Annotated portfolios

A few years ago our team was involved in a project designing for older people living in a care home. Having known the residents for over a year, we appreciated the complex mix of loneliness and sociality, withdrawal and interaction, humor and sadness that characterized their lives. Over that time, we had sketched numerous ideas, produced design workbooks, and even run a daylong session in which they tried a number of lo-fi experience prototypes. Now it was time for us to develop a specific design. What would we make? You might expect that we turned to theory for direction—after all, our studio routinely produces and engages with theoretical work. And indeed, we did have some conceptual themes we wanted to exercise through the project. Our theoretical convictions, however, turned out to give very little guidance about what, specifically, we should make. In the end, we developed a trolley called the Photostroller that shows a continuous slideshow of photographs scraped from the Web, using a controller that enables users to select from a set of predefined categories and tune the degree of “semantic drift” between successive images (Figure 1). We deployed the device in the care home for several months and found that our design supported a range of engagements in the home. Sometimes it fueled conversations in the lounge; other times it was a source of contemplation for a person alone in his room. Overall, the design seemed successful, embodying many of the qualities we wanted. Still, it is questionable how much anything one might call theory was of direct help in coming up with the design. Instead, we drew from a variety of concrete examples of other work for inspiration. For instance, one of our collaborators, Mark Blythe, had been running Web-browsing sessions with the care-home residents, and they had shown interest in the kinds of photographs found on Flickr. We had also witnessed their enthusiastic reception of photographs we collected to show them in a lo-fi prototyping session we ran. Influence also came from specific designs we knew—such as our own Local Barometer, or the Listening Post by Ben Ruben and Mark Hanson—that focused on reframing content taken from the Web. And as we finalized the design, we were deeply influenced by Dieter Rams’s design work for Braun. Theoretical reflection might have been helpful in emphasizing the sorts of qualities we wanted for our design. But our design choices were underdetermined by theory—we could have developed any number of things that would have been in accord with our ideas. Instead, it was by looking at specific examples of practice that we found guidance for our work and, in discussing exactly how those examples were relevant to us, began to develop our design thinking. Later, when the field trial was over, we wrote a report of the project. In addition to describing our process, the design, and the results of our field trial, we discussed the project in terms of conceptual themes we thought might be generalizable to other designs. By abstracting the actual features of the device, using terms such as constraint, control, drift, and openness, we sought to suggest dimensions of design that might be applied broadly. However, we could have theorized the Photostroller in any