Design Interventions — (Prototyping User Experience 2/3)
This article focuses on how designers and use conceptual art to inspire early prototypes
The Prototyping User Experience articles are an overview of selected lectures on the topics of prototyping, interaction design, and UX. The concepts here borrow from my time at Stanford’s d.school, and were developed further while teaching at California College of the Arts, and Art Center College of Art & Design. Each article looks at different core elements of understanding and prototyping experiences. These articles do not focus on software tools, but rather look at how the experience itself can be understood, pushed, pulled, and prototyped. After all, every good human-machine interaction is built on top of a solid human-human interaction.
At the bottom of each article are exercises that can be used as a reference by students, by educators/designers planning a lesson or workshop, or really just anyone interested in these topics :)
The other articles : Use, Usability, & Meaning, and Experimental Prototyping
What is a Design Intervention
Design Interventions are prototypes that provoke real world action and intervene in human behavior. Action and behavior are important to interaction design in many ways. For this lesson we will focus on how you can directly affect that action and behavior, and what those changes tell us about the problem or prototype with which we’re working.
Why Interventions are important
Design interventions can be useful in very early stage prototyping. When you’re designing purely around early concepts and ideas, and you don’t yet have any investment in user interface, CAD modeling or technical undertakings. Think about design interventions as a way of exploring the core ideas and assumptions surrounding an idea, strategy or experience. Interventions work their way into experiences that already exist. For UX design, this means inserting a design or idea into someone’s existing daily routines, culture or actions.
Examples of Interventions (From Design & Art)
Interventions within art and design have a deep history. For nearly 60 years the term intervention has been used to classify art that interacts with existing structures or systems. Artists have used interventions to encourage people to think about their own perceptions of space, culture and experience. Design interventions use that same practice in a more guided sense to explore something envisioned by the designer to communicate their specific goal. The line where an art intervention becomes a design intervention is blurry. I’m not gonna say what’s art and what’s design ;)
You can read more about art interventions here.
Example 1: Rebar PARK(ing) Day
Overview:
The artist/urban design collective Rebar created an intervention that takes over existing parking spaces. The artists would pay for a parking meter, and then fill that space with ‘Park’ materials like grass and benches, and make it a public space for people to go. At the end of the meter time, they pack up the park and go to another parking spot.
Since 2005, when Bela and his collaborators installed the first Park(ing) intervention on a drab street in downtown San Francisco, the idea has gone on to enliven countless blocks around the world, and to enlighten countless urbanites, who get to enjoy spaces normally reserved for stationary cars. Last year’s event, (2016) for instance, featured a streetside ping pong table in Los Angeles, a delightfully twee succulent garden in Madrid, and a giant inflatable Pokemon in Singapore.
Rebar writes about the project in more depth: here.
Example 2: Yoko Ono’s Instruction Paintings
Overview:
These paintings are printed instructions that describe an action or process. But they are just instructions. The person viewing the artwork must imagine how the instructions would happen. The artwork is not provided for them, they have to make it in their mind’s eye.
These Instruction Painting artworks translate very well to design interventions because the artworks are all about asking the viewer to do something, to take some action. Where Yoko Ono’s work stops short is that her work only poses the instructions, and viewers of the artwork may act or not act with that information. In your design interventions, you want people to try the intervention and take some action.
Read more about the Instruction Paintings. The article is here.
How to Construct a Design Intervention
There are two main parts of design intervention: The first is a design, idea or concept. The second is the intervention, which looks to modify or change someone’s existing behavior, routines or experiences.
- The Design: Design interventions are very popular when assessing early concepts or ideas. Because you’re looking at people’s behavior and routines, very little tech is required. Frequently you only need to ask someone to change something about their daily activity as it relates to the experience with which you’re working. But designing how that request, or ask, might affect someone’s experience is the key design portion of these prototypes.
- The Intervention: Here you need to have established the routine, behavior or action you’re designing around. Find out what part of an experience can be tweaked, maybe identify extreme variations of an experience, and ask someone to try something kinda crazy (as long as it’s safe :).
Exercise — Change something for the weekend
This exercise builds on top of the Stanford d.school ‘Wallet Workshop.’ The wallet workshop takes about two hours in a class setting, and requires that students are paired.
- Ask the students in their pairs to reflect on what they learned about their partners relationship to their own wallet. What does it mean to them? What were some of their main insights? Give the pairs 10 minutes (five for each person in a pair) to come up with something their partner needs to change about how they use their wallet or its contents, the more extreme the better.
- Have the paired students commit to trying the behavior for three days. In the next class session, have the pairs run quick interviews about what the three days were like.
NOTE: I often modify the wallet workshop to focus on the specific topic area of a class. The content can focus on just about anything and the steps remain the same. It is often a good way of connecting the design methods with the relevant topic areas.
Learning Objectives
This exercise should help develop your ability to work actively with experiences and action. Students should walk away from these exercises with a firm understanding of how interventions allow you to design/provoke the experience itself, instead of just the artifacts (apps, graphics, objects, etc).
Other Resources & Notes:
- Thanks To Hamish Tennent for initial edits, and my dad for copy editing :)