Hacking a Car: Re-Embodying the Design Classroom

Abstract

Traditionally, design has been taught to students by masters trough practical exercises, but this model has been changing over the last 15 years. When designers got into designing interactive technologies, they borrowed practices from two other fields of research. The social sciences gave them ethnographic methods aimed at creating an empathic undersatnding of people, while software gave them usability techniques and formal means of representation such as flowcharts and wireframes, merging them into some traditional design techniques such as sketching and storyboarding. Thus, designers are typically taught to do a user study, analyze data, and integrate it into a concept, which is communicated with sketches, artifacts, written presentations, or storyboards. For example, in a study of how intimacy could be mediated to support communities in the city, Battarbee et al. (2002) created a scenario of “satellites” that people could use to interact in the distance in piazzas. This concept built on a user study, and was communicated with a visual scenario. (Picture 1).