The Work of a Design Researcher | Design on GOOD

The Work of a Design Researcher | Design on GOOD.

The Work of a Design Researcher

Design mind on GOOD is a series exploring the power of design by the editors of design mind magazine. This is the first installment in a miniseries within that blog, and it will run every Thursday for six week.

Ask any seven designers their view of design research, and you will likely get seven different responses. Why that happens is up for interpretation. Some say it’s because different jobs require different goals. Others contend that it’s because we filter observations through our own life experiences. I say it’s because the world is full of surprises.

Whether it’s discovering Barbie dolls in dishwashers while finding out how people collect them or going undercover as a Girl Scout leader to understand the teenage mindset, the job of a design researcher is to uncover and illuminate something about the user experience that was previously unknown.

The best designers approach research without preconceptions. They are ready to absorb and integrate the obvious as well as the hidden, the stated and the unspoken, the ideal as well as the real. Design researchers are always moved by what they see, and it’s that serendipitous moment of discovery and illumination that lifts designer and user alike. The final outcome, whether it’s a product, a service, or a system, is far more meaningful and resonant because of the work we do.

Over the next few weeks, we will present stories from designers at frog design that offer a peek into a day in the life of a design researcher. Each tale illuminates those wonderful moments when observation becomes insight and our way of noticing the world is forever changed. This week: Life as a Table.

Life As A Table, by Elizabeth Roche

We sat in her crowded living room in a building that reflected the paradox of London. Constructed from worn, gray poured concrete,the building was gloomy, with narrow balconies and exterior stairwells that were dark, chilly, stained, and dripping with water. The front door was just as shabby, but on the other side was a cozy apartment, and Jill (not her real name) was cheerful, intelligent, well-spoken, and eager to greet us. Part of our goal in this journey was to understand the characteristics of aesthetically valuable objects.

Right away, Jill showed us the heavy wooden dining table at the end of the room. The top was at least half a foot thick. She told us a story of how she and her father were taking a day trip near London and saw the table outside the kind of random furniture shop that only appears by chance. It was love at first site, she said, and paid the shopkeeper. Then came the saga of going back for the table in a larger vehicle and manipulating it up the gloomy stairwell in her apartment building and through the door of her apartment. Jill never mentioned it, but we could all see in her eyes that this experience added to the table’s beauty, like a friend who becomes better looking the more you get to know them.

Smiling, Jill pointed out that the table was so sturdy that nothing could damage it beyond use. If something fell and dented it, she told us, the blemish would only add to its beauty. This brings to mind the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi, tersely summarized as finding beauty in asymmetrical, flawed, or imperfect objects. Often these are objects from nature that have been affected by man.

The unifying note in this story is that the beauty we see in some of our things is enhanced — and sometimes entirely created — by the emotional attachment we have to objects. Interestingly, this attachment grows and takes on more value as the object acquires more of the dings, bumps, and scratches of a well-traveled life.

A version of this piece appeared in the May 2009 issue of design mind magazine.

Philosophy of language – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Philosophy of language – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature ofmeaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language and reality. For continental philosophers, however, the philosophy of language tends to be dealt with, not as a separate topic, but as a part of logic. (See the section “Language and continental philosophy” below.)

First, philosophers of language inquire into the nature of meaning, and seek to explain what it means to “mean” something. Topics in that vein include the nature of synonymy, the origins of meaning itself, and how any meaning can ever really be known. Another project under this heading of special interest to analytic philosophers of language is the investigation into the manner in which sentences are composed into a meaningful whole out of the meaning of its parts.

Second, they would like to understand what speakers and listeners do with language in communication, and how it is used socially. Specific interests may include the topics of language learning, language creation, and speech acts.

Third, they would like to know how language relates to the minds of both the speaker and the interpreter. Of specific interest is the grounds for successful translation of words into other words.

Finally, they investigate how language and meaning relate to truth and the world. Philosophers tend to be less concerned with which sentences areactually true, and more with what kinds of meanings can be true or false. A truth-oriented philosopher of language might wonder whether or not a meaningless sentence can be true or false, or whether or not sentences can express propositions about things that do not exist, rather than the way sentences are used.

