DAIM on display

We’re happy to announce that the DAIM project is currently on display at the Danish Design Center as part of the “Challenge Waste” exhibition, which will be on for the summer of 2011. They showcase the project video, the 3 mini projects, and perhaps most prominently “the box” for user driven innovation in waste handling.

Our book Rehearsing the Future has also gained quite a bit of exposure at various conferences and is being used as source book for several design courses. Recently the book has been shortlisted for the Creative Circle Award 2011.

From these exciting announcements to a note in closing: The DAIM project officially ended in 2010. This blog will still be available for reference, but it will no longer be updated.

The current exposure of DAIM seems a great trace to leave behind!

Rehearsing: just how far from implementation?

During the closing DAIM conference in February we showed videos of enacted and improvised design scenarios that were produced during the research project. In one of the videos a shop owner and his customers collaborate with waste professionals and designers to rehearse the future practice of a new in-shop waste handling service. In the conference we proposed that the general distance between a series of rehearsals and the implementation of new robust practices were perhaps not as great as expected. Design researchers in the audience raised the question if the video wasn’t merely documenting a momentary fantasy, a kind of spectacle for the case of the event, and hence very far from establishing a new robust practice. My colleagues and I argued that what took place in the shop had less to do with theatrical make-believe and more with staging the concrete aspirations of competent participants. The participants did not stage a fiction, but developed a fictive reality according to the present resources and constraints. It was about “making, not faking” as Victor Turner once described the efficacy of ritual and social drama. Granted, our research experiments with possible futures often remain exactly that: temporary experiments that lead to new knowledge, but seldom to implementable solutions here and now. But in this case I am delighted to report from the implementation of the in-shop waste handling service in question. See the images here.

New book: Rehearsing the Future

The DAIM project team have produced a new book “Rehearsing the Future” edited by Joachim Halse, Eva Brandt, Brendon Clark and Thomas Binder.

“The DAIM team has crafted an invaluable resource for researchers and designers looking for new ways to support each other.” Brian Rink, IDEO

“…the design anthropological innovation model will have global impact through its commitment to a design anthropology … which is open and participatory, accessibly tangible through models and games, and enhances the positive value systems of people.” Dori Tunstall, Swinburne University of Technology

“This is a must have sourcebook for participatory design practitioners as well as a much needed manifesto to be inspired and challenged by.” Pelle Ehn, Malmö University

Read an excerpt from the book: Download the table of content and the foreword by Melissa Cefkin (pdf)

The book has 214 pages and is published in February 2010 by the Danish Design School Press. ISBN 87-92016-16-2; EAN 9788792016164

The book is sold via The Danish Design School Library.

You can order it here.

Rehearsing the Future, conference

The DAIM conference: Rehearsing the Future was held in Copenhagen on the 23rd and 24th of February 2010. See the conference details here.

PRESENTATION SLIDES:

Joachim Halse, The Danish Design School: From rehearsals to business

Dan Boding-Jensen, Vestforbrænding: It can be done

Liz Sanders, MakeTools: Will it work in the US?

Thomas Binder, The Danish Design School: All-in-a-box

Trine Paludan, The Danish Design School: Teaching the tricks of your trade

Mikkel Jespersen, 1508: Working for or with the Client?

Eva Brandt, The Danish Design School, & Brendon Clark, SPIRE: Models: landscapes and mountains

Erling Björgvinson, Medea: Participatory design in the streets of Malmö

Tuuli Matelmaki, Aalto University: Design research and the Aalto factories

DAIM in Mind Design

Danish center for design research has a nice piece on DAIM in their webzine. Check it out here!

Rehearsing the Future, video

The DAIM pilot project on waste is now available in motion picture. The title of the movie is emblematic of our approach to user-driven innovation: it’s all about concrete encounters between participants who collectively articulate attractive visions and iteratively rehearse their futures.

DAIM approach and models

Last friday DAIM partners Ergonomidesign, SPIRE, 1508, SWECO and DKDS gathered in Ergonomidesign’s wonderfully home-like offices in Stockholm for the last TOOL seminar. It was a good seminar with a strong sense of working collectively with the challenge of bringing the many diverse experiences of DAIM together into an increasingly coherent approach.

For those of you who couldn’t make it, here is some of the material presented: A DAIM approach and attempts at modeling it without, of course, the valuable discussion of it that followed. The presentation attempts to connect central issues from previous seminars with two concrete model sketches included in the presentation: the iceberg and the helix.

The seminar was also an occasion for wrapping up what we have learned from the Golden Projects. Here you will find the Golden conclusion from the 1508 project on Mobile Public Services.

Design dialogues in a box

Can the DAIM approach be properly presented in two pages. I made a go on it, and attached you find the result (only in Danish) Designdialoger i en boks

DAIM at INDEX:Design to improve life

“…with an interest in empowering people by creating surroundings that answered their needs and wishes“. This is part of the background description for the INDEX award “Design to improve life”. DAIM’s pilot project on waste and recycling has been nominated, go find us here!

DAIM Tool Seminar II – Modeling Practice

The goal of the DAIM project is to explore user-driven innovation in a way that can be adopted in design consultancies and other businesses – those similar to DAIM partners: 3Part, 1508 A/S, SWECO, Ergonomidesign, Make Tools, and Vestforbrænding. The project has been set-up to do this through hands-on project work in collaboration with design researchers and practitioners: first during the pilot project with Vestforbrænding, (May and currently in the gold projects with 1508 and 3Part). Upon the completion of the project work, the exploration will continue in the process of writing a DAIM book and hosting a DAIM conference in the Fall.

DAIM Tool Seminar II (June 12, 2009 at 3Part) focused on what design anthropological innovation models can be, and what is valuable to our various audiences. To see various sample models download the presentation “There’s something about models…”. The golden projects were used as examples to handle the modeling exploration. The seminar ended with 4 different portrayals of DAIMs (models) and guidelines for their further development, and a sketch of the parameters of an overall DAIM.