What is it about?
This publication showcases a set of six tools, called Theory Instruments, which are tools designed to allow people to experience theory in a physical way. These instruments can be used to analyze user scenarios or user research data, to generate design ideas and speculate about future use cases, or as organizational tools for reflection. The instruments are designed from everyday objects like clothespins, rods, rings, dices, and cardboard boxes, and we describe our methods and design rationale to allow others to experiment with building their own theory instruments. In the publication, we also give examples of how we've used these instruments with organizations, to provide inspiration for further application.
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Why is it important?
This publication gives a blueprint for working with theory in a tangible way. The open-source nature of the instruments' design allows for replication and further elaboration and experimentation. The instruments can be boundary objects between the more conceptual practices of academics and design anthropologists and the more manual practices of design practitioners.
Perspectives
This publication is, for me, a way of making the work we do in design anthropology (and especially in academia), accessible to our collaborators in industry, and to other design anthropologists. The work itself is especially important, because it has provided us with a method for bridging the theory-practice gap and the knowledge-transfer gap --two major challenges in interdisciplinary collaboration.
Jessica Sorenson
Syddansk Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Collection of Tangible Theory Instruments for Design Anthropology, February 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3569009.3572799.
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