Selected article archive
My interests include image-making and communication, semiotics, visual grammar, and how people construct taxonomies and define their spaces. I am also interested in how people may share or express those ideas.
Other interests include maps. Maps are a way to change the discussion to an individual’s reflection on other things: a city street, interactions with others, an environment, a local history based on landmarks, etc.; i.e. other people and things.
How can people reflect on and interpret the artifacts of their experiences and practices? How can shared artifacts or references be a way to negotiate meaning between people?
How can people’s stories lead to defining larger problems and developing new stories that work as design scenarios?
Finally how can people with different roles and backgrounds converge on shared practices to “get things done” through design and social innovation and other like-minded frameworks?
Scott Townsend and Maria Patsarika.
Rethinking Cultural Probes in Community Research and Design as Ethnographic Practice
Understanding social practices as they co-evolve in researcher-community transactions is fundamental in “design and social innovation” (Manzini et al. 2015) where local knowledge, resources, and agency are key in solving wicked problems (Horst and Rittel 1971). In this paper, we seek to explore the traces that researchers and community members leave behind as indexical forms of representation. Analogies between probes and fragments on the one hand, and ethnographic methods and traces, on the other hand, might be useful; the first as inspirational, yet elusive and sporadic revealing highly subjective clues; the second enabling traceable associations with cultural meaning-making practices within community settings. We present two case studies from community design projects to describe and discuss the use of cultural probes in participatory design as enablers of dialogue and sensemaking in open-ended conversations with communities. Working in communities can thus become a form of “public ethnography”, an effort to understand and analyze social practices from multiple knowledge perspectives as an ongoing process. .. (Link)
MODE
Strategies for an Interdisciplinary Critical Service Learning Engaging Social Sciences and Design
In a greater sense, motion design, experience design, and interaction design can be thought of as experiential and performative. This paper will use a number of projects and investigations in education and also in applied projects to outline motion as indexical gesture and motion/interaction design as “embodiment” in analogy/simile and schema theory, including physical and social interactions. This is organized primarily through four areas of gesture, duration, sequence, and environment, where the last two categories are related to narrative structures based on analogy/simile, schema, and actual designed environments... (Link)
Education Forum
Strategies for an Interdisciplinary Critical Service Learning Engaging Social Sciences and Design
Maria Patsarika and Scott Townsend.
Critical approaches to community engagement and social change reposition the public university in a more dialogic and reciprocal relationship with its publics against instrumentalist, expert-oriented knowledge economy paradigms. With a pluralistic outlook to "futuring" societies in the face of wicked problems(Fry 2010) we present an interdisciplinary framework for service learning as a public pedagogy within the disciplines of design and sociology. (Link)
Introductory lecture Melbourne AUS-Swinburne University
Social Pleasure and Design and Social Innovation: Work in Greece 2015-2017
How do we frame "design and social innovation" in ways that are not dominating or objectifying the people we work with? Social pleasure in the community is one factor. I will describe how daily social pleasure was and continues to be a key to ‘design and social innovation,’ referencing the Greek term ‘oikos.’ Oikos means not only household or hearth, but also the pleasure of doing work or sharing communality together ‘in the household / community.’ These daily connections changed the perception of myself (and now my students) in the community, in ways that were unexpected for us (as visual communication practitioners and researchers). (Link)
Reopening Paul Dourish’s “toolbox,” and the “implications for design” argument (Revised- October 22, 2015- Design and Culture 2016)
In 2006 Paul Dourish gave a paper that discussed the positioning of (specifically) ethnography and the motives for extracting out “implications for design” i.e. design interventions and form. This is part of the basis of this paper, which develops in essay form a “case-study” that helps illustrate the need to develop and pursue critical interrogations of what Dourish called a “toolbox of methods.” (Link)
Editing: introduction to 60 page section in Design and Culture 7.2 and 7.3
Introducing “Design and Academe:” Design Education and Social Innovation
Design and Culture 7.2 started a recurring section on design education and practice. Our first theme was “design education and social innovation,” coming at a time when local needs and global challenges converge with design discourse, academia, and design practices in topical and important new ways (Irwin/Vodeb/Guaralda/Penin/Fry/Lo/Yang) (Link)
Design Philosophy Papers
Complexity and Control; the New Design Paradigm
Issues of research and methods seriously impact the way we think about other cultures, and may create and further instrumentalist practices. (Link)
Florence and Belgrade
Social Capital Overview text in Italian... (Link)
Design and Culture 3-2 Main ArticleSituated Design: A Space for Interaction and “Reading"
Reading is becoming a more diverse activity. While the act of reading engages a reader through intense interiorization and reflection, reading is also placed within more exteriorized social contexts through ubiquitous computing, networking, and densely designed public spaces. (Link)
Brujula- Hemispheric Institute of the Americas
The Borderline Projects: Art-making as a Mirror in Global Redistribution
What is the nature of politically engaged art-practice in light of the shifting contexts of highly mobile global audiences? How does the issue of translation become a strategy in building awareness across languages? What is the position of being between cultures, of communities on a border, or of crossing a border and living within a larger culture which projects its own stereotypes and assumptions about the minority community? Migration based on economic and political pressure is a huge and pervasive trend that is shaping global culture. These questions are the broad basis for the development of a series of linked projects called the Borderline Series, which focuses on contemporary migrations between Latin and North America. (Link)
Design Issues Volume 14, Number 3
Unfolding the Surface of Information
Digital interaction raises many new questions regarding the nature of design. Can the speed and ubiquity of "new" information, broadly construed, be understood through older theories of communication- or is there a threshold that we begin to cross where immediate distribution through electronic networks and user interaction contradicts many older definitions of information design? There is a crisis in our understanding. The older models and applied theories of maker and audience seem insufficient within this environment, yet, what new theories are provided seem to be placed within a hypothetical future that seems disconnected to the present. To examine the present is extremely difficult. (Link)
Zed 5: Beyond the object: the implications issue
Towards a Surface of Information
Interactivity combines time-based media with traditional literacy. Cognitive psychologists have suggested that memory is encoded very differently based on "episodic or semantic" categories. These categories appear oppositional especially regarding the vulnerability and authenticity of information based on personal perception versus authoritative source. Defining and expanding overlaps may help in determining function on the most basic level of interactive design. This paper defines and expands terms to include how perceptual information may integrate more meaningfully in our use of traditional writing, through alternative structures or "schema" of "new" information especially regarding navigation, and interface metaphor. (Link)
Review: Miwon Kwon: One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity
One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity charts the development of site-specific art making from the 60's to the present. The task that Miwon Kwon has taken on is not a survey or complete history for site-specific art. Rather, she has selected practitioners that let her illustrate a kind of evolving critical viewpoint for herself. Kwon connects this recent history to a larger context for, and a yearning to discover, site-specificity now. She develops a historical perspective in which she feels free to move back and forth for the sake of instructive comparisons, and we benefit from her approach. (Link)
Schools of Thought III: Pasadena
Is there a question here?...
Many theorists vie for the supposed key to understanding "new media,” and most are to be found outside of graphic design. Not surprisingly, each author speaks from his or her own disciplinary bias. Critical writing either becomes reductive and ideologically trapped within that bias, or so personalized that the ideas are hard to interrogate. Writers run the gamut, from generalized theories (Bolter and “remediation”), to historical precedent (Manovich) to politics of identity (Haraway). (Link)