Design for our times: workshop 1: design in the 21st century
Design for our times: workshop 1: design in the 21st century - Transcript
Dr. Sara Diamond: Although we meet today on a virtual platform, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the importance of the lands where each of us live in work. From coast to coast to coast in Canada, we acknowledge the ancestral and unceded territory of the Inuit, Métis, and First Nations people that call this land home. For example, in Toronto we are in the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaune, the Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat – but also in a city that is a major gathering place for Indigenous people from all over Canada, including Métis and Inuit. So please join me to acknowledge the values, perspectives, languages, and cultures which can guide and inspire us, the role of indigenous people as guardians and stewards of the lands. And consider how we can, each in our own way, try to move forward in a spirit of reconciliation in collaboration. Thank you.
Design for Our Times was created by the National Research Council, Justine Khalid and I. It will acquaint NRC scientists and staff with an understanding of how design can provide a valuable tool kit within the process of research and innovation. Design, practice and research could strengthen the NRC's role as an engine of economic, environmental, and social transformation. And design certainly offers an important skill set to build back better after COVID-19. All societies have a history of design and contemporary design engages now across the spectrum of human diversity and Indigenous knowledge. So, this workshop will present an overview of contemporary design, illustrating its wide reach, its impacts and possibilities. We hope to provide an understanding of design thinking methods and an opportunity to apply these to actual use cases. So, stay tuned for Workshop 2. We'll examine the shifting nature of design as it integrates Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. And each workshop will feature a story of an inspirational Canadian design company.
We want to take you on a little bit of a journey right now. Please close your eyes for a moment. Take a deep breath. Now open your eyes. Take a piece of paper and a pen or pencil or use your computer to make notes. We're going to ask you to draw later on. Of course, only if you want to. But we're going to ask you to play along with us and do that. We'd like you to look around your environment and find a familiar object. You know, a box of tissue. A computer mouse. Here we go. Evan a stapler. A book. A coffee or tea cup. The glass, your chair. Your smart phone. So, choose something, take a minute to decide what you're going to work with, because we're going to ask you to do some work with this. And of course, all of these objects are designed. What we want you to do as we take you through this very short exercise is to think about the ways that you could improve this object, that you could make it better, and that can be very pragmatic and practical, or it can be quite outlandish or very transformational. We're going to take you through a process. We want you to ask these questions. What need does the object fill? What need is it filling? (Designers call this user centered design) What does it do for you as an object? Who do you think it was made for? When somebody designed this particular version of the object, they had in mind what designers call a persona and those are fictional characters who could use the object? They really do we put together a whole personality or context set of use cases for that persona. And who uses it now? Objects’ use change overtime and also, their dissemination and their value changes and people need change and there's new inventions. So, who uses it now? Why and how do they use it? So do some thinking about that, so please make some notes. And did it meet that imagined persona and user's needs? So how far away is it from that original use? What role does the object play in your daily life? When and how do you use it? For example, what role does it play - designers call this experience design. We're going to talk a lot about experience design today and in future sessions. What is its form? You know, we call this aesthetics, so is it beautiful? And who would find it beautiful and why or why not in terms of its beauty? How closely does its form match its use, and designers call this functional design. So, take a minute and think about that. And then. Do these aesthetics say anything about its brand? Why you or the NRC should buy or acquire it or someone acquire something that you've made, or you've designed? We have two examples of pens here, and if you did choose a Bic pen, but even not because you can see one here in the image. It's inventors in the 1950s, really thought like designers, so, they aggregated emerging technologies. Plastics of course, Post-War was a huge boom in plastic capacity and invention. And ink with the new viscosity and a metal shaving technology capable of a steel 1 millimeter ballpoint head and through design, perfected its ergonomics and very unique look. And then they launched an advertising campaign and advertising is certainly a form of design. And hence the Bic pen. The Bic has allowed the masses - people all over the world, to access affordable pens. It's actually been a major gain for literacy. Bic, of course, later democratized the razor and lighters, and some of you would remember the slogan “flick my Bic” and again used iconic brand identity and marketing. This is a very classic story of you know, new emerging technologies; seeing a gap in the market; and designing to fill that gap. And it's a great story of how design allows that kind of transformation and can create new markets and new opportunities. Now we know that some of you who've joined us are inventing new materials. So, think about the materiality of the object that you've chosen. What is it made from, and do you think that the designer had any influence in the materials choices? And then a little bit of reverse engineering. What is the manufacturing process so, maybe think about that for a minute for a few seconds, really? And in that manufacturing process, is it made from recycled or reused materials? Designers call this sustainable or circular design. And we're going to talk about some of those trends later on today. How would you improve it? This is concept design where you take an existing object and you reimagine it. And could you improve its design and production process? Then that's transformation design, so that's the whole from materials right through to product and out the door to advertising. How could you improve that? But we're going to have you focus a lot on the concept design here. So, we're going to give you a little bit of time and ask you to work with us. Take a few seconds now to really think through how you would improve the object that you've chosen. We're going to countdown for maybe 5 to 10 seconds here. And then we're going to ask you to sketch it. If thinking through its new use comes to you through a sketching process, which certainly that happens with designers to some extent, go ahead and sketch. I'm going to give you a bit of a countdown there. OK. 5,4,3,2,1 we're going to exit PowerPoint for a moment to allow you to show your sketch, which we're describing as a low fidelity prototype. We’d love it if some of you, we hope that a number of you are brave enough to turn your cameras on and show the sketch. And then we can have an opportunity to discuss it, briefly, to respond to it. Okay, Heather, brave woman! Do you have a sketch to show us? You've got fabulous wallpaper with sketches all over it. Okay! Heather, can you describe your sketch briefly? She's putting her audio on. Yeah perfect,
Heather: I grabbed a typical pencil sharpener metal, so, it's the very basic of forms. I have sketched it out, but I was thinking in terms of materials and in terms of grip. That to have something soft. Enclosing three of the sides would be a useful and maybe making it colorful because it's very plain.
