The post Bauhaus Futures Book Chapter appeared first on Alex Taylor.

The post EASST 2018 Presentation appeared first on Alex Taylor.

What I really enjoyed in reading this book is that it offers a way for those of us in design to think with the kind of hopeful scholarship coming out of feminist theory. For so many, scholars like Haraway are a challenge to read, but not only does Rosner make this scholarship accessible, she spins something new into the ideas. She takes Haraway’s ‘speculative fabulations’ and provides very tangible ways to think ‘with’ stories, and think ‘other’ and ‘more than’ with stories. Her design interventions (constituting a patchwork across the book) provide exemplary ways of both undertaking design and also thinking with it. The centrepiece, the work Rosner has done with others on weaving the Apollo mission’s ‘core memory’, speaks then to both a designerly practice for doing technological innovation and a way to do design in responsible, sensitive and open-ended ways.

Beyond recounting her exemplary design practice, Rosner does a lovely job setting the stage in the early parts to the book. We learn how an instrumentalist design prevails in today’s science and technology, and yet Rosner shows it didn’t always and doesn’t have to be this way. I liked, in particular, her interweaving story of Haraway’s biography and Lucy Suchman’s profound influence on science and technology, which serves to draw out sometimes common and sometimes contrasting viewpoints. This stitching together of some arguably very different threads produces a lively tapestry of ideas for Rosner to work with, showing immediately her commitment to a generative working with the relations between design and technoscientific innovation.

I can’t wait to see how this book impacts practice and the future wave of designers aiming to make a difference. I for one will be adding it to my class readings.

The post Reading “Critical Fabulations” appeared first on Alex Taylor.

Billed as the first digital home assistant, Audrey was released in November 2000. Jointly designed by the famed design firm, IDEO, and the tech industry’s then flavour of the month, 3COM, Audrey was praised for its industrial design and innovative appliance-like approach to home computing. Six months later, Audrey was on her way to the proverbial glue factory.

Named, somewhat incongruously, after Audrey Hepburn, the domestic appliance was conceived in response to the heavyweight computing paradigm prevalent in the day. The premise was a computer designed for the home; a simplified device with limited input mechanisms, a basic feature set and a softened aesthetic (available in five ‘kitchen matching’ colours: meadow, linen, ocean, slate and sunshine).
Interleaving interview transcripts recorded with two of Audrey’s design team with written materials available on the appliance, we consider why a technology failed that on the face of it was thoughtfully designed and strategically targeted. Self-reflection from the designers will be set against the hyperbole surrounding the product’s release and its cult status achieved in subsequently spawned online forums. Overall, the collected materials will be amassed to critically reflect on the sudden demise of Audrey. Given the lessons learnt from Audrey’s history, thought will also be given to whether it may be time to revisit the idea of an information appliance for the home and what form this appliance might take.

The post Audrey, Anyone? appeared first on Alex Taylor.

Design Issues, Summer 2017, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 25–36

The post Article in Design Issues appeared first on Alex Taylor.

SAVE THE DATE 11June 6pm Opening VIENNA BIENNALE 2015: IDEAS FOR CHANGE https://t.co/TWZntdYWBX pic.twitter.com/061HYLrT6D

— VIENNA BIENNALE (@VieBiennale) April 22, 2015

… the Biennale sets the developments in robotics and AI against the future of work and labour. I’ve used this as an invitation to consider two ‘modes’ of capability:

When it comes to judging the capacities of humans and nonhumans, we are drawn to two modes of existence. In one mode, we are compelled to see capability as residing within an actor, as an intrinsic quality of their being. A favourite determinant is the brain-weight to body-weight ratio; another is genetic predisposition. We have devised all manner of tests to isolate human and nonhuman capacities: IQ tests, rats mazes and Turing tests among them. Naturally, humans come out on top using most counts.
In the second mode, we observe actors excel in their achievements. We allow ourselves to be surprised and delighted by exhibitions of capacity that exceed our expectations (and that contravene the first mode in so many ways). To find evidence of this mode, one need only turn to that vast repository of record and observation, YouTube, and witness the viewing numbers for titles like “species [x] and species [y] playing together”, “species [x] and species [y] unlikely friends”, and so on. As these titles suggest, capability is often recognised here as accomplished with others—with other objects, other actors, other critters.
Speculating on human capacities—on what humans might be capable of and how they might work in the future—I find myself asking, as the animal studies scholar Vinciane Despret does, which of these modes is ‘more interesting’ and which ‘makes more interesting’. Which of these modes invites us to speculate on new fabulations of actors of all kinds, of actors becoming-with each other, of becoming other-than-humanly-capable, of becoming more capable?
I am taken by the mode that views capability as collectively achieved and that invites those conditions that enlarge capacities through on-going interminglings. The future of work, through this mode, will be dictated not by the limits of being human, but by how we might best attune ourselves with others, how we might become more capable together.

The post Vienna art, design, and architecture biennale appeared first on Alex Taylor.

