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Improvising Design

… taming Wicked Problems with design

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Improvising Design

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Improvising Design

Why is design improvisational?  We talk about design as if it were fixed: as if there were one best way to design everything. We celebrate designers who produce especially elegant or usable artifacts as if they were possessed of supernatural powers.

Susan April 14, 2015November 15, 2022 design, improvisation, wicked problems Read more

Design Methods as Performative Objects

Brown and Duguid’s (2001) concept of a “network of practice” has been niggling away at my consciousness. The idea is that a collection of people are enabled to understand each others’ work because of commonalities in practice, but not to

Susan July 10, 2014May 28, 2015 design, learning Read more

Responsive Web Design

I manage the website for an Animal Rescue shelter. I have been struggling with the design of the site for some time now, as I have some users who are still using IE6 under windows XP (on an SVGA screen),

Susan March 12, 2014May 28, 2015 design, interaction design, Internet Read more

On Realizing The Relevance of Actor-Network Theory

A recent emphasis on sociomateriality appears to have entered the IS literature because of discussions by Orlikowski (2010) and the excellent empirical study of Volkoff et al. (2007). Now that people have been sensitized to the literature on material practice,

Susan September 23, 2013May 28, 2015 design, research, trajectory Read more

Organizational Forms Of Coordination

I have been working for a while on comparing the results from some very complex research studies of collaborative design in groups that span disciplines or knowledge domains. I was stunned to realize that I had different types of group

Susan February 25, 2011May 28, 2015 collaboration, design, groups Read more

The Potential of Interaction Design

While browsing and working on a recent paper, I mused on the missed opportunity of interaction design. Reading Terry Winograd’s (1997) From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design, I was stunned to see how visionary this was, in the context of

Susan August 5, 2010May 28, 2015 design, interaction design Read more

Chapter 1 of Book Available

Chapter 1 for Improvising Design book has been uploaded. The first chapter discusses why we need better models and methods for design … and why design is improvisational. Doubtless, stuff will be shifted around a little, as I complete my

Susan May 11, 2010May 28, 2015 book, design, improvisation Read more

Design as Bricolage.

The core problem of design is to use a problem-representation that can allow people to communicate the structures in their “mental jigsaw picture” to others.

Susan April 12, 2010May 28, 2015 bricolage, design Read more

Design as the Serendipity of Location

As I ruminate on design processes, I can’t help but reflect on the similarities between research methods, processes and outcomes, and design methods, processes and outcomes. I read an article which argued that there were two types of people: people

Susan November 27, 2009May 28, 2015 design, improvisation, research Read more

Why The IKEA Font Matters

People have been commenting on the change of font used by IKEA for their catalogs since August, when the new catalog came out. IKEA had used the Futura font for 50 years, but made the decision to adopt Microsoft’s Verdana

Susan September 5, 2009May 28, 2015 design Read more
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Recent Posts

  • Coordination, Cooperation, and Collaboration
  • Improvising Design
  • The Co-Design of Business & IT Systems
  • Design Methods as Performative Objects
  • Responsive Web Design

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