Reading summaries

Group Study - New York Times Magazine - The Work issue

Summary/ Main bullet points

This reading focused on researching what makes a good/ successful group and what makes a bad/unsuccessful group, and looking into the traits and habits of each group and how certain personalities worked together, and it wasn't necessarily the smartest people that made the best groups.

Positive

• Studies show that groups tend to innovate faster, find mistakes more quickly, find better solutions to problems.
• Studies also show that people working in groups tend to achieve better results and report higher job satisfaction.
• Two behaviours that all good teams generally shared include, members speaking in roughly the same proportion ( equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking)
• The good teams also had a high social sensitivity, skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.
• refer to traits such as conversational turn taking and average social sensitivity as aspects of whats known as physiological safety.
• enthusiasm for one another ideas joking around and having fun - allowed everyone to have fun and feel relaxed and energized.

Negatives

• Always feeling like you have to prove yourself, team dynamics putting her on edge.
• when she talked to her members of her group their responses were friendly and warm, when they gathered as a team things became fraught
• If only one person in a group spoke or a small group of people spoke it lowered the collective intelligence.
• people in ineffective teams had less social sensitivity towards their colleagues.

Affective labor - Michael Hardt

Summary/ main points

• The primary point of this essay is to put into context the changing role of affective labour in the capitalist economy.
• The processes of economic post - modernization that have been in course for the past twenty - five years have positioned affective labour in a role that is not only directly but at the direct pinnacle of the hierarchy of labouring forms.
• Affective labor is immaterial labor.
• Shift towards services is most recognizable in the dominant capitalist countries.

Immaterial Labour

• The passage toward an informational economy involves necessarily a change in the quality of labour and the nature of the labouring processes.
• The primary structural change between these models involves the system of communication between the production and consumption of commodities, that is the passage of information between factory and market.
• Factories will maintain zero stock and commodities will be produced just in time, according to present demand of the existing markets.
• Most services indeed are based on the continual exchange of information and knowledges - results in no material and durable good.
• Symbolic - analytical services - tasks that involve problem solving, problem identifying and strategic brokering activities.
• Manufacturing is material labour of the production of durable goods, immaterial labour of analytic and symbolic tasks, which itself breaks down into creative intelligent manipulation, on one hand, and routine and symbolic tasks, on the other.
• The production and manipulation of affects and requires (virtual or actual) human contact and proximity.

Biopower

• Biopower is the power of the creation of life, it is the production of collective subjectivities, sociality, and society itself.

Experience Prototyping 

Summary/ main bullet points

This reading talks about 'Experience Prototyping' as a form of prototyping that enables everyone to gain a first hand at existing or future conditions / experiences through active engagement, asking questions like what is prototyping, and looking into the practice or experience prototyping.

Introduction

• We find ourselves stretching limits of prototyping tools to explore and communicate what it will be like to interact with the things we design.
• 'Prototypes' are representations of a design made before the final item exists - this informs both the design process and design decisions.

What is experience prototyping?

• The concrete sensory experience of using an item - what the user looks at, feels, hears when they use the item.
• We can say an experience prototype is any kind of representation. In any medium that is designed to understand. explore or communicate what it might be like to engage with the product, space or system we are designing. 

Why is experience important? Why now?

• We find ourselves more often designing complex and dynamic interactions with converging hardware and software, spaces and services.
• The tools we use to design - e.g. prototypes, influence the way we think.

Experience prototyping in practice

• Three different activities in the process where experience prototyping is valuable - Understanding existing user experience and context - Exploring and evaluating design ideas - communicating ideas to an audience.

Understanding uses experience 

• Experience prototyping is applied here to demonstrate context and identify issues and opportunities in the design.
• Questions to ask at this stage include, what are the contextual, physical, temporal, sensory, social and cognitive factors need to be considered as you design, What is the essence of the existing user experience? What are essential factors that should be preserved?

The patient experience

• Builds upon peoples own imaginations and the use of other proxy devices to recreate essential elements in a personal experience.

The ROV pilot experience

• Use a proxy device to provide the team with specific insight into an experience that was not readily available to them.

The role playing a train journey experience

• informative and fun for a designer to find out what experiences would be like in a particular context through dramatic improvisation.

Exploring and evaluating design ideas

• The main purpose is facilitating the exploration of possible solutions and directing the design team towards a more informed development of user experience and the tangible components which create it.
• Through experience prototypes of these items and their interactive behaviour we are able to evaluate a variety of ideas.
• early stages - multiple design directions need to be explored, efficiently prototyped and compared.
• A tactile immersive - represented by a palm sized pebble 
• a shared experience - where the control functions can be split by two hands or two players
• a full body physical experience - represented by surface of skateboard

Children's picture communicator

• A true exprinace prototype for users - providing a really relevant experaince - seems to require a level of resoultion and functionality such that it can be let loose into an everyday context and more fully intergrated into peoples lives

communicating ideas

• Understand the subjective value of a design by directly experiencing it - Usually done with the intention of persuading the audience. 

Create and Reflect - testing service concepts with small scale prototypes

Desktop Walkthrough

What is it?

A small scale 3D model of a service environment. Employing simple props like lego figures lets designers bring a situation to life, acting out common scenarios and helping develop prototypes.

How is it made?

Kept fairly simple, insights into the service environment. Simple lego buildings with labels

Why is it used?

Allow and iterative analysis of situations depicted. New ideas and refinements constantly being introduced to the simulation. Walkthrough models provide a common language, various people can assess and co-develop a prototype, or analyse and restructure a problematic touch point.

Service Prototypes 

What is it?

Simulation service experience. Informal role play style conversations . Detailed full scale recreations.

How is it made?

Usually some form of mock up of the service system will be created. The prototype will generally be developed iteratively, with suggestions and refinements being constantly incorporated. 

Why is it used?

Far deeper understanding of a service than is possible with written of visual depictions. - learning by doing -, focus on user experiance. Help iterate design solutions as they can quickly incorporate and test ideas and refinements they may provoke.