I’m going to this – quite excited that there is such an interest in critical design theory in Built Environment and Engineering at QUT:
Faculty of the Built Environment and Engineering School of Design and Design Research Theme
Invite you for a public talk
Design for, by and with users: from participatory design to meta-design and place-making
Speaker: Prof Pelle Ehn, Malmö University, Sweden
Date: Wednesday, 22 March 2006
Time: 18.00 (for 18.15)
Venue: ‘ O’ 308, Gardens Point campus, Queensland University of TechnologyAbstract
Making products and services that are meaningful to their users is one of the foundations for design. One approach to meet this demand in the design process has been labeled participatory design, inviting stakeholders as co-designers. Examples of this approach, a theoretical foundation and potential shortcomings will be reflected upon. This leads into reconsidering user participation and towards a more general perspective of meta-design of artefacts and infrastructures, towards designing and eventually the ways in which people make place. Some of these reflections will be in line with the just published “The Semantic Turn a new foundation for design” by Ulm designer and professor of communication Klaus Krippendorff.
Language-games, design-games and place-making-games will be central concepts, but the foundational “turn” or “twist” suggested is pragmatic rather than semantic.
3 responses to “Public talk on participatory design”
The last time I saw Pelle Ehn speak he was on about design as an “anxious act of political love”… But I’m especially curious about his suggestion above that we move from user-centred to place-centred design, and I hope you’ll ask hard questions about the ethics and politics involved 😉
he has several papers online, all of them very good. look for the scandanavian journal of information systems, or drop me a note, i can send you the ones that i converted to text-pdfs.
Anne, certainly will do that! I’ll report back, so you can tell me if my questions were hard enough 😉 I’m very curious what the BEE folk will make of it all, as a matter of fact.
Thanks jeremy – is there anything you don’t know?