Exploring Digital Design: Multi-Disciplinary Design Practices

Exploring Digital Design takes a multi-disciplinary look at digital design research where digital design is embedded in a larger socio-cultural context. Working from socio-technical research areas such as Participatory Design (PD), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), the book explores how humanities offer new insights into digital design, and discusses a variety of digital design research practices, methods, and theoretical approaches spanning established disciplinary borders. The aim of the book is to explore the diversity of contemporary digital design practices in which commonly shared aspects are interpreted and integrated into different disciplinary and interdisciplinary conversations. It is the conversations and explorations with humanities that further distinguish this book within digital design research.Illustrated with real examples from digital design research practices from a variety of research projects and from a broad range of contexts Exploring Digital Design offers a basis for understanding the disciplinary roots as well as the interdisciplinary dialogues in digital design research, providing theoretical, empirical, and methodological sources for understanding digital design research.The first half of the book Exploring Digital Design is authored as a multi-disciplinary approach to digital design research, and represents novel perspectives and analyses in this research. The contributors are Gunnar Liestol, Andrew Morrison and Christina Mortberg in addition to the editors.Although primarily written for researchers and graduate students, digital design practioners will also find the book useful. Overall, Exploring Digital Design provides an excellent introduction to, and resource for, research into digital design.

Tone Bratteteig, PhD, is associate professor at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, where she leads a research group on Design of Information Systems. She was one of the initiators and the coordinator of the multidisciplinary research initiative, Digital Design, at the University of Oslo. Bratteteig is educated as a computer scientist, but her research background and profile is multidisciplinary and she is involved in several multidisciplinary research projects. Bratteteig has been doing participatory design research from the early 1980s, in later years addressing more general questions concerning design and use of information systems. Her current research focuses on the relations between autonomy and automation when introducing digital technologies that distribute (work) tasks between people and technologies (“Automation and Autonomy”, 2009-2013, funded by The Norwegian Research Council).Pirjo Elovaara, PhD, is senior lecturer in Technoscience Studies at the School of Planning and Mediedesign, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. Her research field is based on feminist technoscience and focuses on design and use of information and communication technology. She is especially interested in the concepts and practices of participation and agency. She has also been involved in a number of local and regional ICT development projects in the region ofBlekinge, in the southeast of Sweden. Her latest research project, together with Christina Mortberg, was about gender, skills, technology and e-government with the title ‘From government to e-government: gender, skills, learning and technology’ (2005–2007).Gunnar Liestol, PhD, is professor at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. He has a magister artium degree in literature and a PhD in media studies on the thesis 'Essays in Rhetorics of Hypermedia Design' (1999). He has designed several hypermedia systems, among them the award-winning 'Kon-Tiki Interactive' (1995). He is the author of numerous articles and books, both national and international, including Digital Media Revisited, (2003, MIT Press, with A. Morrison and T. Rasmussen). Liestol is currently head of the project: 'INVENTIO – Theory and Practice on Designing Digital Genres for Learning and Leisure' (2006–2010), funded by the Norwegian Research Council, exploring the convergence of mobility and localization in digital media textuality.Andrew Morrison, PhD, is an associate professor at InterMedia, an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Oslo and Professor of Interdisciplinary Design at the Institute of Design, Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO).His current research is into mixed reality arts, mediatized persuasion in branding and advertising, the collaborative design of a mobile GPS narrative and design and research into digital research rhetoric online. He publishes research and supervises graduate students in these areas at AHO. Andrew co-edited Digital Media Revisited (2003, The MIT Press, with G. Liestol and T. Rasmussen); he has recently edited and co-authored Inside Multimodal Composition (2009, Hampton Press), a collection of multidisciplinary design and practice-based research pieces with Communication Design at its core. Morrison heads the Communication Design Research Group at InterMedia and is Leader of Design Research at the Institute ofDesign (AHO). His earlier research and participatory design has been into academic communication and electronic literacies, critical discourse and HIV/AIDS education and prevention.Christina Mortberg, PhD, docent/reader, is an associate professor at the Departmentof Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway and University of Umea, Sweden. Mortberg’s current research interests can be described in two interrelated areas that link to each other. In the first, systems design, she bases her research on situated perspectives and participatory design approaches and in the second, a theoretical/methodological perspective