I design custom research tools for specific challenges, contexts and people.
Fire Futures participatory design tools
The Fire Futures project responds to the wicked problem of sharing responsibility for the risks of posed by natural disasters. It focuses on two communities at very high risk of intense bushfires and aims to support residents and agencies to realise a fire-resilient future. Custom design tools including a deck of design cards and a set of canvases were developed for a community workshop to explore what a fire-resilient future might look like and practical steps to achieve it. The design tools demonstrate how bespoke methods can support participation and engagement with a complex social issue with the aim of fostering community action.
The card deck and canvases are available to download.
Speculative workbooks
A set of workbooks were developed as part of the Physical Journalism project as a way to encourage journalists and news designers to imagine how physical computing could change the way they told stories.
The workbooks were slim, A5, blank-page notebooks into which were glued 14 questions that prompted our participants to think of a story, identify the people and objects involved, and then consider how they might tell that story by moving it to a different location and using physical computing technologies such as RFID tags, sensors and lights, among other things. Each question was on a separate page with space for responses.
Physical News card deck and canvases
The Physical News Card Deck is a set of 48 cards and four activities designed to encourage journalists to imagine how physical computing technologies could be incorporated into public interest storytelling. The deck represents a novel way to think about how journalistic practice could respond to the emergence of tangible interfaces and ambient information environments. Although card decks are an established tool to support design work, no tool exists for journalistic contexts. The Physical News deck uses news stories and constraints that are particular to journalistic practice alongside technologies such as LED lights, radio transmission tags, sensors and mixed reality.
The deck is available to download and comes with a set of workshop activities.