Dr. Sara Diamond: Fantastic, that's great, you know. I think you've got something that could go to market. Heather: It’s probably already is in market, but I'm no expert. Sara: Part design allows us to offer these sorts of incremental improvements to things that then really take off, anybody else? Thank you, Heather, for being willing to share your idea. Anybody else want to share their sketch or idea? Okay, we don't seem to have any takers. Well, do you continue your thinking and your sketching and we will talk a little bit later on about what the process has been that we went through and how a designer would think about that. Thank-you very much. Heather for sharing. We’re going to go back now and continue our discussion about design and. We will go back to the PowerPoint Khalid. Thank you. Now you're a designer! Workshop one is now over I'm just kidding.
So, to continue our discussion, I hope that we've shown you that we could spend hours exploring all the elements of your physical or virtual room and its affordances from a design perspective. And our point is that everything is designed. Design, although fundamentally artificial, that is human driven, is multi-sensory and design is the way we create products, services, and systems. It's the mechanism by which we shape the material and virtual environment around us to meet our needs and desires. And it's Canadian Bill Buxton, who is the Chief Scientist of Microsoft, he formerly was the Chief Scientist of the Canadian firm Alias Wavefront, which was acquired by Autodesk. Bill has observed that products and services do not exist in isolation. They represent the individual, social, and cultural experiences that they engender and the value and impact that they have on others. Yet our challenge is that design is ubiquitous and often invisible, if successful. So, to be effective, design needs to be excellent, and it needs to be consciously deployed. And then it can become invisible. We're going to share this story of an inspirational Canadian design company. We're going to do this at all of the workshops, and tonight, is the Canadian Fashion Awards gala by the way, and Canada actually has a substantive industry in this country. I'm wearing a dress by Ryerson graduates’ Fresh label. We thought because of the date it would be great to talk about roots. So, Roots was started in 1973 by Michael Budman and Don Green, both American natives and Detroit locals and they attended Camp Tamakwa in Algonquin Park, fell in love with Canada, and repatriated here. They began with a concept for sports footwear and they launched the negative heel shoe which was supposed to both exercise your foot and be comfortable and keep you healthy, especially when you stand for long periods of time. They then added menswear and the Beaver Canoe Sportswear design line. And in the late 1980s they added interior design. The Roots logo was created in the 1970s by leading graphic artists Heather Cooper and Robert Burns, and it featured Canada's iconic animal, the beaver - hard at work, and was an instant global hit. Roots went international very fast in part because of its advertising. Although Roots was born before the days of what's called a B Corp, the nomenclature for a socially committed company, Roots has made it their mission to champion environmental issues, fund literacy campaigns, encourage local businesses and promote a healthy lifestyle. They currently have 245 stores. 115 of them are in Canada, 5 in the US, and 125 in China and Taiwan. And Roots is currently taking some hits through COVID. Their enterprise value is 306 million. Roots places design at the core of its operations, whether product design, interior design, experience design or visual marketing displays. Their policy or statement on design is that it is, “Responsible for managing the process from conception through the production, the Roots design team stays true to the spirit and values of Roots in creating any new product”, so, highly integrated into all of the processes of the company. A very successful strategy for Roots has been personalization, you can make a physical appointment. (Or you could before COVID-19), but in the US again now, in some parts of Canada and in China and other places so you can go physically into the store. Or, you can work on line to build your own trophy jacket. Contemporary design, and this is an important point, and it's true in physical goods as much as computational interfaces - contemporary design has introduced personalization and localization of mass market products to suit the specific nature of those markets and individuals within them. Just think back to Bill Buxton’s statement that each design expresses a culture. And companies like Roots that are global also create culture and they create mass culture and they create shared values in the places that they're located. But they're also able to adapt effectively to localize their products, so, it's a dialectic between the two. Roots recognizes that effective variability requires a deep understanding of people, their differences, their desires, and their needs. In 2015 Budman and Green sold the majority of their shares to search capital, and Meaghan Roach became their CEO and she came in not from a design background, but a strong strategy background. And she also recognized that its market is extremely diverse, and Roots now aggressively supports racialized and women leaders in its employee and management ranks. So, Roach is very aware of this importance and in her words, she sees that as better diversifying its image and its staff. Representing its customer base so you know there's a business driver here for diversity and gender equity, as well as the kind of ethics behind the history of the company. During the height of COVID-19 it turned its production around to manufacture COVID-19 supplies, some of which are distributed without cost or at cost. And Roots was also very early in recognizing the gender-based impact of COVID-19 and used design thinking and empathy to chart a court for the company. And it's expressed in this slide. I'll give you a second to read that quote, but Roach has been very active and has been a leader again, quoting this ethics of Roots as a design centric company. In trying to support its staff in managing to get their work done, but in the ways that they needed to. So, it also may be valuable to know Roots management took a 25% cut in its salary and she took no salary to keep a larger number of people employed, and that certainly has not been the case with some other companies during COVID-19. The downside is Roots has depended heavily on its highly branded in-store experience and it is struggling to maintain the same level of service in its transition to online shopping, which then you know, argues for design thinking work, transformation design and looking at how it can more effectively adapt to what probably will in the future be a hybrid of in-store experience and online. I'm just going to pause again and ask if there's any questions to date or comments. We've covered a few things. We've covered the design exercise you might want to comment on that, but also, anything that you'd like to say or ask about Roots and some of these basic concepts of design. So, any questions so far. You can certainly put a question in chat if you'd like to. Or feel free to raise your hand. Justine, are we seeing anything? No OK. Then we will just continue. Will come back later to Q&A in some focused ways.
