Critical design is the theme of my second project of DECO7100. This article I’ll talk about what I learned during the whole process and some reflections in several parts which give me the most inspiration.
For the project 2, our group chooses “Drain joy from education” as the topic of the design, we aim to create a public interactive installation at the campus that will promote public discussion and awareness of the experienced qualities of the campus. Having the experience of project 1, I don’t feel confused anymore and know what we need to find at the first step. we start to do some research to get a clearer picture of what exactly critical design is, and how to address our ideas and concepts from a critical perspective. The information we need is what things frustrate students and what kind of joy they can gain in education. The methods we adopted contains literature reviews, questionnaire, interview, vox pop, dairy studies and site survey. To be honest, when I listen to this terminology in the lecture, I thought we need to create something like an artistic product which is anti-something, but it is a misconception. The following quote is the definition of critical design from Dunne and Raby:
Critical Design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life. It is more of an attitude than anything else, a position rather than a method. There are many people doing this who have never heard of the term critical design and who have their own way of describing what they do. Naming it Critical Design is simply a useful way of making this activity more visible and subject to discussion and debate.
— Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby
During the research, I did two interviews and I got some useful information, such as time management is a stressful thing, but I feel the questions we designed can be structured better in my future’s study when I need to make a questionnaire again. It’s difficult for interviewees to think up specific event for some questions. For instance, for the question, “what kind of things frustrate you most at campus” one interview only gave two words “deadline” and “due” after thinking for a while.
The case study is the second part that I have some reflections because this step helps me imagine what effects of our installation would produce and really provides a deeper understanding of critical design for. For example, “Interactive Art Installation” is a typical example, which impresses me most (see Fig.1). As some people may feel inferior to others due to the social status, wealth and so on, the point of this example is to remind people that we aren’t any different from others and the of this product is to make people smile and break the stereotype. The installation is located at a local market, everyone can wear a clown mask and face a wall with displays on a festival market, while there was a screen displaying the video of applauding and smiling people.
Fig. 1
Framing map (see Fig.2) is another useful part I learnt during the process since it offers me a new way to come up with concept. Based on the data gained in the research, we summarized five insights and chose the most common insight “the way university campuses assess and examine students is a significant burden of university students”. The implied values in this insight include ““university should not be only about assessment” and “the amount assessment is unreasonably high”. Then we value fiction: “Everything about you should be assessed, not just your learning”. The whole process inspires my first concept, called “You are not the Person we want”. I design a robot which can be as an interviewer to evaluate whether the student is the person that companies want to recruit. Some students who only have a high GPA cannot receive a good feedback. The aim of this concept is to make students think what kind of skills that they really need to acquire at the university. Although this is not chosen as our final concept, the process that I think up this concept is the most important thing.
Fig. 2
The experience of user evaluation is the last thing I want to share with you. Observation, user comments, and interview are three ways we conducted in this part. Observing the number of people who interact with our installation, including the number of people who stopped, who took pictures, who wrote comments on the cabinet, and who sat inside is my task (see Fig.3). In the in front of the Hawken Engineering, there were a few people paying attention to our installation because they were busy on the way to the library or study and only one people sat inside. This makes me consider the importance of site survey. If we investigated more sites in this part, we can choose a more appropriate site to display our product and the data we obtained would be more satisfying. It is noticeable to mention one detail in my observation since we hung it at the corner of the cabinet in order to record participants’ behavior, while some people just waved their hands in front of the camera rather than got in, I doubt that the smartphone may prevent them coming into the cabinet. In the next site, we removed the smartphone and only put a video camera far away from the installation. The consequence is that six people sat inside. It proves that the observation is really a necessary part of user evaluation, which can help us improve some designs immediately.
Fig. 3
Overall, the deployment of the installation can be regarded successfully, but some improvement spaces still exist. The purpose of the installation is not very clear, so some people feel confused the function of it and the reflection of audiences just stop at agreeing or disagreeing with our theses without further thinking. However, when finishing this project, I have a clearer understanding of design process and the meaning of critical design.