Rapid, Broad, Autobiographical Design Experience Prototypes
I am currently a second-year interaction design graduate student at the University of Washington in the final phases of my thesis. This article is a review of a method I employed to enrich my thesis research: rapid, broad, autobiographical design experience prototypes. I used this method to bridge the gap between my spring quarter thesis proposal and my formal research in fall quarter. This lightweight and exploratory method allowed me to work broadly, quickly, playfully and theoretically to test out various ideas within the loosely defined scope of my thesis proposal. In retrospect, working in this way provided me with a foundation of experiences and reflections which have had a remarkable impact on my more targeted/structured research and design direction. The following is a description of my thesis proposal, descriptions of the ensuant experience prototypes, and finally a meta-reflection on this autobiographical research approach (however, it should be noted, this is not autobiographical design as described by Carman Neustaedter, Phoebe Sengers and Audrey Desjardins due to it not being something I designed to live with over a period of time, but more a quick way to investigate my own existing cycling practice).
Thesis Proposal: Tangible Technology for Everyday Cyclists
I am a long-time bike commuter who has ridden my bike for a multitude of reasons: community, racing, work, touring, commuting, and fitness. It is a part of my identity, my community and my lifestyle. As a burgeoning interaction designer, I am interested in how technology reflects on and directs actions. For this reason, my thesis proposal argued that the majority of technology developed for cyclists simply supported performance and route statistics. I agreed with the tactile and wearable form factor of much technology for cyclists, but I claimed, from my personal experience, that the culture and practice of cycling is a much richer and more multi-faceted space than is currently being represented by technology, and asked how technology might be designed for cyclists to support the practices of a more diverse array of cyclists. To explore and ideate in this space, I created four autobiographical design experience prototypes in order to begin exploring the design space of tangible and wearable technology for everyday cyclists.
Song Hunter
This exploration observed a unique moment of symbiosis between bikes and cars in a city and asked how this point of contact might be leveraged into unique, cultural, or ludic experiences for cyclists.
The prototype was based on an experience that I have had many times as a cyclist, where I will pull up to a stop light or intersection, or ride along slow-moving traffic and hear someone bump a really good song out their car window that makes me want to ride my bike to the beat. Naturally, they always pull away and the song goes with them. However, using Song Hunter, I sought to capture a car’s song and continue to listen to it even after the car pulled away.
To prototype the Song Hunter experience, I purchased a Bluetooth speaker and a phone mount for my bicycle (see above photo). When I heard someone loudly playing a song out their window I would ride beside them and attempt to Shazam the song. If I could successfully find the song with Shazam, I would then attempt to get it to play from my small Bluetooth speaker.
This experience was interesting in that it experientially reinforced what I knew about traffic patterns in the city as well as how influential design can be on behavior. In the beginning stages of this experiment, I tried to find songs during my morning commute. This failed, as apparently no one bumps music at 8:30 am. In order to hunt songs, I had to ride my bike in rush hour traffic in the heat of summer. I was breathing exhaust and swerving into tightly packed traffic in downtown Seattle — a situation I would normally avoid. It was also hard to catch songs, I would awkwardly fumble with my phone to get to Shazam, riding slowly next to cars, splitting/weaving through lanes in stop-and-go traffic, trying to pace with cars long enough to catch the song. I only successfully grabbed two songs, but I was very proud of myself when I did (see above playlist).
Bike Clothes Discussion Cards
One aspect of being an everyday cyclist is the complexity of dressing for cycling and everyday life. If prompted, I could give a detailed inventory of how every piece of clothing in my closet intersects with cycling. Some clothes are for long rides, some only for short commutes, some coats are too long, while some are ugly but perfect for riding in a rainstorm, and some clothes I don’t wear often because I love them and I don’t want to sweat in them. In other words, it is complicated. To explore this, I created a set of cards that tried to draw out some of the complexities of dressing for cycling.
I first created a digital mockup of how clothes might be organized in a system of playing cards with labels denoting their place within a cycling lifestyle. I then created a hypothetical set of cards in illustrator that I thought I could print out and use as physical markers to inventory my clothes. I finally began to make paper prototypes of these ‘clothing cards’ on the fly as I went through my wardrobe. I noticed I was developing categories such as how much I liked the piece of clothing, how long I would be willing to ride in it, the fabric quality and durability (does it wrinkle easily?), and the weather the garment was best suited for.
