3AD: A Shift of Focus to Context

This year's Appliance Design conference began with an interactive session led by Pieter Jan Stappers of the ID-StudioLab, University of Delft, and ended with the 3AD International Design Competition, where nine finalists each paraded a prototype for exactly 15 minutes of fame, before a winner was chosen.

Held at Bristol's Hewlett Packard headquarters, like the last two (see also UN story: The Reinvention of the Appliance Design Conference, it was both stylistically and thematically different from its predecessors. Stylistically, it was more about engagement than listening to research, with not only the opening Design Colloquium, but also another that afternoon led by the Royal College of Art's Bill Gaver. The colloquia presented ideas (Stappers on "Creative connections: user, designer, context, and tools"; Gaver on "Reconsidering photography") to the attendees and then broke them into groups to explore them further. Meanwhile, the morning of the second day was a chance to wander round and try out other people's work, ask questions and hear research explained. Apart from the competition - where delegates sat and listened, charged with asking challenging questions of the finalists, but not always delivering - there were only six actual papers given.

Thematically, the conference had moved on from product design issues to a contemplation of the broader picture. The best work, including the winning design, had paid real attention to the wider social or organisational context in which the design was to be used.

For instance, "Cabinet: merging designers’ digital and physical collections of visual materials" by Ianus Keller, Also Hoeben and Aadjan Van Der Helm of the ID-StudioLab, Delft University of Technology, the design that won the 3AD prize, was not merely described, but shown in action in a design office. The mechanism for merging digital and printed materials was discussed in terms of how it complemented existing practice – both as research informing the design and then as a situated object being used for a month by professionals.

A clever combination of a big working space, a camera and a simple control, the Cabinet can cluster digital images in piles manually with a small dragging device, create new piles and add new images from analogue material at the press of a button, allowing cropping as part of the save. No file names are needed to store the images and they can be transferred to and from a computer with a simple memory stick. A link describing the entry more fully is below.

Keller explained how actual post-it notes could co-exist with virtual post-its in the office world that the desk went into, and how it was placed by the photocopier and the communal files and served to partially replace their function once staff became used to the new interface.

The "MusicCube: A Physical Experience with Digital Music" by Miguel Bruns Alonso ID StudioLab, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, got a special mention for innovative design, as did Joep Frens of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, for his "rich user interface for a digital camera".

More stories from 3AD will appear on UN over the next few weeks, featuring some other designs and instances of interesting research into context.

Associated Link: The winning entry at 3AD

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