Data Exploration for Generative Design Research

Abstract

The current work elaborates upon a Generative Data Exploration method, which is a design technique aiming at supporting designers in integrating data in their design activities. Digital data offers new opportunities in all sort of professional domains, yet existing approaches and tools to manipulate data are predominantly targeted at data experts. As access to data is becoming democratised, new types of techniques are needed to leverage the agency of designers and to empower them to utilise data in the design process. Designers without prior data experience can benefit from the techniques, know-how, best practices of experts, if such expert knowledge is codified in design methods and tools. The aims of a Generative Data Exploration method are twofold. First, the method facilitates a learning curve on gaining holistic data literacy. Second, the method supports designing where digital data, exploration of data and sense-making of data is part of the process.

Issues integrating urban data and citizen participation

“…Meanwhile, in another European-funded project, the Open4Citizens, the results emphasise data's democratising power and design's role in supporting open data as a resource (Morelli et al, 2018). Furthermore, open data can complement traditional qualitative research methods, providing scale and access to a digital footprint of human activity (Kun, Péter;Mulder, Ingrid;Kortuem, 2018). By embracing open and accessible data, service designers can unlock the potential of data to enhance the user experience, improve service efficiency and drive innovation.…”

Data-inspired co-design for museum and gallery visitor experiences

“…However, more focused and small-scale uses of data are also to be found in design, such as in cultural (Gaver et al , 1999; Bogers et al , 2016) and technology probes (Hutchinson et al , 2003) that are employed to collect longitudinal data in situ , even over the lifetime of an artifact (Benford et al , 2016). In such cases, particularly with multidisciplinary approaches, the data is formed of qualitative and quantitative sets (Darzentas et al , 2019; Willson, 2019) that necessitate considerable analysis and sense-making to inform the design process, and tooling is necessary to support this (Kun et al 2018). In tandem with creativity support systems (CCSs) (Gabriel et al , 2016; Wang and Nickerson, 2017), recent research has also described how data captured from ideation processes and enabling tools can shape design thinking: for example, how data describing how ideation cards are used can provide insight into creative processes and help designers reflect on how their own ideas fit within the wider design spaces in which they operate (Darzentas et al , 2019; Perez et al , 2019).…”

Data as a Resource for Designing Digitally Enhanced Consumer Packaged Goods

“…We took an exploratory approach to gauge the value of our data visualisations to serve as an aid in sketching enhanced CPGs. This relied on the first-hand nature of the way in which the effects of the data were directly communicated to researchers as found in similar studies [17,55]. Thematic analysis was performed on the transcriptions [56], while polytextual analysis was applied to the sketches [57].…”

“…We found that participants readily drew upon and expressed satisfaction with the data visualisations to create their design concepts. As stated by P24, "I was able to kind of use what I learned from the data to put them into the design itself", while we have an intuitive knowledge of how CPGs are used, we might not remember specific interactions with them due to their being commonly regarded as unimportant details occurring in the background of our everyday lives [66]; however, approaches to design which put data at the centre of the process have shown the value of supplying such information [17,20,40,55,67] to create innovations firmly grounded in empirical insights. To our minds, the effects of including only general consumers in these data-inspired approaches still remain woefully understudied.…”