We've talked about an exemplary company, and we know that Roots may seem far away from some of the research at the NRC, but it's not that far away if you think about design products and end users. But now we want to talk about a series of case studies and approaches that 21st century design has adopted or engaged with, and we've talked about. Some of these are design methods, and you'll see these come up throughout the rest of the presentation, and we're going to talk about 5 themes. What can we learn from chairs? We're going to talk about what we think the breakthrough design of the 21st century is, and we're going to ask your opinion on some of this. We're going to talk about design as a social movement, and particularly in particular, the quest for livable cities. We're going to talk about user centered design and we started with an exercise earlier on that frames that a bit, and we're going to end with information design, looking at the 21st century's focus on data. We’re going to talk about chairs. First, back to a little moment of user experience. Please close your eyes again. Adjust your body to your chair and breathe in and out so. I have to do this too. And now ask yourself with your eyes still closed is the chair comfortable? And how does it shape your posture? And now open your eyes and think about these questions. How much time do you spend in in this chair? You know what's its typology? Is it an office chair? Or perhaps because of working from home it's a kitchen chair or a dining room chair. Now maybe you are at home, or you or in your office or your lab and you've moved to a standing desk. So just again go through that earlier exercise of what's the purpose of this chair? What was it originally designed for versus how you're using it? Think maybe about its design process if you want to. You know some came from wood into a factory, into of course either commercial or retail distribution. And also think about that persona. You know how did the companies’ designers imagine the end users of the chair that you're now sitting in? And think about that as we're moving through our presentation and like the fashion industry. Canadians are really, really world leaders in furniture design. In fact, more significantly, in terms of their global impact than Canadian fashion to some extent, and they are leaders and chair designs. Office furniture, it may well be created by Teknion, one of Canada's global office and health care furniture companies, and they brought the world of modularity to furniture design, and they compete with Steelcase and Herman Miller for market share. Now if it's your dining room table, which is my situation right now, if its your dining room take chair it could be by one of many bespoke Canadian furniture designers. Or if you were sitting in a comfortable chair while looking at your laptop, it could be Nienkamper. They are a large Canada based global firm who has outfitted every Air Canada lounge around the world. Or it could be more practical furniture created by Umbra in collaboration with Canadian design legend Karim Rashid, and Umbra is a fantastic design company. Another Canadian design global success story. In case you're sitting outside on your deck or in your garden or on your balcony in a white plastic chair, did you know it was a Canadian designer D. C. Simpson who first invented the Monobloc in 1946? This is injection molded, lightweight, stackable, polypropylene turned into the world's most common chair. A billion are sold in Europe annually, and there are many, many billions in the world. And again, this is another instance where technology innovation, in this case plastics, and design innovation, have gone hand in hand. So, chairs are really interesting! You know they began certainly not as something distributed to masses of people. They began with rulers sitting on thrones as far back as 3500 BC in Egypt and the chair was a symbol of power. They later became fixtures in European homes and in the Renaissance, and the idea of “chair” still represents that residue of power. You know, to chair a board meeting, it's become a verb, right? Or to be a chair, a research chair, some of whom are joining us today. So, chair design considers usage, ergonomics, weight, folding ability - which was first patented by John Cram in 1855 - stacking which we first saw in the 1920s. There now actually are ISOs such as ISO 9241, which governs workstation layout but looks at, where does the chair sit in relation to the workstation and talks about health, and impacts o for vision and body. The chair is such a symbol of everyday life in the West. And all of us are spending much too much time sitting, especially during the pandemic. So, it's not surprising that furniture designers gravitated to the chairs. Both practical, and aesthetic expressions of their identity and their brand. Two famous examples from mid-century Danish design are Hans Jørgensen Wegner’s Wishbone Chair and Round. The Round chair was described by American journalists as quote, “the most beautiful chair in the world”, unquote in 1949, and it catapulted designed Danish design into the American market. Another very famous chair is the Lounge Chair Wood (LCW) AKA the Low Chair Wood or Eames Plywood Lounge Chair designed by the famous married team Charles and Ray Eames. This chair required a technique for molding plywood that the Ames developed and they won prizes for quote, “The natural evolution of furniture in a changing world”, unquote. And again, we see this reciprocity between materials innovation and design innovation which runs through the entire course of what is design. So that then brings us if we leap forward, 60 or 70 years to a discussion of trends and chair design in our 21st century world. Please stay seated for the ride! Chairs remain important or emblematic in terms of design and design companies and design engagements. A significant and growing design trend in the 21st century is design for the circular economy, so, this is a “movement”. This movement involves concept design which requires rethinking existing designs - using techniques like redesign, recycling, reuse, repair, remanufacturing, refurbishing and upcycling. Products then become resources for new applications at the end of their life. American philanthropist Ellen MacCarthy is one of the leading drivers of this movement, and she believes quote, “Design is key to the first principle of the circular economy. Design out waste and pollution”. End of quote. You know, many things today are still designed for the linear model that is cradle to grave manufacturing. This means that almost everything needs to be redesigned in accordance with the principles of circular economy that is cradle to cradle. The difference is that user needs must be balanced with systems awareness and environmental impact, and if anything, this requires a greater level of user engagement because behavior change requires users to buy into the circular economy. According to Katerina Medkova & Brett Fifield, quote, “Traditionally design has not considered product impact during its birth and use, and what happens when it is not in use anymore and thrown away. Products were not designed to last, allowing for new models to come to fulfil the needs and temptations of consumers”. End quote. But planned obsolescence, which is a term I'm sure we're all familiar with, has been built into capitalism, and it's a driving source of wealth. The idea of circular economy design is really important because it's not only about sustainability and it's not only about ethics, not only of what needs to happen for the for the planet and the world to manage the challenges of carbon economy etc., and waste and garbage, but planned obsolescence is so much a driver of economic well-being. The circular economy seeks economic returns at every level of its process, so, it looks at how you can monetize using design thinking and good economic planning. A different kind of approach in order to provide alternate revenue streams so, you know this is very important. It's different from sustainability, and that logic in that sense that there's always going to be an economic driver in output. In terms of some of the methods of the circular economy, Sass Brown, who is a British fashion designer, talks about recycling, and I quote her, “… working with recycled fabrics, garments, hardware and more, diverting post-consumer waste from the landfill and reinvigorating those lost materials with new life and value.” End of quote. So that's a recycling method, which is that things are already been tossed out how can you retrieve them and work with them? But circular design includes understanding all of the potential stages of a product lifecycle use. So that means increased use of modular design where you can substitute a component in a system without having to replace the entire system, or additive manufacturing to support local on demand production. 3D printing is revolutionary in terms of design and we will see that throughout, you know, the four workshops. Certainly, we'll talk about it later on in some other contexts, but the ability to actually work increasingly with nontoxic and recycled materials in terms of 3D printing, both to prototype, but also, to actually print, is very exciting as we think forward. Building services around products so being able to use the product in different ways because of developing services around it. Home delivery systems for experiences and products and reduced travel for example. And we've certainly been doing that through COVID-19. And extending product life span. Collaborative consumption, so bulk buying and looking at how to do this on a mass scale, through buying co-ops, etc., and then creating markets for recycling. And then also IoT platforms that allow product tracking through supply chains. So, understanding we're a product is within its cycle, and being able to intervene and think through an intervention. And then the reuse of waste materials for energy. And then of course policy and tax incentives for reuse.
