Social
Spaces

As described in the post “Mapping the Euregional fablab: a report”, Social Spaces did two mapping sessions at the i_beta festival in Heerlen, the Netherlands on Friday June 18th 2010. Here, we designed a Euregional fablab. The videos of the two presentations (in which the participants of both the sessions presented their maps) are now online!

Creating spaces: Euregional fablab from Social Spaces on Vimeo.

Creating spaces: Euregional fablab from Social Spaces on Vimeo.

On Friday 11th of June the research group Social Spaces was invited to organize two mapping sessions at the i_beta festival in Heerlen, the Netherlands. This festival revolved around innovation and new trends in the world of e-culture and creative economy. Organized by Social Beta – centre for e-culture, the i_beta festival focused especially on the challenges the Meuse-Rhine Euregion faces today and on the role e-culture can play in solving these problems. During the two mapping sessions the participants, all coming from various disciplines, designed a Euregional fablab. They discussed how they would imagine a(n) (e-culture) fablab in the Meuse-Rhine Euregion and what key values it would represent.

Social Spaces will be present at the i-beta festival in Heerlen at the 11th of June to present MAPit, a mapping toolkit to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogues and creation processes. The mapping kit answers to the fact that people from different profiles, backgrounds and expertise do not necessarily share the same ‘language’. Adding a visual layer, that is open and adjustable to all participants, creates a different dialogue and enables everyone to join the conversation. Via the toolkit a group of people visualises thoughts and ideas in a playful way and in that way stimulates and guides cross-disciplinary creation processes. MAPit uses an open-source set of icons indicating people, things, activities. Empty icons are also available to create new icons during discussions. In this way, icons can be added and adjusted, implying that the system is never complete and is open to iterative refinement. The MAPit toolkit also contains ‘strange’ or critical icons, like ‘bombs’ and ‘locks’, allowing people to disagree and enabling them to risk a step on uncommon ground, which is more conductive to creativity. On the i_beta event, we will discuss the role of mapping toolkits in moderating cross-disciplinary creation processes in the field of e-culture and creative industries. We will also work with our own MAPit toolkit, exploring the roles of creativity and e-culture in (the future of) the Meuse-Rhine Euregion.

More information on this project here

Today we presented the UseWell mapping icons to our social spaces colleagues in order to get feedback. We received useful comments on our current mapping icons and strategy.

The icon set we designed for UseWell is inspired on the mapping kit created in the research project Interface-Our-Space. Interface-Our-Space made this kit to create an overview of creative processes. This enables critical reflection and transparency regarding artistic and research projects which are often quite complex. This kit contains icons for persons, tasks, activities, communication tools, lines and arrow to indicate directions, etc..

The icons designed for UseWell will help in our mapping exercises to gather user-centered design methods and tools. Icons are for example persons to define roles of project participants, problem and opportunity which will tell us if a specific method was used to conquer a problem or work out an opportunity, documentation of the project, achievement to clarify what was achieved by using a specific method or tool, etc.

For example icons to display emotional collaboration, whether you agree or disagree or even stand neutral towards a situation, were not clear enough. We will redesign these, as well for the tiny detail of the gender specified icons of persons. We made a female and male icons, this difference should be visualised more clearly.

Another concern was that we are going to receive to few methods and tools with using only the mapping exercise. However, our desk research creates an inventory of existing methods and tools. The goal of UseWell is to gather methods and tools, which are the most used and innovative.

Furthermore, we were asked how we start a mapping session. We will use the ‘personal inventory’ method (IDEO cards) as an icebreaker to create a casual atmosphere and to open up the discussion. Additionally, a mapping session will always be led by two researchers (Andrea & Priscilla); one will instruct the participants and facilitate the mapping process of writing down and gluing to the sheets of paper, the other will take notes and ask critical questions about the ongoing discussion.

Last week Priscilla Machils, Annet Dekker (Virtual Platform) and me went to Brighton to map the mixed reality game/work ‘Uncle Roy All Around You’ by Blast Theory. This to document imaginative participatory practices in arts and design for a future publication for BAM. The report will follow soon.

Matt Adams pointed us to an article that used the work of Blast Theory as a casestudy to illustrate the productive role of ambiguity in participatory design processes. The article is not recent, but still very relevant today and especially for our research work. It discusses the role of ambiguity in design. The authors Gaver and Benford state that design is too often focussed on usability and functionality, while neglecting the stimulating role of ambiguous elements. The aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of ambiguity are thoroughly explored in the arts. Therefore the authors want to translate this artistic experience in tactics that can be used by (interaction) designers. The article can be found here:
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/documents/ambiguity_CHI_2003.pdf

The reflection of the authors Gaver, Beaver and Benford about ambiguity as design principle zooms in on the project “Projected Realities”. This project represents the lives of elderly people in the Dutch Bijlmer’s community life via images and words in a ‘sloganbench’ and an ‘imagebank’. Images and words selected by the elderly about their lives are presented without much context in this bench and bank. The ambiguous representation of the lives of elderly in the community leaves openings for imagination and interpretation. The bench, for example, presents slogans about the lives of the elderly. If you sit on the bench the slogans are hidden. The slogans can thus only be observed when standing. Of course this not what the bench is intended for. The familiar is mixed in playful ways with the strange. This to make lives of elderly visible in the community in imaginative ways. In that way the designers want to increase awareness and understanding for their needs and desires (http://cms.gold.ac.uk/media/20gaver-dunne.projReal.chi99.pdf).They also refer to Desert Rain by Blast Theory as an illustration of ambiguity as design principle. It is a mixed reality game about the Gulf war. The borders between the virtual and the physical world are made deliberately ambiguous. Factual images of the Gulf War are mixed with fictional images and game elements are mixed with theatre and installation (Gaver et al, 2003, p. 234).

The two articles and their reflections on the role of ambiguity, critical awareness and imagination relate very much to what Simon Bowen will talk about tomorrow in Z33 at eight (Hasselt). Please join us!