For her graduation project Louise Hugen did several workshops on her project designing for Things as Citizens.
At November 8 Louise has conducted research about the values of citizens: how would citizens like Things to act when Things get an agency?
She applied the research method Contextmapping and conducted this method with a focus group of IoT professionals that live in Amsterdam. Contextmapping is a method that is used to discover insights about the unconsciousness of people: their fears and dreams and their values. This research method consists of a sensitizing phase (a home study before the session) and a session during which participants discuss and create. Before the session, participants did a small home study to discover their values about people’s behavior in public spaces. During the session, three provotypes were shown to the participants. These three provotypes had an anti-social character which lead to a discussion by the participants. Based upon their opinions and thoughts, the participants decided together how ‘good Things’ should be designed and they started creating their own Thing with the desired characteristics.
At the moment Louise is processing the results of the session, which will be shown soon on the website as a follow up.
At ThingsCon Louise gave a workshop to ideate things as citizens.
During this workshop, demonstrators of Things as Citizens were shown for evaluation. Based upon these demonstrators, the attendees had an interactive session to evaluate how Things should be designed; how can they collaborate with citizens and contribute to human life?
The workshop was a success and delivered some new insights and confirmations on the theories of things as citizens design criteria.