In putting this talk together, we have been thinking about some of the places where NRC scientists are very active, and the opportunity to think about how in inventing new materials there also can be secondary uses within the manufacturing cycle, and these opportunities for reuse are very exciting. And we had some ideas here which you may already be doing. The High-Performance Building Program at the NRC is a contributor to circular design as buildings are retrofit for energy efficiency. Within those practices, so is the Bioenergy Systems for Viable Stationary Applications Program, because it's remaking biomass and waste into renewable powers and fuels. So that's also part of the cycle is in. What are the energy sources within the circular economy? The Sustainable Food Research and Technologies program creates value-added products such as packaging materials through the reuse of food and agricultural waste. In a number of these areas, designers’ engagement could actually amplify some of the ways that the product and materials invention can be leveraged in terms of deployment within the circular economy and into specific designs. The other thing that's been happening is that national circular economy plans are in development and they use strategic foresight, which is a form of design. It's a kind of futurism that is design driven, as well as data driven, which we're going to talk about in Workshop Three. They’re using these methods to project 20-year forecasts. I'll just say it again. Circular design focuses on economic viability, and so for these reasons, it's systems transformation design as much as industrial design, and it's also service design, which is reimagining the consumer experience, which is integral to its success, to encourage engagement and make it easy to upgrade an existing product refurbish or bulk buy to reduce packaging. Now we're going to come back to chairs. I know that went off somewhere, but we're still seated and we're still thinking about our chairs. Here’s an example of a chair that was invented for the circular economy and with circular economy design in mind. This is by Philip Stark and Emeco and it's made from 75% waste polypropylene and 25% reclaimed wood that would usually be swept away. And what's important about this is it's not recycling, that is going into, disposed of waste. It's actually intervening at a point within the manufacturing cycle and gathering the materials that are about to be disposed. There’s a kind of efficiency to it. It's pre consumer waste. And it's collected from wood production manufacturing as well as from polypropylene production. The Broom chair is available in multiple colors and types. Just again because we want to share design methods and the chair in the circular economy touches on many types and stages of design – Concept Design, Circular Economy Design, Systems Design, Transformation Design, Service Design. It's a nice summary of a lot of those methods of thinking. We're now going to move onto another kind of major development in the 21st century, which is generative design. We’re going to talk about a generative design chair, but first, we're going to talk a little bit about what generative design is, and we're going to be much more engaged in that dialogue in Workshop Four. But here, we're going to talk about it within a particular industrial design context. It’s a very exciting and new dimension of many facets of design. And it's an approach that's valuable when problems are too complex for humans to easily find solutions. Really generative design works with meta heuristics. Danil Nagy and Lorenzo Villagi described this as a set of optimization techniques based on iteratively sampling solutions and using performance criteria to generate better and better outcomes, so being able to do a huge sweep of potential opportunities within a set of constraints that are described, look at those and then apply more preferences and constraints to come up with a number of different models that the designer then can choose from. And of course, iteratively test with users and users. Inputs are in the front end and then also at the evaluated end and the designer intervenes along the way so Philip Stark will stay “Philip Stark”. He's also a leader in adopting generative design in a project with Autodesk in 2019 and it is really charming how he talks about the process - he talks about the AI like it's an entity so he tends to anthropomorphize the AI. He describes having a conversation with the AI in the Autodesk system where he asked it the fundamental question, “How can you support our body with the least amount of energy and material possible?” So, you know we spent the beginning of our chair conversation talking about how comfortable we are, how well our bodies are supported, are we in the right chair? for what we're doing, and so, the result after multiple iterations between the program and the designer through this conversation was the AI chair by AI Chair by Kartell. Kartell was the design furniture company that was part of this and it's made from 100% recycled industrial scraps and again it's pre consumer waste effectively combining circular economy design and generative design. I think we're going to see a lot more of that as we move forward. We want to share a second generative design chair but this one with different goals. And this gets back to our early conversation around your comfort as you're sitting and listening to this presentation. This is a design by Karthik Patanjali and he uses sensors to evaluate how the user sits and a design of the chair is algorithmically generated based on this analysis. So, the generated form and you'll actually see, I think, Khalid. If you go to the next slide, there are some great images of people sitting in different ways. Yes, there you go. So, people sitting and they're sitting in there moving around and the form slowly evolves in real time as the system learns more from the users. Then Karthik Patanjali 3D prints the final prototype and the chair is made. And some of what's exciting in this when materials that change shape become widely available, shape metals and smart textiles. This method could be used to adapt and evolve the form of chair overtime with use. And you know, we've looked at some interesting research and we didn't include it here, but we're happy to send some examples to people, but in the context of looking at aging populations and older people and people with disabilities there are different kinds of support for building chairs that are highly responsive to those bodies. changing through the course of the day to support mobility and comfort and well-being. Also, just thinking again of where the NRC research in AI for the Simulation and Design of Materials with Targeted Properties could well provide breakthroughs in consumer product design. There’s a real opportunity for some of these more foundational materials research to have an impact in the industrial design and consumer market. In the future, companies like Teknion and they are a Canadian success story, will be able to test thousands of parameters using artificial intelligence and parametric and geospatial visualization to find the best modular strategy with users’ needs, space constraints, materials