Bio:
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Ron Wakkary is a Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) where he established the Everyday Design Studio, a design research studio that explores interaction design. Wakkary’s research investigates the changing nature of interaction design in response to everyday design practices like home life, DIY, amateur experts, hobbyists, and sustainability. In the spirit of design research, Wakkary’s research aims to be reflective and generative, creating new interaction design prototypes and uncovering new, emergent practices of design that help to shape both design and its relations to technologies. Wakkary publishes regularly in design, human-computer-interaction, and tangible computing journals and conferences. He is an Editor-in-Chief of ACM interactions, Director of the Interaction Design Research Centre at SFU, member of the SIGCHI Executive Committee, and a member of the Steering Committee for Tangible Embedded/Embodied Interaction (TEI). His research is funded by NSERC, SSHRC, GRAND-NCE, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others.

Talk: Designing for Everyday Design Practices
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Ron Wakkary will present his research on everyday design, an idea that assumes that everyone is a designer. Design in this sense is the ongoing creative use and reuse of design artifacts. Design is comprised of a multiplicity of practices that share in their need to manipulate designed worlds to improve fit and quality through ongoing transformations and adaptations, yet what drives each practice and how they are carried out is unique and diverse. The research is based on studies of various everyday practices including family life (6), repair (3, 5), sustainability (7), green-DIY (5), hobbyists (1), steampunk (4, 1), and skateboarding (2). The aim of these studies is to understand what social practices tell us about design and, in particular, the design of technologies. Wakkary will discuss the characteristics and implications of this direction for HCI. These include the need for designers to shift attention to technologies as materials (or objects) within practices rather than configurations of functions and interfaces. The implications of this shift include the design of technological objects as resources, the simplification or minimization of interaction to fit competences, and the notion that interaction design outcomes are assessed for their interpretive potential as much as promised utility.

[1] Audrey Desjardins and Ron Wakkary. 2013. Manifestations of everyday design: guiding goals and motivations. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition (C&C ’13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 253-262.
[2] Sabrina Hauser, Audrey Desjardins, and Ron Wakkary. 2013. Skateboards as a mobile technology. In CHI ’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1419-1424.
[3] Leah Maestri and Ron Wakkary. 2011. Understanding repair as a creative process of everyday design. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Creativity and cognition (C&C ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 81-90.
[4] Joshua Tanenbaum, Karen Tanenbaum, and Ron Wakkary. 2012. Steampunk as design fiction. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1583-1592..
[5] Ron Wakkary, Audrey Desjardins, Sabrina Hauser, and Leah Maestri. 2008. A sustainable design fiction: Green practices. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 20, 4, Article 23 (September 2008), 34 pages.
[6] Ron Wakkary and Leah Maestri. 2007. The resourcefulness of everyday design. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition (C\&C ’07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 163-172
[7] Ron Wakkary and Karen Tanenbaum. 2009. A sustainable identity: the creativity of an everyday designer. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 365-374.