Introduction - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Introduction

Now that we know that, what do we know? This is the perennial
question that follows the presentation of new research, informed
reflection and cogent commentary. What greater understanding flows
from the results presented? The answers sparked by the material
collected in this issue are varied and often compelling. Nynke Tromp,
Paul Hekkert and Peter-Paul Verbeek explore the power of design to
promote or inhibit personal behavior. They explicate various aspects
of user experiences with particular attention to the identification and
classification of influences that shape behavior. But with greater
understanding of user experience comes the growing realization
que, as they contend: Deliberately affecting behavior to create a specific
social impact requires a redefinition of the role of the designer.

Fernando Secomandi and Dirk Snelders review the academic
literature on service design and argue for the necessity of refining
our understanding of the interfaces or touchpoints between
service organizations and their clients. Finalement, they conclude,
understanding what they identify as the material heterogeneity of
service interfaces opens up the possibility of advancing the general
understanding of the nature and potential of services themselves.

Anders Albrechtslund and Thomas Ryberg tackle one of the
pressing concerns confronting civil society: surveillance. According
to Albrechtslund and Ryberg, neither the dystopian nightmare
of intrusive surveillance nor the utopian dream of benevolent
observation adequately captures the design issues embedded in
the technology of surveillance. En outre, the crude limitation
of viewpoints implied by the dystopian/utopian polarity actually
inhibits rather than facilitates the discussion of how to manage
surveillance. Albrechtslund outlines a model of participatory
surveillance; un modèle, cependant, that challenges designers to revisit
the conceptual framework we use to think about the phenomenon.
We are, it appears, not prisoners of our technologies but rather
prisoners of an inadequate conceptual framework for imagining
different scenarios.

Nina Murayama probes the relationship between artwork
and furniture design in the career of Donald Judd. While the
unity of all the arts has long been recognized as one of the goals
of Modernism (enshrined, Par exemple, in Walter Gropius’s clarion
call for unity in the original Bauhaus program of 1919), Murayama
argues that Judd’s approach to managing his production of both art
and furniture served more to interrogate the discourse of unity than
to promote it.

A trio of articles by Alison Perelman, Barbara Hahn and
Christine Zimmerman, and Mike Esbester explore different

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aspects of information design. Perelman’s treatment of the USDA’s
iconic (et, it turns out, controversé) Food Pyramid reminds
us that visual metaphors are hardly neutral or self-evident tools
of communications. Hahn and Zimmerman’s review of efforts to
visualize hospital routines demonstrates how the visual nature of
some forms of information design can convey crucial dimensions
of research results that are often obscured or lost in statistical
evaluations alone. Esbester’s analysis of British tax forms before
1914 sheds light on a neglected aspect of a common challenge: le
design and use of forms. Esbester demonstrates how historical
study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the social
dimension of design.

This issue concludes with two exhibition reviews, un
by David Rifkind and the second by Robbert van Strien. Au-delà
reporting on ephemeral events, both reviewers go on to explore the
strengths and weaknesses of exhibitions as particularly vivid and
direct ways to connect viewers with objects. The idea of connection is
important to the editors of this journal as well. We remain committed
to the goal of connecting readers with authors whose informed
observations and challenging insights convey the complexity of
design artifacts, the richness of designed experiences and the depth
of cultural phenomena shaped by design.

Bruce Brown
Richard Buchanan
Dennis Doordan
Victor Margolin