The article is a hard hitting critique of Apple’s current design philosophy. More than this, though, the two long time interaction design gurus set out a clear project for design, one that they see Apple having been instrumental in but now deviating from. Their general argument is, on the face of it, pretty convincing. Yet digging a little deeper it’s one that I have problems with. This post is really an effort to sort things out in my own mind.
I think, outwardly, at least, Norman and Tog have a point about Apple doing a disservice to design. Certainly, in their marketing and stores, they are putting a lot of emphasis on visual aesthetic and physical form. As Norman and Tog say, this conveys a message that the business of design (and how it is being widely promoted by Apple) is all about making things pretty. I am fairly confident though that Apple’s designers would make a strong case for putting meticulous effort into interaction cues, and visual (and tactile) feedback—that is, in thinking carefully about the ensemble of product/interaction design. I’ve read interviews with Apple’s designers saying just this and heard Ive talking about the painstaking efforts to convey interactional qualities through animation, touch, tactility, etc. Whether they’ve made good choices or not is, I’d say, another matter.
Again, I also recognise that Norman and Tog have some very clear and convincing arguments for the kind of interaction design they proselytise. I worry though that they are part of the old guard that sees some of the original ‘solutions’ to the problems they themselves created/defined as the best ones (for example, what they see to be ).

If we were to take this reference—indeed reverence—to Apple’s past design at face value, we would be led to imagine that none of us had problems with using earlier versions of Mac OS. Well, of course we did. I never really got on with Apple’s original bitmap Chicago font, the open/save dialogues were notoriously confusing, and we’re still left with the legacy of a very awkward solution for ejecting media.


More importantly, there is a sense of the authors misjudging the changing ways we have come to think about computing and use computers. In fact, I think many people don’t think they’re using computers anymore—at least in how we understood them in the 80s/90s as productivity machines. Our phones and tablets are much more entertainment devices (devices of consumption), not so far from a gaming experience in which many will know things like discoverability, feedback, mapping, and the ability to undo are just not cast in the same mould. Of course, the kinds of design criteria Norman and Tog talk about are important and I, for one, sorely miss them when I try to use Word, Excel, etc. on a iPad. But in the world of iOS, where the forms of use are so very different, I think the issues manifest themselves differently and demand a different kind of attention (one that Norman and Tog choose not to see or perhaps not to understand).
What particularly interests me about this is that I think we need to recognise that what good usability is and, to some extent, what good design is are things we in a sense ‘manufacture’ through the technologies we produce and design. Tog and Norman understand good design guidelines as static, something somehow unchanging, irrespective of everything else that is changing. By talking about “basic psychological principles” they indicate an obduracy to what good design might be, but fail to recognise that this is deeply bound to the continuously changing material practices we are enabling through ‘computing’. They write: “principles reflect the needs, desires, and abilities of human beings, not the machines they use.”
The trouble is our needs, desires and abilities are inexorably entangled with matter, matter like machines. The qualities of being human can’t in some way exist outside of these entanglements. Of course, there is much to be gained by looking back to designers like Dieter Rams, but I think what we’re doing when we do this historicising is reworking old concepts into contemporary moments, undertaking a translation work to make these meaningful for the assemblies of things and people we are dealing with today. So, to me, the guidelines Norman and Tog speak of make most sense for the machines that they played a role in engineering and building. A principle of consistency has a very particular meaning for the early Mac OS that, I feel, doesn’t translate in any straightforward way to contemporary operating systems and ecologies of apps, etc. What Tog and Norman miss, I think, is that we are always giving shape to new and different possibilities of good design through the things we create. As computing has diverged from the Macintosh (and PC), we have created logics and rationales that present fundamentally different kinds of interaction where it doesn’t always make sense to rigidly apply past principles.
Even though Tog and Norman plead for us not to, yes, let’s take the popularity of the iPad amongst—for lack of a better category description—retirees (or ‘grandparents’ if you like). I know I’m not alone in being struck by how people from my parents’ generation can get so intimately attached to their iPads. I think we have to ask what’s going on here and not brush aside what is visibly a genuine intimacy by simply criticising some specific user interface features based on the design of “traditional computers”. And this is meant as more than the hackneyed “could my mother use it” kind of point. Really, what’s going on here? Of course, there are probably plenty of reasons for the iPad’s appeal (and I don’t mean to overlook a lot of the really difficult and frustrating aspects of using them), but I think we’re witnessing a different set of expectations around computing and the relationships we form with machines. This seems to be something Norman and Tog don’t want to acknowledge (despite Norman’s efforts to understand ). 
As I see it, the iOS aims to reveal (and make discoverable) a different set of qualities that appeal in different sorts of ways and that fit within a logic of portable and touch enabled devices in the way the Mac OS doesn’t (and shouldn’t). In the original design of the Mac, choices also needed to made about what was immediately discoverable and what would be buried under the menu architecture and in obscure dialogues (remember the Chooser?), and this presented a particular kind of logic-of-use. With the iOS, I think (intentionally or not) a different kind of experience is surfaced by the decisions to reveal and hide interactional capabilities, and the logic-of-use here is fundamentally different; I feel like the iPad, etc. is much more about the feel for content (and to some extent, creation). So perhaps it’s this that makes the devices so appealing and that many of us, including my parents, get so attached to.


Finally, I should say that I am a long time Mac user but I feel wedded to Macs (and the Apple ‘ecosystem’), for now at least, because that’s what I’ve bought into and am used to using. I’m really not sure whether Apple’s interaction design is especially better than anyone else’s and I think there are lots of things that confuse and frustrate me about their various operating systems. This post isn’t one defending Apple’s design, but more a response to what I see as Don Norman’s and Bruce Tognazzini’s views on design.

The post On “How Apple is Giving Design a Bad Name” appeared first on Alex Taylor.