Keynote I — A Short History of a Design Conference

Steven Kyffin

Senior Director, Company Design Research, Philips Design, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Abstract:

Way back in 2004, three of us were intrigued by the notion that the nature of things, the essence of what a fabricated object is, was about to be – and really should be – completely and fundamentally questioned, re-defined, and exploded. We knew our current conceptions needed to be shattered once and for all so that we could be truly creative in how we contributed to the conceiving of the NEW THINGS. We were intrigued because the three of us were working in three very different practicing contexts and represented somewhat different aspects of the design disciplinary spectrum. If we truly accumulated the views and the abilities we had in conceiving of ideas and things, then surely the results would be very, very different, and might even be important in driving the practice and discipline of Design forward in some way. Even more important is that we quickly concluded that we could not be the only ones to have had these thoughts! The only way to find out, we concluded, was to offer to host an event, a little conference, to enable all comers to share and build on the thoughts they we having and exploring in the territory we were all unraveling together.

In 2005 DeSForM was born!

We still believe that DesForm is the first international conference seeking to present current research into the nature, character and behavior of emerging new typologies of co-designed, content rich, connected and intelligent objects within adaptive systems. It aims to bring together researchers in the many related fields of design to assess the outcomes of this research and begin to identify issues and territories for future investigation and exploration.

Our original working premise for this research was that forms, either concrete or abstract, always carry or mediate meanings. It is the responsibility of designers to make good use of these meanings, for example, to make products beautiful, to stress the importance of certain values, or to improve a product’s ease of use. Further, it should promote or negotiate enriched experiences between people (communities) and people, people and objects, and in time between objects (systems of objects) and objects. Design uses its own languages for this purpose, just as poets, painters, journalists, sculptures, filmmakers and other artists do. Objects, whether hard, soft or digital, are still being designed using a mono-sensorial approach rather than a multi-sensorial approach.

Design has long since practiced and developed its ideas on a cultural platform, rather than merely on a technological, marketing or a financial and business base. Understanding people, not as a single intellectual or physiological entity, but rather as a member of a cultural expression within a socio-political paradigm or ‘world-view’ is the essence of this cultural platform, which is why this year in 2009 DeSForM is hosted outside of Europe, here in Asia.

Here, through DeSForM 09, we can open even more widely the debate on what it means to represent or mediate ideas, function, and intelligence in a particular cultural context through a new language which has not hither to been over-run with modernist Western nuances, idioms and formal icons from bygone eras. Particularly this year in this Asian context, we can debate how objects, whether digital or physical, are moving from a functional relationship with us to a cultural and empathetic relationship—from short term ‘forgettable’ relationships to long term, sustained relationships.

As objects are beginning to be considered as part of multi-dimensional ECO system (potentially being physically, digitally and behaviorally different in nature) we need to be questioning how and out of what we could be creating them; and how might they be manifested over time through use by different hands and in different contexts?

If we explore this new complexity in objects, we believe that we need to know how to ‘read’ the objects and how to design them to be read in the way we intend, irrespective of additional readings or meanings which people might add and re-appropriate. Tomorrow’s objects, we expect, are in a continual state of becoming.

As if this were not enough, we also challenged ourselves with the ambition to develop precise formulation of new theories and subsequent tools and processes which design thinkers and practitioners alike could work with in the creation of such new possibilities. For example, some 20 years ago, researchers started working hard to put most of the 3D and material design elements (engineering drawings, stress analysis, production manufacturing simulations and so on) into the language of the computer, which is why we have CAD now. Our ambition is to seek to promise the next contemporary breakthroughs of similar impact in the face of today’s new realities.

What shall they be…?

In conclusion, the original three founders became five and it is our ambition that this key note will revisit the premise which DeSForM was built upon and provide a little glimpse of the main points of debate over the past years as a means to launch us into the heady challenges we have to share though the papers presented in the next few days.

Speakers’ short bio statements:

Steven Kyffin is Senior Director of Design Research & Innovation at Philips Design. In this function he is responsible for the Design Research program within Royal Philips Electronics, and for the Ideas (innovation) Engine at Philips Design. Design Research is the domain of knowledge and competence building in the design-related domains of socio-cultural trends, cultural contextualization and understanding emerging technological (ICT) and material developments. He is also responsible for identifying new strategies in brand design, design-led innovation, as well as the more ‘traditional’ design practice disciplines such as product design, graphic & communication design, user interaction and interface design. The Ideas Engine is the key contributor for fuelling Philips’ new business “Incubators.” These Incubators generate future product service solutions and build upon IP territories across the entire Philips portfolio.

Before joining Philips in 1998, Steven was Director of the Industrial Design Master’s program at the Royal College of Art in London for three years. There, he initiated and directed PhD studies and collaborative projects with major international and UK institutions. These projects saw the integration of design, engineering and cultural disciplines. Prior to his appointment with RCA, he ran his own design consulting company.

 In addition to his current responsibilities, Steven is a member of the Philips Design Global Leadership Team. He also holds a number of adjunct professorships from leading design universities in Europe and Asia. He is regularly published in conference papers and as a contributing author to books, and is often invited to give keynote speeches at international conferences.

 Steven plays an active role across a number of leading design universities. For example, he is Visiting Professor at the University of Northumbria, Hong Kong Poly U & the Southern Yangtze University in Wuxi Shanghai. He also sits on a number of other university faculty steering & review boards.

Steven was born in Hong Kong and currently lives in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. He received his Master of Design, Industrial Design, Royal College of Art, London, in 1984 and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Design in 2009 from Northumbria University.

