We warmly invite you to Context Mapping class Work-In-Progress show of 2021 Fall semester. For 16 weeks, we have navigated through emerging Metaverse platforms, and explored the new worlds. While the heart pounding journey, we have encountered new forms of digital life spaces, and their natives. In Sky: Children of Light, anonymous companions in magic cape had guided us to their dreamy fantasies. A distance couple shared us their imaginary home in Gather Town, and told us their teary love story. Isolated college students set forth their desperations, and hopes in corona pandemic. They continue their studies, and friendships while they come over the bridge from teenage school kids to adulthood. The world biggest metaverse, Roblox builders were silently expanding their universes in impeccable endurance. Here, we build worlds, so do the future.
Our WIP show not only presents our design researches and concept designs, but also invites you as participants of our design space that has been built to embrace your imaginations, and visions. Please join us, and tell us your stories.
The gap between research and design which can lead to the gap between analysis and conceptualization
The gap can be due to difference between researchers and designers in :
Skill sets between disciplines or areas of expertise,
culture and values
roles and (perceived) responsibilities,
(perceived) ownership over parts of the process
specialized languages,
boundaries, edges and domains of the unique disciplines, and mindsets and egos of the people involved.
Figure#10.1 Differences between research conducted for informing and research conducted for inspiring
So what does the generative design research process really look like?
Making the plan
Gathering data in the field
Analysis
Communication
Conceptualization
Bridging
Visual thinking and the culture of the charrette : The Charrette Space
“What goes on here will be different from what you are accustomed to.” The charrette becomes a mini-theatre in which the participants enact the narrative of the project.
Working in one pod of the charrette space
Materials are performing different ‘roles’ in situations of co-deisning
Using concepts from third space theory, we have analyzed participatory design methods in four high level categories:
Spaces and places, in which users are brought away from their workplaces or home environments, and software professionals are brought away from their laboratories and office. Examples include Future Workshops, Starting(or Search) Conferences, and Strategic Design Workshops.
Narrative structures, in which users create documentaries of their work and/or lives. Examples include stories and storytelling, CARD and other storyboarding methods with workers and/or children, collaborative photodocumentaries, collaborative videodocumentaries, and workplace drama enactments.
Games, in which users and software people engage in an atmosphere of play to create new ways of describing work and other activities, and new technologies. Examples include Carpentopoly, Layout Kit, CARD, Icon Design Games, and multimedia collage-like collaboration such as User Game and Landscape Game.
Constructions, in which users and software people collaboratively design and construct the concepts for new technologies, often using low-tech materials to facilitate equal abilities by users and professionals to express and critique ideas. Examples include creation of new language concepts to capture the users’ perspectives, co-creating evocative descriptive artifacts (e.g., Strategic Design Workshops), co-creating specification-oriented artifacts(e.g., PICTIVE and other paper-prototyping approaches), and collaborative software prototyping.
The group of events forming Human Cities Helsinki was held during September 2017 and organised by Group X at Aalto University Department of Architecture. They consisted of a collaborative workshop and a triple exhibition as main events, together with adjacent activities organised by the City of Helsinki or programmed within Helsinki Design Week 2017. People from different background, place of origin and representing a variety of institutions participated in the various events.
Figure 1. Illustration of the Character Game process.
Figure 2. Participants start by immersing themselves in user data and creating a dream seniors’ house (right) that works as a game world for the role-play.
Figure 3. Participants select and complete character templates describing their role characters, specific seniors they play in the game.
Figure 4. Participants reflect on what they experienced during the game and codesign new B2B ideas related to seniors’ houses as well as point out interesting themes related to designing for seniors.
Figure 5. Examples of different game settings and materials from several design games that the authors organised in various contexts and purposes.
Conceptualization is on the other side of the analysis space
Figure#9.1 The Analysis and Conceptualization Space Model
Figure#9.3 The Primary Action Categories in the Design Opportunity Space
In making, we use our hands to embody ideas in the form of physical artifacts. The nature of the artifact changes from early to later stages in the design process. Artifacts made early in the progress are likely to describe experiences while artifacts made later in the process are more likely to resemble the objects and/or spaces.
With telling we use verbal languages to describe future scenarios of use. We might tell a story about the future or describe a future artifact. Telling alone can be difficult for peole who don’t have verbal access to their own tacit knowledge. It is generally easier to tell a story about a specific instantiation of something than to formulate an abstract or general assertion.