and cost factors. So, our last chair, there is a competition right now amongst research centers to design the smart wheelchair, the AI robotics enabled wheelchair, as some call it, which augments power wheelchairs -and those have been available really since the 1950s. We live in an era in which a growing aging population will increasingly require wheelchairs. And also, society has improved its recognition that people with disabilities have a tremendous amount to contribute to society if we work closely with them, if we collaborate with them to enable their inclusion, and that's called inclusive design. In a comprehensive review article - this article looks at the kind of history of smart wheelchair invention. It looks at different strategies that it looks at it both longitudinally, but also, what's happening right now. So, in this review article, Jesse, Lehman, and Hunlock are very optimistic about the results of user, designer and engineer collaboration, because inclusive design really is about being able to adapt to the specific needs of that user, not all smart wheelchairs are appropriate for all individuals who need wheelchairs, so, you need to really design for this. Specificity along a range of affordances. They say the best smart wheelchairs will be able to accommodate people with all disability types by utilizing a multimodal interface that combines computer vision, the ability to look at and see and understand the environment touch. Voice and brain control. And there is important research happening on brain directed brain control systems. They say, “The best SWs (smart wheelchairs) will be able to accommodate people with all disability types by utilizing a multi-modal interface that combines computer vision, touch, voice, and brain control. SWs will be able to build 3D maps using mobile scanners [Of course using GIS GPS data}, and navigate autonomously by streaming and analyzing sensory data in real-time through cloud computing “So long quote, but meaningful because it goes through a number of the different affordances that then enable this design. So, it's a very exciting time. This is a space that my own university OCAD University’s Inclusive Design has been pretty active in. One of the most successful current applications very recently is from university of Portsmouth, and they've implemented collision detection in which wheelchairs recognize obstacles and can navigate around these and they've built quite a sophisticated system that can work in the outdoor environment as well as indoors. And we talked about aging populations and the NRC's research in aging in place. We're going to talk about some examples of exciting work happening in terms of supporting older people to be more engaged in society and we will come back to that topic in weeks three and four, and certainly, of deep relevance given the kind of challenges that seniors have experienced during COVID-19. So now please stretch however, you are able. I'm going to just give you a little moment to take a deep breath, and then we're going to move on. And ask you again for some questions. And I'll do my own stretch. There you go.
Our exercise with chairs has touched on two big contemporary trends, circular economy design and the integration of AI in multiple forms into design practices. But we just wondered if you had any questions or comments of what you've heard and you've seen, in how it might relate to your research.
Justine De Ridder: We had a question in the chat:” What’s the difference between UX and general design, User experience design”.
Dr. Sara Diamond: That's a great question. Thank you very much. User experience design is really looking at the entire experience around the technology. So, it's how you build out and think about the identity of the user. So, from A-Z what it's like? For example, if you log onto your mobile phone and you open an app, what is communicated to you? How easy is that experience and how much does it connect you to other facets of your life in a completely seamless and comfortable way? The principle of user experience design is that the user is always the subject of the design; you're designing for that user and you are trying to build an experience around every facet of the use of an object. And we're actually going to talk a lot about that shortly. We don't want to be spoiler, but we are going to talk about experience design with one of our case studies shortly, so that's a great question. It is a specific field in general design, but it's a philosophy instead of practices. Now in the 21st century that really has emerged around consumer experience being seamless. Justine or Khalid do you want to add to that as you're both emerging designers?
Justine De Ridder: I think that's UX design emerged from many different practices of design, and so when we talk about general design as a designer, we see so many different facets of design and UX designer definitely is one of them. Just another question that popped up,” Can you comment on the ability of design to influence economic systems, to ensure all users can access the products they need as opposed to the 1% accessing design?”
Dr. Sara Diamond: Fantastic question and we're going to talk a little bit in a little while too about the ways that design actually can become both philosophy and also be a social movement. We did give the example of the BIC Pen. It's a fantastic example because it was designed to think about a mass market and something that would fit; multiple users’ needs. A part of the philosophy of many designers right now is to move away from design for about 1%, but rather to look at design for the other 99%. So, it's partly how you model the user. It's how you think about materials. It's how you think about distribution. You also need to think about production sites, right? And ensuring that production is distributed in ways that it builds the economy of that distribution network so. A lot of the tools that we're trying to share in terms of thinking about how to imagine a persona, how to imagine the design process, how to think through materials, how to think about sustainability, every stage of that design cycle can be adapted to think about non luxury goods in different forms of mass production, so that's a fabulous question, and it's true a whole part of design is still about, luxury and bespoke design in the goods market. But there's been a really big shift, certainly, in what designers want to do, which is to be world changing in a positive way. And Bruce Mau’s work if you're interested in, exploring some of that. He’s written a lot and talked a lot about that. Again, Khalid Justine, you want to add anything?
Khalid Hassan: The main point of the earlier portion of the presentation was to move design from object to method and to understand that even an economic system in and of itself is a design problem that can reprioritize and alter the focus. You can use design to even reinvent economies in of themselves as opposed to thinking of the end products. So, foresight is part of that.
Dr. Sara Diamond: So, you answered better than I did. Thank you, Khalid. Good. So, thanks, those are great questions and I think we're going to keep moving on now, and there's going to be more time certainly for discussion.
