanism Proceedings

This book contains papers from the January 2008 conference, Sensory Urbanism, held by the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. This conference was part of the Designing for the 21st Century Initiative project: 'Multimodal Representation of Urban Space'. This project is funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC). I am on the advisory board of this project. Papers deal with issues surrounding the sensory perception of urban design and how to design better for all the senses. The book is illustrated throughout, and contains 26 papers from fields including architecture, urban design, environmental psychology, urban design, planning, sound design and more.

"Representing space is not only a long-standing challenge to the arts but is also a major task in the planning process for buildings, cities, and many other products. This particularly applies to the "Urban Renaissance" of our days with its emphasis on public places.

Space – more than the surrounding objects or buildings – seems to demand to be represented not only visually, as it is not only determined by the visible surrounding objects, but also by sound and smell which are literally "in the air", and by an integrated multimodal body experience which is related to the space itself. Nevertheless, spaces, especially urban spaces in planning processes, are today usually only represented in a visual manner.

The major hypothesis of our project is that much better results for convenient and appealing urban spaces could be achieved if all sensory factors were acknowledged and controlled during the design process. There is no doubt about the multimodal quality of urban space – it always appeals to all senses. For example the most beautifully designed public square is destroyed if a noisy and odorous motorway is nearby, and not much would be left of the special atmosphere of the Piazza della Fontana di Trevi in Rome if the sound and coolness deriving from the running water was missing. All these factors are usually poorly represented (if considered at all) during the design process, but such an appropriate representation could help create better public spaces.

How might such an appropriate representation of the multimodal qualities of urban space be achieved during the design process? Depending on this general question several sub-questions emerge: How can space be represented in general? What means of representing space have already been developed? What kind of design control could be achieved if the multimodal qualities of spaces were also included into the design process? What kind of creativity might be evoked by using methods of multimodal space representation? What affordable and practical technologies might be used in common design processes for spaces?"

For more information contact:

Dr Raymond Lucas
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Department of Architecture
University of Strathclyde
Room G28, Architecture Building
131 Rottenrow
Glasgow, G4 0NG

raymond.lucas@strath.ac.uk

The Sensory Notation Handbook will be available soon, with the first edition detailing the notational system and providing 30 case studies from Rome, Tokyo and Boston. An expanded edition of 50 studies - including Glasgow and Edinburgh will follow.

Creativity (event)

The final Product Scotland workshop (supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Methods Network programme) was held at The Lighthouse (Scotland's Centre for Architecture and Design) on 17th December. The subject for this workshop was 'Creativity'. The day started with a presentation from Craig Whittet and Alex Milton about various understandings of and approaches to creativity. There followed some exercises for those attending in hastily assembled groups that tried to show that less-structured, nonlinear approaches to problem solving were more creative. However, given that most of the groups immediately tried to subvert the system as presented, it was actualy hard to tell which approach was more or less creative (it was all very wacky). The organizers had addressed this aspect of the workshop with the subtitle/caveat 'Preaching to the Converted'.

The organizers of the other 3 workshops were then invited to provide a brief review of the outcomes of these for the benefit of those that had not attended them. We were then introduced to the brief for the day's main activity. This consisted of working in groups to produce a 'pitch' for a project, product or service that was to be developed in response to the overarching workshop themes of 'Future Body, Future Food and Future City'. We were encouraged to begin discussing ideas over lunch and informed that representatives of the funding body Nesta would be attending our presentations.

The pitches ended up being quite diverse and involved everything from slide presentations, paper prototypes of interactive web-based applications, systems models and mocked-up business plans. Each group had 5 minutes to pitch. As in the other workshops the most striking thing about the results was the breadth and scope of what can be achieved in a ridiculously short amount of time by disparate individuals that embrace the spirit of the event with a sense of adaptability.

A Product Scotland DVD has been produced, a book is in the works and eventually more documentation of the 4 events will go up on the Product Scotland website. There are also discussions occurring to make subsequent funding bids for more money to conduct more events in the future. If you want to know more contact Paul Rodgers on 0131 455 2313 or at p.rodgers@napier.ac.uk

de-form (event)

Thursday 6th December was the third Product Scotland workshop (supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Methods Network programme). The subject for this workshop was: scanning, sampling and rapid prototyping. It was introduced and led by Jon Pengelly and was held at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen. Again the themes explored were: Future Body, Future Food and Future City with an emphasis on the use of computer-based technologies to transition between the digital and the physical and vice versa. The workshop explored how these technologies are impacting on the traditional role of the product designer. Participants were asked to bring to the workshop an object that they had a personal emotional attachment to, or something associated with food on the move, personal space or urban escapism. The workshop went something like this:

10.30 – 11.00 Arrival and coffee
11.0 - 11.30 Jon Pengelly: overview - themes & format for the day
11.30 – 11.45 Geoffrey Mann: scanning moths & clouds
11.45 – 1.00 Body scanning
1.00 – 1.45 Lunch
1.45 - 2.00 John Marshall: 21st Century transformations in manufacturing
2.00 - 3.45 Group working: generating and manipulating data from digital scans, printing work from body scanning, object scans etc.
3.45 – 4.00 Coffee
4.00 – 5.30 Finishing up and bringing together thoughts related to theme
6.00 – 8.00 Reception at Peacock Visual Arts

This workshop was slightly different than the previous two (see below). There was certainly more of an emphasis on computing. However, there was the same focus on the 'hands-on' that has carried through all the workshops. Various strategies were explored to make digital objects physical and physical objects digital. These ranged from the 'misuse' of ultra high tech 3D scanners (e.g. moving around in a body scanner - it crashed) to 'rapid prototyping' that can be done on your kitchen table and 3D object scanning without a scanner. The slides from my presentation are below and some useful links can be found here.

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The next workshop will be about 'Creativity' and will be held at The Lighthouse in Glasgow on 17th December, 2007.