Stimulating Creative Dialogues between Humans & Things

Stimulating Creative Dialogues between Humans & Things: DIY in the age of the IoT

Amram, T.

Giaccardi, E. (mentor)
Hoftijzer, J.W. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

Design for Interaction

2016-08-31

Expressing creativity answers to fundamental human needs such as Autonomy, Competence and Self-Esteem (Sheldon, Elliot et al. 2001). However, as industrialisation caused the first consumer revolution, passive consumption of mass-produced objects became the norm. A contemporary response to this passive consumption can be found in an increasingly popular DIY subculture: the ‘Maker Movement’. The Maker Movement is characterised by its affinity for making technology and production accessible through open collaboration (Dougherty 2012) and mediating technologies (Hoftijzer, 2009). This thesis is guided by the principle that the process of design should be democratised. The author postulates that in order to genuinely advance a democratic design process, the amateur designer should have access to ethnographic tools as well. The research carried out in this project aims at understanding how Makers conceptualise and explores how they could use data from their everyday ‘Things’ (Giaccardi et al. 2016) as an ethnographic resource to understand their own design space. Ultimately, this thesis introduces the notion of ‘data-inspired DIY’ as a new creative practice, herein embodied in a set of speculative technologies.

DIY
IoT
Maker Movement
Things as co-ethnographers
Thing Ethnography
Meta Design
Data-Inspired
Quantified Self

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6edaefd6-3b25-4d12-aa91-8ab8dc9f7bb1

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2016 Amram, T.