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.