Keynote II — Form is Void and Void is Form

Yi-Ping Hung

Professor and Director, Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University

Abstract:

Whenever there is perception of form, there is fraud. When you think you know something, you actually do not know it, for you are seized by the form of knowing something. When you feel you are not knowing anything, you begin to know something. My design concept is to try to use multimedia technology to bring out the user’s consciousness of form and void, and to guide the user back to oneness and peace, or at least to the pathway leading to oneness and peace. In our recent work “I am,” we used a gaze tracking device to record and analyze the intent of a participant when browsing a colorful cabinet and being interrupted by a sudden display of a digitized self portrait. This was done to invite the participants to contemplate their volition and consciousness. In another interactive work, “Breathing between Present and Past,” we made it possible for museum visitors to revive a famous rusty artifact by touching a virtual display of the artifact. The visitor could only be successful, however, if he or she had breathed slowly and deeply in sync with the breathing of the artifact (rendered with computer simulation) for a certain period of time. It was hoped that breathing could function as a bridge between form and void, and could help to build a good connection between the museum visitors and the museum artifacts. In our current project “i-m-Space,” which is an Interactive Multimedia-enhanced Space for the rehabilitation of post-surgery breast cancer patients, we again use breathing and touching as the interaction elements for relaxation and rehabilitation. Some of our other related works will be introduced in this talk and include a virtual touch panel, 3D magic crystal ball, and i-m-Top and i-m-Tube.

Speakers' short bio statements:

Yi-Ping Hung received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 1982. He received an M.S. from the Division of Engineering, an M.S. from the Division of Applied Mathematics, and a Ph.D. from the Division of Engineering, all at Brown University, in 1987, 1988 and 1990, respectively. He is currently a professor in the Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, and in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, both at National Taiwan University. From 1990 to 2002, he was with the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, where he became a tenured research fellow in 1997 and is now a Joint Research Fellow. He served as a deputy director of the Institute of Information Science from 1996 to 1997, and received the Young Researcher Publication Award from Academia Sinica in 1997. Since 2007, he has served as the director of the Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia at National Taiwan University. He was the program co-chair of ACCV’00 and ICAT’00, and the workshop co-chair for ICCV’03. He has served on the editorial board of the International Journal of Computer Vision since 2004. His current research interests include computer vision, pattern recognition, image processing, virtual reality, multimedia system and human-computer interaction.

Keynote III — Creating Meaning in Systems Design

Philip Ross & Joep Frens

Assistant Professors, Designing Quality in Interaction Group, Department of Industrial Design, University of Technology Eindhoven, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Speakers' Research Website:

Philip Ross: http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/p.r.ross/

Joep Frens: http://www.richinteraction.nl

Abstract:

The face of design is changing. The products we use increasingly become part of larger systems that connect multiple people with multiple technologies. This emerging field of ‘systems design’ presents design research with new challenges. How can design research deal with the complexity of multiple people and multiple products that are intricately connected?

In this joint presentation, we explore systems design with a focus on the question of how to create meaningful interactions. This question is addressed from a specific theoretical point of departure that looks at action as generator of meaning in human-product interaction. Respect for all human skills, e.g. perceptual-motor, emotional, cognitive and social skills, is key in our approach. We observe that current systems design tends to resort to abstractions to deal with the complexity of systems (think of on-screen social software for example). We see much potential for creating meaning in human-system interaction by capitalizing on human skills in a more physical way.

The projects ‘Rich Interaction’ and ‘Ethics & Aesthetics in Interaction’ are presented to illustrate our research approach, and to lay the groundwork for our venture into systems design. Both research-through-design projects feature innovative designs that allow people to meaningfully interact with products through expressive, physical action. Despite the fact that these projects stay in the domain of one product-one person interactions, they provide valuable insights for the creation of meaning in systems design. We present a set of systems design explorations based on what we learned in our previous research. These designs share the intention to capitalize on all human skills, including the physical. By reflecting on them, a number of new issues, insights and questions for systems design emerge. These reflections provide researchers with refreshing considerations for moving into the field of systems design.

Speakers' short bio statements:

Philip Ross was born in Deurne, the Netherlands on the 21st of May 1978. He studied Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. In 2003, he received his Master’s degree cum laude with the design research project “Making atmospheres tangible: A research-through-design approach for designing a tangible, expressive product.” The project’s final design was awarded the ZH Vormgevingsprijs at a Dutch student design competition. In 2004, Ross started at the department of Industrial Design at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven as a PhD candidate. During the spring semester of 2006, he was a visiting researcher and teacher at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design in Pittsburgh, USA. He received his PhD degree cum laude in December 2008, with the dissertation “Ethics and aesthetics in intelligent product and system design.” This dissertation explored how to incorporate ethics in the design of intelligent systems, focusing on interactive lighting systems. A resulting interactive LED lamp design was awarded an STW Valorisation Grant, a stimulation grant for commercialization. Philip Ross is currently Assistant Professor in the Designing Quality in Interaction group at the Eindhoven Industrial Design department. In addition to his work at the university, Philip is a passionate jazz guitar player.

Joep Frens was born on the 11th of September, 1974 in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. After obtaining his master degree in Industrial Design Engineering from Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands) he went to Switzerland to pursue a career in research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. He returned to the Netherlands as a PhD student. In 2006 he received a doctoral degree from the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (the Netherlands) on a dissertation titled “Designing for rich interaction: Integrating form, interaction, and function.” Presently he is Assistant Professor at the same university. He teaches several courses at the undergraduate and master levels and continues his research on designing for interaction. In the recent past he has been invited for teaching and lecturing to the USA (CMU), Germany (HFGSG), and South-Korea (KAIST).

Conference Program | Paper Presentations | Keynote (I) | Keynote (II) | Keynote (III)