Studio Reflections: Week 1–2 (Project Definition)

Microsoft Design Expo banner (link: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/designexpo2016/)

In our graduate studio, we recently began our semester-long project sponsored by the Microsoft Design Expo. The Design Expo establishes a project brief that primarily provides the technological impetus and constraints for the project. The student teams each determine which territories they want to work on and how to design the technology concept to apply to a meaningful area.

What was interesting to me was the way in which different design teams began approaching the problem of designing the design territory (i.e. the overlapping area in the middle that is called out by the green arrow and label). Some teams started from the technology, others from the user group, others from the context. Regardless of which direction they started from though, the same questions had to be answered…

Why the specific technology?
Why this group?
Why this context / application?

For our group, we started exploring the technology a little, explored a few different contexts and then came up with two strong possibilities: transportation and home environments. Initially, I was skeptical of the transportation environment which was centered around the notion of driverless cars. However, the framing of the design question that was proposed resonated with me. We wanted to ask,

How can we use CUI to make people feel more comfortable in driverless cars?

I couldn’t help but feel that CUI — or more generally, the notion of voice, tone, presence, sound — could have a huge role in the notion of people’s comfort with new and unfamiliar environments and technologies. This seemed like a meaningful and worthwhile area to explore and where our team ultimately landed.

Along the way, however, we had to consider the notion of a future with driverless cars and the ethics around it. This is still something that we’re grappling with. Initially I struggled with the question of if we design something to make the driverless car experience more appealing, then aren’t we supporting or enabling a future with driverless cars?

However, the more I thought about it, the more I elected to stay open and ambivalent. I wanted to stay curious rather than “judge-y” and decided to treat this as an opportunity to play with the idea of possible futures. The question that I’m curious about getting to at the end of all of this is, IF we had the technology for driverless cars AND IF the experience was one that was comfortable for humans and designed well for them THEN is this still a preferred future we want to have?

This question requires projecting imagined realities out into the future. Whether I truly support driverless cars or not, I believe this exercise is worthwhile. On an aside, I also thought about some of the dangerous driving behaviors of people that I know and how I might actually feel more comfortable if they were in driverless cars themselves…

Finally, I think this is a worthwhile question to ask because if we think the technology and engineering capability is headed in this direction, designers have a role and responsibility to help shape that future.

Self-Driving Cars May Get Here Before We're Ready
SOMETIME in the future - although no one quite knows when - your morning commute may look something like this: Open an…www.nytimes.com

In any case, our presentation to the MS liaison went well, although similar questions were brought up by our peers. Our professor importantly asked as questions regarding our target user population, which I think is the next place we need to focus on.

Where our team landed in the first phase of project definition

Our next step will be to simultaneously define the scope further as we conduct exploratory research of our territory area. I’m eager to use this project as an opportunity to try out different research methods in each of the phases.

Some Reflections So Far:

Brainstorming. I really enjoyed these silent affinity mapping exercises we did for brainstorming. They were helpful in getting each person to think on their own without censorship and then starting the conversation from there.
Coming up with an idea: Abduction vs. Deduction. It was interesting to me how our team used abductive reasoning to get from here’s a bunch of possible territory ideas to here’s what we’re going to do. There was definitely a jump that was not fully logical but that made sense once we decided we all liked the topic.
Ethics of Driverless cars / a different mindset for futurism. There’s a different mindset for thinking about possible future scenarios that involves a loosening of something in your mind.
Exploratory vs. generative research. Still getting clearer about this in my head. I’ve just decided to treat this whole process as a learning experience.
Dialogical vs. Dialectical discourse. When we get to points of contention in our team discussions, it’s been useful to think of the notion of dialogical discourse versus dialectical.
Her. I finally watched the movie, Her, and thought it was really beautiful and bold. Some initial thoughts and inspirations from that movie… the notion of presence and of being on/off, the notion of PERSONALITY — why did the AI even need a personality?