Turing test – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Turing test – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Turing test is a test of a machine‘s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing’s original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give the correct answer; it checks how closely the answer resembles typical human answers. The conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so that the result is not dependent on the machine’s ability to render words into audio.^[2]

The test was introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which opens with the words: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?'” Since “thinking” is difficult to define, Turing chooses to “replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.”^[3] Turing’s new question is: “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?”^[4] This question, Turing believed, is one that can actually be answered. In the remainder of the paper, he argued against all the major objections to the proposition that “machines can think”.^[5]

In the years since 1950, the test has proven to be both highly influential and widely criticized, and it is an essential concept in the philosophy of artificial intelligence.^[1]^[6]

Alan Turing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alan Turing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS (/ˈtjʊərɪŋ/; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a pioneering English computer scientist,mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer.^[2]^[3]^[4] Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science andartificial intelligence.^[5]

Turing machine – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Turing machine – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A Turing machine is a device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite its simplicity, a Turing machine can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm, and is particularly useful in explaining the functions of a CPU inside a computer.

The “Turing” machine was described by Alan Turing in 1936,^[1] who called it an “a(utomatic)-machine”. The Turing machine is not intended as a practical computing technology, but rather as a hypothetical device representing a computing machine. Turing machines help computer scientists understand the limits of mechanical computation.

Turing gave a succinct definition of the experiment in his 1948 essay, “Intelligent Machinery”. Referring to his 1936 publication, Turing wrote that the Turing machine, here called a Logical Computing Machine, consisted of:

…an unlimited memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares, on each of which a symbol could be printed. At any moment there is one symbol in the machine; it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, but the symbols on the tape elsewhere do not affect the behaviour of the machine. However, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine. Any symbol on the tape may therefore eventually have an innings.^[2] (Turing 1948, p. 61)

A Turing machine that is able to simulate any other Turing machine is called a universal Turing machine (UTM, or simply a universal machine). A more mathematically oriented definition with a similar “universal” nature was introduced by Alonzo Church, whose work on lambda calculus intertwined with Turing’s in a formal theory ofcomputation known as the Church–Turing thesis. The thesis states that Turing machines indeed capture the informal notion of effective method in logic and mathematics, and provide a precise definition of an algorithm or ‘mechanical procedure’.

Amazon.com: Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power (Columbia Themes in Philosophy) (9780231137522): John Searle: Books

Amazon.com: Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power (Columbia Themes in Philosophy) (9780231137522): John Searle: Books.

Our self-conception derives mostly from our own experience. We believe ourselves to be conscious, rational, social, ethical, language-using, political agents who possess free will. Yet we know we exist in a universe that consists of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles. How can we resolve the conflict between these two visions?

In Freedom and Neurobiology, the philosopher John Searle discusses the possibility of free will within the context of contemporary neurobiology. He begins by explaining the relationship between human reality and the more fundamental reality as described by physics and chemistry. Then he proposes a neurobiological resolution to the problem by demonstrating how various conceptions of free will have different consequences for the neurobiology of consciousness.

In the second half of the book, Searle applies his theory of social reality to the problem of political power, explaining the role of language in the formation of our political reality. The institutional structures that organize, empower, and regulate our lives-money, property, marriage, government-consist in the assignment and collective acceptance of certain statuses to objects and people. Whether it is the president of the United States, a twenty-dollar bill, or private property, these entities perform functions as determined by their status in our institutional reality. Searle focuses on the political powers that exist within these systems of status functions and the way in which language constitutes them.

Searle argues that consciousness and rationality are crucial to our existence and that they are the result of the biological evolution of our species. He addresses the problem of free will within the context of a neurobiological conception of consciousness and rationality, and he addresses the problem of political power within the context of this analysis.

A clear and concise contribution to the free-will debate and the study of cognition, Freedom and Neurobiology is essential reading for students and scholars of the philosophy of mind.

Egalitarianism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Egalitarianism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Egalitarianism (from French égal, meaning “equal”) is a trend of thought that favors equality among living entities. Egalitarian doctrines maintain that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or social status, according to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.^[1] The Cultural theory of risk holds egalitarianism as defined by (1) a negative attitude towards rules and principles, and (2) a positive attitude towards group decision-making, with fatalism termed as its opposite.^[2] According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the term has two distinct definitions in modern English.^[3] It is defined either as a political doctrinethat all people should be treated as equals and have the same political, economic, social, and civil rights^[4] or as a social philosophy advocating the removal of economic inequalities among people or the decentralization of power. Some sources define egalitarianism as the point of view that equality reflects the natural state of humanity.^[5]^[6]^[7]