We're going to now talk about what we've described as the breakthrough design of the 21st century, and this is relevant, very relevant to the experience design question that we had, so this is good. We're going to ask you to complete a poll, so, this is a moment for interaction and please participate. You don't have to show your face or anything, so here you go. What is the most important? design of the 21st century? Is it the platform (Facebook Netflix); the electric car, (the Tesla) or is it the smartphone (iPhone)? Please vote. I want to see the numbers come in. Just give it. Two more seconds, yeah? OK, I think that's great. OK, so we know not everybody voted, but this is still very helpful. So, you chose the smartphone. Elon Musk did not win the battle. And some of you also chose the platform and the smartphone and the platform are highly integrated. So that's fantastic. Thank you. And we're going to now talk a little bit about, in fact, the smartphone. So, we chose the same one that you did and we maybe will ask you again to have your mobile device handy so that you've got it and you're thinking about it as we go through the next bits and we're going to now ask you to please fill in another poll. There’s a number of questions. What kind of operating system do you use? And then please proceed through the rest of the questions. There we go. OK, we have lots of coming in, good. OK, and then we're asking you here, about your uses. So, do you use it for email, news, telephone, video chat, messaging, social media? How many hours you spend on your phone? So where are we here? I'll leave it on for two more seconds, yes? This is very interesting. So, we have a majority of Android users and a few people on Windows. Nobody on BlackBerry, but that's because Android is now compatible with Blackberry’s new Android system. I have a BlackBerry, but I didn't poll, didn't submit my vote and we have text messaging as the dominant form, but we still have a lot of use of email, telephone and video chat, some social media. In terms of your use - One to two hours and some of you are intense users. 4 1/2 plus so and some more light users, so that's great. So, thank you for that. Take that down right now. So that was very interesting, and now we're going to show you where you sit in relationship to just a sample of the Canadian population. This is a large survey that was done by Statistica. And you are anomalous. Your 9 to 7 people because of as of 2021 iOS had 51.9% of our mobile market and Android had 48.8%. Social media, text messaging and email were the primary uses of those who were surveyed. So that was interesting. Because text was a major use for you and the average daily mobile use by Canadians has risen steadily with 2. 8 hours of use by Anglophones and 2.23 by Francophones. So, your data, we saw different chunks of use, but you probably fit within that, that that number. But it's just interesting to see the survey. Other questions to think about: What are your favorite features of the device. How many of the features do you understand? How many do you use? And this also of course is relevant for apps because we often download apps and then it's, “Why is that on my phone, I haven’t used that for years”, right? So how many do you use and if ever? When do you use your phone? When do you turn it off? And how do you respond when it vibrates or rings? You know part of this pattern is really interesting because we've moved so much to text and away from phone calls and for some of us when the phone rings it's like wow, that's a major intervention. The point here is that your relationship with your mobile phone may be one of the most complicated relationships of your lives. We chose the story of the iPhone as the 21st century Gamechanger because it wiped out the competition in the mobile market. And we think the mobile phone in general has played, is the major game changer in so many ways? But the iPhone itself consisted of brilliant industrial design driven by foresight, user centric research and excellent design aesthetics. And it moved mobile navigation from keyboard to haptics, so that was a huge change. And there were many competitors in the market at the time. There was Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, BlackBerry, Microsoft, Motorola. Not all of them are alive now. And when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, he described it as quote, “a widescreen iPod with touch controls”, end quote, and then quote, “a breakthrough Internet communications device”, unquote. So, the other thing the iPhone did, which was really significant is it put a camera, first, a still camera and then a video camera in everyone's pocket or purse. You know transforming for better or for worse, the ways that we experience the world through the selfie. So, we have a whole new culture and again, going back to Bill Buxton about how design shapes our culture that's emerged through this revolutionary device. And the iPhone demonstrated that design is the fundamental feature in a shift to a world that is moving away from products and moving instead toward services. Apple not only exemplified product design but also service design, which crosses virtual worlds and tangible physical worlds to create, “…meaningful experiences for people”. So, and again, that's going back to our friend Steve Jobs - so Apple launched the concept of the App Store in 2008 with 500 apps and now there are over 2.1 million Apple apps on the market in terms of the iStore. Google Android adds another million on top of that, so about 3.5. And as you may have considered during our earlier polls, apps have changed your mobile into a bank machine, a health and wellness monitor, a personal calendar, your portable office, and a gaming platform. And mobile devices have changed the labour market, creating on demand services such as ride sharing and food delivery that are driven by mobile orders. We also have to remember iTunes, which is why the iPhone is a systems design revolution. We chose it, not just the mobile phone in general, but because iTunes broke the back of the pirate music market and also gave Apple platform experience so it was able to use that experience to build the App Store. And it's an interesting time to talk about the iStore. As Apple faces challenges from Fortnite and Spotify and US antitrust hearings, it may have to remodel its model where it tightly controls the pricing of its iStore and adds a significant 30% cost on top of that. of apps, in order to use its platform. So, on the other side of this, unlike its competitors, Apple recently brought in enhanced privacy protections, the app tracking transparency ATT feature allows users to choose whether or not they are tracked and this may strengthen its market share at a time when there are enhanced concerns about unauthorized data sharing. Apple has also recently made a commitment to Zero carbon and quote, “a comprehensive approach to responsible mineral sourcing, including requirements and programs at many levels of the supply chain”, unquote. Really trying to also not have any blood metals, so, ensuring that its sources are clean and have good labour practices which is a major shift and it's a response to its consumer base, which lobbied very hard to have Apple do this.
Now we're going to go back to the turn of the century. The next stage in this development was less design and more technology driven, and that was Google's investment in Android and its launch of the Open Handset Alliance, which was sideways jump for essentially a search (which was of course Google's Big Revolution) one of the major search entities, the most powerful, but also, an advertised driven business. A design driven business in which successful advertising drove its revenue. But the Android phone would have failed without excellent design, and I think it's again important to talk about this, because Samsung, which has led that market, had reversed engineered American inventions for years. And Samsung completely transformed its businesses, and began to in 1996 at the direction of its then chairman Lee Kun Hee, who was frustrated with the lack of innovation he felt in in Korean engineering schools and in companies, and in Samsung. He moved to build a design focused company and he began actually, to recruit and work with designers from all over the world. He hired thousands of designers and collaborated with design institutions and integrated design into all aspects of the Samsung business. We’re not going to go into all the details around that, but it really changed its position in the world and its position in the market. And it certainly meant that Samsung was positioned to be able to really lead in the Android Market through really effective design. An example of this is the Galaxy Note. Its an example where designers saw an unmet need as knowledge workers used wallet size diaries to keep notes and schedules. They created a smart diary that included a pen interface and a 5 1/2” screen, not a tablet and not a mobile. That was a really important interface in taking a space in between. It was very inventive and as of September 2020 according to. Counterpart research, the Galaxy Note 20 is the world's best or was back in September of last year, the world's best-selling 5G smartphone. The smart phone is exemplary of the ways that in the 21st century design focuses on user or customer experience - usability is now merely the price of entry… The bar is getting raised every day for the way an object or an experience looks or feels, its tone of voice, its personality. And we expect the same quality from the NRC website as our mobile phone, right? As in the Roots case, the introduction of variability into universality, a result of digital tools, for example, in interface personalization, allows consumers to feel control over products and their environment in both symbolic and genuine ways. And you know also, access is a huge issue. I experienced this all the time because I spend some of my time in northern Canada, and the Internet is really not viable there. the NRC’s High-throughput and Secure Networks Challenge program is incredibly important. It's a fundamental necessity for the delivery of education, healthcare and entertainment on our mobile devices in all regions. Of course, we've seen how important design is within this concept of access and the network. The iPhone combined Strategic Foresight, Industrial Design, Service Design and usability, user experience design, so Experience Design or UX.
