Participatory Innovation Workshops

Swinburne's Faculty of Design, in collaboration with the Participatory Innovation Conference 2012, is proud to host three Participatory Innovation Workshops delivered by international experts.

These workshops are free and open to the public. 

Venue: Swinburne Faculty of Design, PA Building, Level 2 Gallery,  144 High Street, Prahran 3181 

Registration: Contact Brett McIvor at bmcivor@swin.edu.au with your name, contact number, email address and number attending. 

Workshop 1 - Monday, 16 January 2012, 1-5pm 

Title: Video Field Studies with your Cell Phone

Facilitator: Jacob Buur, Professor of User-Centred Design at the University of Southern Denmark, and research director of the strategic research centre SPIRE

Many researchers and practitioners in HCI, Interaction Design, Design Anthropology swear to video when doing field studies of potential users. This is due to the power of the media for capturing practices and contexts, conveying empathy, and engaging audiences. Newcomers to the field, and in particular practitioners from smaller organizations are understandably nervous about embarking on video projects out of fear that it is difficult to get consent in the first place, that the ethics is difficult to handle, that video shooting makes the social relations awkward, that the editing task is monumental, that equipment is difficult to handle etc.

This workshop presents a lightweight entry into video field studies using your cell phone and simple computer editing. My approach has a strong focus on how to use video in design, rather than on the technical side. The goal is to engage design teams in meaningful discussions based on user empathy, rather than to produce beautiful videos. Basically it is a search for a minimalist way of achieving what usually requires trained shooting and editing with larger equipment.

Workshop 2 - Tuesday, 17 January 2012, 9am-12pm 

Title: Idea Brokering, a workshop technique for innovation

Facilitator: Mr Hiroshi Tamura, Director, i.school, The University of Tokyo. Research Director, Innovation Laboratory, Hakuhodo Inc.

The Earthquake and tsunami that took place on March 11th has taken away thousands of lives on that day in Tohoku Region of Japan. Media since then has covered the disaster and the consequent Fukushima nuclear accident, however, has done so little apart from confusing people with rich yet cryptic data of little relevance. Yet one thing was certain, which is that we could no longer expect changes to take place in this society unless we actively come up with innovations ourselves. Now, the question is: how can we bring that change?

As practitioners, we find ethnography a perfect source of information to breed ideas for people to act upon. In this workshop, we will introduce a workshop method called "idea-brokering", which we utilize ethnographic, human-centered view to raise awareness on the social issues. An example case would concern the behavioral and motivational changes of people in Japan that are taking place today. We will then describe key points how the workshop can be designed and be prepared. Towards the end we will open up the discussion for how we could practice ethnography for social innovation.

We invite participants of the conference with experience and/or interest in:?

• Research in sustainability, communications, energy and water, products and services?
• Research in corporations or institutions with mild/little practice on human-centered design or innovations?
• Design for behavioral and motivation change?
• Creative workshop methods

Workshop 3 - Thursday, 19 January 2012, 9am-12pm

Title: "Learning by Toying"- Experience the fun of relating design, culture & education 

Facilitator: Professor Sudarshan Khanna is a former Principal Designer-Faculty, and Chairman of Education &  Research at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, India

The workshop has been designed to experience aspects of creativity, innovation and design methods as part of the process of education. This hands-on workshop shall reconfirm that simple, interesting playthings are the products of Culture & Education.

The Workshop will start with an Interactive-Talk. The short introduction with examples, will explain that Learning can be fun and a process of experiencing the inter-relationship between design-science-technology, socio-cultural contexts and the creative process.  A lot can be learned from the Toys and Tales of any society.  The participants would make/develop a set of dynamic toys out of a sheet of paper. Later, they would be introduced to 2 or 3 toy design concepts. Participants shall make & develop ideas by using simple, available materials.