UrbanIxD: From Ethnography to Speculative Design Fictions for the Hybrid City

Shenando Stals (Centre for Interaction Design, Edinburgh Napier University, UK)
Michael Smyth (Centre for Interaction Design, Edinburgh Napier University, UK)
Oli Mival (Centre for Interaction Design, Edinburgh Napier University, UK)

This paper presents research in the field of Urban Interaction Design which seeks to understand how people's personal, emotional relationships with urban places could potentially inform the design of new technological devices and services. A Speculative Design approach is taken by creating Speculative Design Fictions informed by the data gathered using the ethnographically-informed Walking & Talking method. However, creating the crucial link between themes in the data corpus and possible future scenarios for Speculative Design Fictions can be challenging. Building outwards from a sophisticated understanding of the approach, this paper presents a case study which focuses on the step-by-step process of designing and creating this crucial link for a Speculative Design Fiction in the form of a short film, using design techniques such as Tactics for Ambiguity, PACT-analysis and SCAMPER.

Citation

Shenando Stals, Michael Smyth, and Oli Mival. 2019. UrbanIxD: From Ethnography to Speculative Design Fictions for the Hybrid City. In Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium 2019 (HTTF 2019), November 19–20, 2019, Nottingham, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3363384.3363486

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With thanks to our sponsors:

University of Nottingham logo

SIGCHI logo

Microsoft logo