Enacting refers to the use of the body in the environment to express ideas about future experience. We also call this pretending or play-acting. Acting, improvising and performing can also be considered forms of enactment that are useful in the design process.
You can enter the enacting/making/telling model at any point, i.e., by making props or prototypes , or telling stories about the future, or by acting out ideas(enacting). And from each entry point, you can move in any direction as these examples indicate:
First make a prototype and then use it in telling stories about how it might fit into people’s future ways of living.
First tell a story about the future and then make stuff that helps you to tell the story more effectively.
Tell or write a story about the future and then enact it using the actual environment of use as the stage.
First enact a future scenario and then make props to help make the enactment more real.
Enact a future scenario and then turn it into story.
The exploration and finding of a current frame of reference for creating and utilizing visual tools for communication, capable of serving as a common means of expression for multidisciplinary teams, is the purpose of this research paper. In every case, visual means proved to be valuable thinking and communication assets. Two specific dimensions of communication that allowed team members to define, generate, and communicate innovation opportunities—storytelling and representation—were identified.
Figure 4
Example of an abstracted diagram of communication flow and visual means utilized in the design project scenario described by an industrial designer.
Figure 5
The three general communication activities identified in the communication process of the eighteen design scenarios described by the interviewees.
Figure 6
Visual means comparison by discipline during the communication activity of defining perceived needs.
Figure 7
Visual means comparison by discipline during the communication activity of generating ideas and opportunities.
Figure 8
Visual means comparison by discipline during the communication activity of presenting solutions.
Figure 1: Cognitive work analysis assesses the capabilities and constraints that shape the cognitive work associated with adaptive activity
Figure 3: The standard two-dimensional format of an abstraction-decomposition space
Work can be described in terms of work situations (the situational contexts for work), domain functions (device-independent functional descriptions of capabilities and constraints essential to satisfying the domain purpose) and work tasks (what is to be accomplished by goal directed activity within the work domain). Work organization analysis identifies the work tasks that rely on the domain functions identified in work domain analysis and identifies the work situations in which those work tasks are typically activated.
Figure 6: A decision ladder template with cognitive states depicted as ovals and cognitive processes depicted as arrows
A cognitive strategy is a generic pattern or, alternatively, a behavioural prototype for a work task or a component of a work task. It is a way of transforming one cognitive state into another and is therefore a class of cognitive process. In contrast to work task analysis, cognitive strategies analysis develops more detailed descriptions of the way in which one cognitive state can be transformed into another.
To illustrate, the right-hand leg of the decision ladder in Figure 6 identifies the cognitive process of evaluate plan. If our knowledge elicitation effort reveals that a particular work task does employ this process, we may want to identify one or more strategies that might be used in execution of that process. Klein (1998) observes that experts will often use mental simulation. In contrast, a novice may ask a more experienced person or may follow guidelines. These alternatives constitute three different generic strategies that could be employed in execution of that same cognitive process.
A cognitive strategy may be a generic method of executing a single process (as in the example above) or a generic method of executing multiple processes. Cognitive strategies analysis identifies the actual and potential strategies that are or could be used in execution of a work task and also the reasons that a particular strategy might be selected in preference to other possible strategies. Particular strategies might be preferred because of task demands such as the amount of time, memory load, or level of knowledge. However, all work tasks must support realisation of the values identified in work domain analysis. Strategies that result in violation of those values should be discouraged. Problematically, there may be a conflict between the preferences shaped by task demands and the constraints imposed by the values.
The analysis should identify the range of possible strategies rather than the strategies actually used. If workers avoid potentially valuable strategies because they impose unacceptable demands we might find that we can resolve that problem by designing effective support for such strategies.
Figure 7.1 The Creating Socionas process
The process involves five steps: First, the user researcher (puppet marked by “R”) gathers user data in dialogue with users (“U”), and prepares the data for sharing with the design team (“D”). In the second half of the process, the designers interpret the prepared user data for NPD, after which the user researcher checks the designers’ findings and/or ideas with users. The user researchers facilitate the Creating Socionas process with the help of representations (frames), such as probes, immersion kits and storyboards. In planning the Creating Socionas effort, user researchers should be aware that facilitation of the Creating Socionas process requires time and needs to be planned.
Figure 4
Figure 6
Figure 7
Contextmapping 