After re-drawing the clothing cards using a system of color-coding to represent larger themes, I took them to a friend’s house and asked her to talk through some of her clothes with the cards. We ended up adding to the set and discussing the tradeoffs between fashion and function in a cycling wardrobe as well as the complexities of sweat, rain, sun and packing for multiple activities throughout the day.
“In the Elements”
In this exploration, I wanted to see if clothes for cycling could reflect the intersections of the cyclists with the elements and their cycling practice in playful ways. After sketching a lot of wacky ideas like chia-helmets and color-changing coats, I was inspired by the phenomena of bike-tan-lines in combination with the tanning-bed practice of putting a sticker on your body somewhere while you were tanning (like a flower or shamrock) to show the difference between your tan and non-tan to keep track of your progress (I grew up in Alaska where tanning was a cultural phenomenon). Bike tan lines are also a pretty funny part of being a cyclist. A lot of cycling gear is made of spandex, so when one rides in the summer, the spandex creates these aggressive lines on a cyclist's legs and arms.
To this end, I embroidered a heart into my cycling shorts and set off on a bike ride to see if I could give myself a heart-shaped tan. While this didn’t happen in one ride, I found this low-fidelity experience profoundly impactful. The superfluous nature of this little heart added a layer of reflection to my cycling practice that highlighted the tension between the risk and joy involved in frequent, prolonged exposure to the sun.
Assemblage Reel
In this experiment, I was interested in exploring the concept of assemblages, which is a term used by Bruno Latour, Giles Deleuze, and Jane Bennet to make webs of actors more horizontal and challenge entrenched subject-object hierarchies. In the work of Jane Bennet in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, assemblages are a way to reduce bias towards anthropocentrism by realizing the intertwined nature of human and non-human actors.
I wanted to explore the elements of an assemblage of riding a bike from two perspectives, one being the ‘objective’ lens of a camera and one being my own ‘subjective’ reflection after a bike ride. To accomplish this, I performed an extremely simple task — I went on a bike ride and took pictures with an old DSLR camera. I figured by reviewing the photographs later, I could create an objective litany of the objects captured. This obviously still had an element of curation or decision making, as I was selecting when to take the photographs, but I figured they would still offer new information beyond my intention upon reflection. After completing the bike ride, I created a web of the parts of an assemblage of cycling from my own personal experiences. To represent the contrast between a digital, photographic record and my conceptual, mind map record, I created a gif of my mind map overlaying the photographs of my ride. I then sketched a further iteration of this where a 360 camera mounted to my bike would take random photographs, resulting in a less controlled record of a bike ride.
Reflection on the Method
Much of contemporary design practice stresses a ‘human-centered’ approach where a designer dissolves into their user group through ‘objective’ research methods. I would challenge the objectivity of any research method, since all methods are designed to some extent by a researcher, and offer a reminder that designers are humans too! Design directions are built through situated, personal intuition and inspiration as well as rigorous research about user groups.
This research happened at a stage before my design question was fully formulated and gave me permission to follow my curiosity and intuition. It reminds me a bit of an autobiographical approach to design workbooks described by Bill Gaver in his paper Making Spaces: How Design Workbooks Work, where, “workbooks are also evidence of, and a tool for, a methodological approach which recognizes that ideas may develop slowly over time, that important issues and perspectives may emerge from multiple concrete ideas” (pg. 1551). Some of my explorations started as jokes to myself (Song Hunter and In The Elements) or unpacked experiences that I have always felt had a potential to be understood more clearly (Bike Clothes Cards) or helped me explore theoretical lenses I was interested in understanding (Assemblage Reel) without the pressure of formalized research or specific outcomes. This allowed me to experience and play before solidifying a direction, building new personal knowledge which I subconsciously returned to later in my design process.
Designing ways to experience and my own questions, and then reflect on those experiences, felt like the most important takeaway from this method. Experience begets fundamentally different reflections and insights than conjecture, this is why designers write on stickynotes, build paper prototypes, conduct card sorts, build a wizard of oz machines, or engage in body storming. I guess this was not that different than all of that, it was just situated within my own practice and run for myself by myself (a function of thesis structure at the University of Washington) with the guidance, always, of my amazing thesis advisor!
Ultimately, personal exploration and reflection through fast experience prototypes can take infinite forms and has the potential to be profoundly impactful on a design process. I will try, in the future, to keep parts of this open-ended, exploratory, experiential and personal approach to generative work in the early stages of the design process.