CHI 2007 Workshop:
Supporting Design Studio Culture in HCI

Topic Description

In the general case, a design studio is creative, collaborative, and most-of-all highly material —that is the space is dominated by material objects, surfaces for sharing ideas and inspiration, making ideas and activities visible and tangible by means of physical materials such as post-it notes, sketches, magazine scraps, models, and physical prototypes. The physical arrangement of a design studio creates shared spaces and personal spaces. There are oftentimes walls and other less permanent vertical surfaces that are highly decorated with various images, diagrams, sketches, and objects related to design work-in-progress. The persistence of what is represented on such surfaces is important to the design process and serves as collective memory and external cognition for the design teams. The rich environment of the design studio stimulates creativity in a manner germane to the design tasks at hand. Many of the objects in a design studio may have seemingly little to do with the projects at hand, but in fact serve to challenge and inspire new ideas, to create cross-contextual remindings that lead to breakthrough thinking and conceptualization.

Setting up a workspace as a design studio with work-in-progress in clear view invites critique and fosters the deeply entrenched designerly practice of showing work and eliciting feedback early and often . Such practice encourages discourse and reflection during the design process. Much of design work is collaborative and group-oriented and the physical nature of design studios affords such group-orientation and collaborations. There is a beehive effect in a fully functional design studio in which the energy of others serves as a stimulus to each individual and between groups. The physical environment encourages and emphasizes sharing and collaborative interaction more than individual work in front of individual personal computers.

For the specific case of interaction design and HCI, we want to understand to what extent common design studio culture can and should play a role. The purpose of the workshop is to explore the degree to which design studio culture is already a part of the practice of design in HCI or interaction design, and to understand how best to support the best practices of studio culture in this specific context in the future.

One of the most important questions concerns the degree to which virtual, online notions of design studio culture can be effectively realized in the context HCI and design—how do virtual world studios compare to physical world notions of design studio culture and to mixed physical and virtual world notions?

The goals of the workshop are to examine these and other pertinent questions from the perspectives of research, education and practice.

Outcomes

Depending on the quality of the position papers, we may invite certain authors to contribute to an anthology that we will make public and publish in a suitable venue to be determined. We will circulate a transcript of the insights and strategies discussions to all participants. Assuming sufficient interest, we will make the wiki an on-going forum for discussion of design studio culture in interaction design. We will host and maintain the wiki at the School of Informatics.

Organizers

•  Eli Blevis, Assistant Professor at Indiana University, School of Informatics. (eblevis@indiana.edu)
•  Youn-Kyung Lim, Assistant Professor at Indiana University, School of Informatics. (younlim@indiana.edu)
•  Erik Stolterman, Professor and Director of the HCID program at Indiana University, School of Informatics. (estolter@indiana.edu)
•  Tracee Vetting Wolf, Staff Software Product Design Professional at IBM T.J. Watson Research. (tlwolf@us.ibm.com)
•  Keiichi Sato, Professor and Ph.D. program co-coordinator at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology. (sato@id.iit.edu)