We're going to move on and talk about design as a social movement and the quest for livable cities. And this comes back to that great question about, the 1% versus the 99%. And we've already seen in our discussion of design for the circular economy that design can become a social movement. This is certainly true of the Bauhaus movement in Weimer Germany which argued that form follows function, for truth to materials, minimalism, sustainable use of resources and an emphasis on designers, scientists and technologists collaborating to solve social and economic challenges). I underscore that the sustainable use of resource is so important for Bauhaus so not design for the 1% but for society. And interestingly, there's now something called the New Bauhaus Movement that launched about four months ago, actually, towards the beginning of this year across a number of European countries and across the EU, which is focused on sustainability and sustainable design. And back to these principles, not so much modernist aesthetics, but all these principles of the Bauhaus. And then design with the other 90% is also a movement and it's a current movement that refocuses designers on collaboratively solving challenges in the emerging world and with indigenous communities. Again, a place where the NRC is playing in in really important and beneficial ways. The New Urbanism movement in the 1970s and 80s was in part inspired by Canadian Jane Jacobs formative work, The Death and Life of Great Cities in 1961, which emphasized the need to look at cities as systems where the health of the city required understanding its environmental and social patterns, as well as its economic drivers and built space. Also influential was Christopher Alexander's, A Pattern Language in which he developed the concept that cities can be understood by extracting existing successful patterns that then would be analyzed for urban design processes and rules. For both Jacobs and Alexander consultation with city dwellers in planning their cities was an imperative and this did not usually happen, so, they really introduced this. Architects and urban planners, other architects and urban planners, though, recognized that complex urban systems can't just bubble up from the base, but they needed drivers from the top as well as that organic development, and they modernized earlier building codes and included mixed use development, sidewalks, greenspace, multimodal transportation, a vibrant public realm and other qualities to make the city more livable. Andres Duany is one of the movement's founders of New Urbanism and with his collaborators applied the idea of the charrette, a method that emerged in the art schools of the 19th century in France. They took that method, and they applied it to architecture and urban planning. These are intensive planning brainstorms that include users in imagining a new building, a park, an amenity, with the design team. Teams divide into subgroups and develop alternate ideas that are presented and critiqued. A very interesting current project is the Reinvent Phoenix project that Duany’s company DPZ is leading, and it's an example of current practices in which large populations are involved in charettes, imagining design features using online as well as face to face consultation tools. The Reinvent Phoenix project held these goals: diverse and affordable housing; a thriving economic development; green infrastructure; balanced land use; connected mobility; and health, and vitality. What's interesting is that these actions have inspired the next phase of New Urbanism, something called the Complete Communities movement and the Complete Community goal is now part of many of the city plans in cities where people on this call currently live, bringing together urban and transportation planning to create walkable communities that maximize density, multimodal transportation, active transit and cars, mixed land use, access to jobs, and varied housing, typologies and costs, that are able to support multiple generations and with amenities and enhanced public realm. Seeking to include not displace current neighborhood dwellers all through sustainable planning for financial and environmental benefits. All of these complex elements and for many NRC research projects you have direct relevance for complete communities to be successful. In meeting environmental goals, they need new materials such as glass reinforced fabrics that make complex structure affordable, highly adaptive shaped metal alloys for sun shading for buildings, glue, laminate, laminated timber structures and affordable environmentally efficient concrete. They require AI embedded infrastructure for building and environmental management, security, health care and other service delivery. Complete communities demand infrastructure and architecture to adapt to aging in place. The NRC’s High-throughput and Secure Networks Challenge that will provide high speed network capacity, as we’ve said is important to Canada but is essential to support a growing work from home culture. The Daniels’ Sunny Meadow and Beckenrose developments in Brampton will build the highest tall timber buildings to date in Canada. I’m actually working with them to use generative design to define and evaluate trade-offs, including last mile transit. Another point of relevance is the NRC’s Fleet Forward program which automates commercial transport and can ensure that communities are serviced. Complete communities also rely on substantive recreational and agricultural greenbelt, which translates increasingly to agriculture within urban and suburban settings - another factor in the Daniels plan. Designers are creating “agrihoods” and exploring intensive food cultivation as part of urban planning, and landscape architecture. The prestigious urban planning and design Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize this year addresses and I quote, “nurturing nutrition in the city”, end of quote, addressing food insecurity in urban centres. The NRC’s Sustainable Food Research and Technologies Program is actually an important fountain of innovation that can feed urban agriculture. I think we're going to maybe move, keep moving and go to questions at the end of our presentation, but we want you to think about how current NRC research is relevant in both the complete communities movement and some of the design instances that we're going to share in the next little while.
And now for our fourth big trend in contemporary design - User-Centric Design. We’ve asked about experiential design and we're going to go back again, and talk a little bit about user centric design and its forms. The most engaged co-design or participatory design began in the 1970s and 80s in Northern Europe and was articulated by Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman, who inspired HCI as a discipline (Human Computer Interaction) as working with users throughout the design process, and now even ISO's demand attention to users’ needs, where the idea is that designers must properly comprehend and specify the detail of user requirements and the context in which a product will be used before producing solutions. At the start of the day, we asked you to think about objects in your home or office and we asked you to think about improving them, and we just thought it would be interesting to take you through a little bit of that journey map, so to speak, of how designers approach problems. The first goal would have been to empathize with you as a user as you logged onto your 3000th Zoom call since COVID-19, understand why you chose the object and that you did, and they would have explored your use of it. They might have undertaken, contextual inquiry around those needs, interviewed you and your colleagues and had you fill out a survey. You would have completed a design probe; you would have documented your use and you would reflect on your everyday life and experience. The designers would have observed you using media capture tools and before COVID-19, old-fashioned participatory observation methods while you worked at home are the lab. They would have mapped the physical space that the redesign would fit in, maybe sat at your desk or dining room. And built a social network map of who would be connected to your use of the object and where decision making lies in adopting a refreshed design. Then they would have created a problem statement which defined the problem and synthesized the research and described the difference between the current state and future state of the design. At the same time, they would have undertaken research, gathered historical approaches to the problem and designs and seen if any of these are relevant or could be turned around, flipped, or adapted. Then they would have ideated using techniques we're going to teach you in Workshop Two and come out with a number of solutions, redefine them by introducing constraints, eliminating ideas, coming up with a final design concept and a user journey map describing the use of the design. From start to finish they would have checked those ideas with you. Then they would have built a prototype, like your sketch that we asked for, using low tech digital prototypes or design sketches that also could be built through 3D printing and touched and interacted with and then critiqued, and then brought these back to you as a user through the process for feedback before a high-fidelity prototype is built with usability testing to follow. If designers are looking to the future of the contemporary objects around you, they might have built scenarios to investigate that feature far in near and then design that object with this information in view. Or replace the object with something entirely different. A better mouse or no mouse at all. A better coffee cop or temperature responsive mug and so on so we know this is a lot for coming back to it. In Workshop Two and you'll also going to receive a copy of this PowerPoint in English and for those of you speak French of the French version. Our fifth and final trend is information design, with the 21st century focus on data, and we know that data does not become information without interpretation, and that requires skillful representation. Data visualization is a scientific and artistic discipline, and it brings together cognitive science, data analysis, analytics, and design. It’s essential for the analysis of data produced for experimental research, for the communication of science and the process of science, but also for policy and strategy and democracy and debate. Data visualization also is a very important component in the area of machine learning. It can strengthen explainable AI to disclose data provenance. So where did the data come from that the AI is being trained on, or machine learning trained on just to disclose decision paths of AI. We're going to come back to that again so but we offer two examples of data visualization that we thought are both useful and beautiful, and relevant to Canada's energy sector. Jer Thorpe is a Canadian visualization designer and an artist, and he created Herald Harbinger an artwork that documents the melting Beau Glacier in Banff National Park. Lots of consonance there, which is installed in a Calgary oil industry tower and in its Plaza. At first and 7th Ave, if you know Calgary, that's like right downtown. The artist placed a seismic station on the glacier and the station monitors the melting of the glacier as it pools and slowly fills the Bow Valley, capturing its patterns in the lobby. Inside the lobby, the glacier’s real-time perturbations are visually juxtaposed against the aggregated trajectories of nearby pedestrians and vehicles in a sequence of overlapping visualizations and soundscape created by composer Ben Rubin. Outside on the Plaza the glacier’s activity is made visible with a very visceral public presence for this very restless complex of ice rock and water. And it's a gentle and poetic critique of fossil fuels and their contribution to global warming. On a very different note, considering public responsibility in the energy sector, the Canadian Energy Regulator undertook a very significant data visualization project led by Annette Hester. We interviewed her for this workshop and she said, quote, “I look at projects of digital transformation and the way people absorb information. We live in a world with more and more data. More data, however, does not necessarily mean more insights or clarity”. End of quote. The data visualization initiative is a three-year initiative using design driven interactive visualization and it was meant to facilitate understanding of the Canada Energy Regulator’s (CER) data and be a catalyst for a change in the organization’s data culture and work process but also catalyze change in the organization's data culture and work process. So, it was an instrument of transformation design. It changed the way that the CER works with data. It strengthens their internal data fluency and work process, and it also shifted the CER’s. relationship with the public in terms of making its data transparent and available. Data visualization is integrated into all CER reporting, for example, incidents at CER, regulated Pipelines. Hester sees the need for data visualization as a means of interpreting data and AI decisions, “The next frontier is for data visualization to become ubiquitous for gaining insights and exacerbating scientific discovery.” We know that visualization is very much part of the practices at the NRC and it’s also an opportunity for more public engagement as you continue to do your work.
We know we're very close to the end. We're going to just again take maybe take a couple of minutes to see if there's any final questions, and then we're going to just summarize and let you know what's up next in our next workshop. You might want to comment on whether you use data visualization in your work, but also thinking back on the complete communities presentation. Using chat messages, or any hands up? I don't think there's any questions so far. In summary today we've looked at the many strategies of 21st century design, and we've looked at how Industrial Design alone has expanded into concept design systems, design, transformation, design, sustainable design, circular economy design, and generative design. And we've seen design as a social movement. We hope you found the exercise fun, as a way of engaging a little bit it in the world through the lens of design. And we've also seen that AI and design are increasingly linked. Ending on an economic note, the intentional adoption of design has proven results. Design operates as a critically important source of economic value. It raises firms’ levels of profitability and productivity, and it contributes to national economic, competitive and performance ranking. Those who invest heavily in design do better and those are countries like Finland and it rates 5th in global innovation, Canadian, UK and Singapore studies have shown that firms that invest in design outperform others as much as 200%. Design will be an important factor to help us plan our way out of COVID-19 to retain the gains of digitization, service delivery and efficiency that have emerged while building back in the public realm and physical economies. We hope that you've enjoyed today's session and that you'll join us in two weeks.
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| DOI | Resolve DOI: https://doi.org/10.4224/40002667 |
| Author | Search for: ; Search for: ; Search for: ; Search for: 1 |
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| Format | Text, Learning Object |
| Subject | industrial design; concept design; systems design; transformation design; sustainable design; circular economy design; design as a social movement; service and experiential design; generative design; information design; visualization |
| Abstract | |
| Publication date | 2021-08-18 |
| Date created | 2021-05-19 |
| Publisher | National Research Council of Canada. Digital Technologies Research Centre |
| Related publication | View items (3) |
| Translation of | View items (1) |
| Language | English |
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| Record identifier | 42df3f56-ba47-4534-bf87-39ed841d4c18 |
| Record created | 2021-08-18 |
| Record modified | 2022-05-19 |
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