Kim Halskov

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Aarhus University

Spatial, low-resolution media facades integrated into buildings pose specific design challenges. We provide a conceptual framework for addressing how content for a media façade may be designed taking into account the specific qualities of the display of media façade interfaces: scale, shape, pixel configuration, pixel shape, and light quality. We a...

This entry explores the influence of digitalization on human creativity, focusing on the basic strands of creativity originally identified in Mel Rhodes’ (1961) seminal analytical model: person, process, press, and product. While digitalization has enabled vast, new opportunities for creative expression, productivity, collaboration, and global shar...

This paper examines how digital or analog tools influences the creative design process and outcome in collaborative design ideation. In this study, the particular digital tool is a prototype developed in collaboration with a global design firm, and is intended to be the digital counterpart to pen, paper, sticky-notes, and whiteboards, which are com...

Previous design cases and examples are important resources in design, most famously conceptualized by Donald Schön as the designer’s repertoire. We propose a way of approaching and gathering such examples, and introduce a tool for constructing and analyzing the design spaces these collections form. Each example is deconstructed in terms of aspects...

Sticky notes abound as a material in design practice, yet their use is under-explored empirically and theoretically. We address the research question: how do sticky notes support design cognition and collaboration when compared to other kinds of design materials? We compare four types of design materials (sketches, prototypes, cards, sticky notes)...

Building on the concept “prototypes that filter the design space,” we establish how other kinds of design artifacts and activities (e.g., sketching, tests, concept posters, metaphors, design tools) are equally critical in filtering the design space. We also suggest a parallel term, “informing the design space,” to define how design artifacts and ac...

Available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/w0tmfhgichs

Searching for sources of inspiration is central to creative design; however, we have limited knowledge of individual inspiration search strategies in response to varying levels of task constraints. We studied 39 high-school students’ inspiration search strategies using Google Images. Low task constrainedness led to divergent search marked by quick...

A core challenge in tabletop research is to support transitions between individual activities and team work. Shape-changing tabletops open up new opportunities for addressing this challenge. However, interaction design for shape-changing furniture is in its early stages - so far, research has mainly focused on triggering shape-changes, and less on...

We argue that the distinguishing features of Participatory Design are not the participatory activities as such but the mechanisms used, the effects produced and the way in which these are sustained. We use program theory to illuminate how participatory design works and how it may be understood as more than a collection of methods or a matter of con...

Fifty years ago Spencer Silver at 3M invented a not-so-sticky reusable adhesive that enabled development of the Post-it ® note. Since then, sticky notes have become the most commonly used design material, and their use is standard practice in a multitude of creativity techniques such as brainstorming, business model generation, and design thinking....

Interaction design is increasingly about embedding interactive technologies in our built environment; architecture is increasingly about the use of interactive technologies to reimagine and dynamically repurpose our built environment. This forum focuses on this intersection of interaction and architecture. --- Mikael Wiberg, Editor

Creativity is widely recognized as a valuable trait. The aim of this research is to explore the usefulness of incorporating elements of both game and play into creativity methods, so called design games or gameful ideation methods. This paper presents findings from a study in which a Gameful Idea Generation (GIG) was conducted. GIG is a collaborati...

Leveraging knowledge generated in design activities for subsequent design and research purposes is an important yet challenging task due to the complex and messy nature of design work. In this paper, we discuss opportunities and challenges for documentation in design processes to support the transformation of design knowledge across different level...

Hackathons have attracted increasing interest in recent years, and whereas much of the research focus on the role of hackathons as potential means for education, innovation, or municipal engagement, this paper focuses on the creative process of a hackathon. We present an explorative, autobiographical case study of a team at a hackathon and in the a...

Research-through-design (RtD) has become a well-established research approach within HCI research. In this paper we discuss how research-through-design can be applied as an explicit strategy for teaching interaction design. RtD is productive when teaching interaction design, because it keeps students in a constant loop of doing and reflecting, as w...

Game jams have gained an increasingly important role in game development communities, and have attracted attention in academia as well. However, research on how game jam formats shapes and drives creativity and design processes is scarce, and needs further development in order to advance our understanding of unique types of design processes. To pro...

Physical tools and materials like pen, paper, sticky-notes, and whiteboards are commonly used in collaborative creative design processes, whereas digital tools play a more marginal role. But what are the benefits and drawbacks of physical, digital, and hybrid physical-digital setups when it comes to supporting collaborative ideation? To answer this...

Metaphor's generative power is commonly acknowledged, but typically studied through the impact of a chosen metaphor on the designed product. In this article we take a longitudinal approach, tracing a generative metaphor through a yearlong design process. We report a case study in which the metaphor `Plant a Seed' provides the pivotal focus in the d...

The aims of the workshop are to examine and discuss the current state of research in designing interactive systems to support and augment creative work, and to outline a roadmap for future research initiatives. The workshop will explore methodological issues and approaches, overarching trends and developments, exemplary cases, and future initiative...

The near-ubiquitous usage of sticky notes is rarely the object of examination or research in itself. This paper details the initial findings of a structured survey and analysis of existing research literature mentioning sticky note usage. The main contributions of the paper are: An overview of our findings so far, which includes characterizations o...

Little effort has been devoted to studying the emotional experience of designers over time. Using sentiment analysis, we explore a unique corpus of designers' written reflections on 15 different design processes. We investigate how positive and negative sentiment in the reflections change over the course of a three-month design project. Our finding...

We investigate the way Post-It notes support creative design team practice, focusing on how they function as cognitive externalisations that, through grouping activities, support categorisation qualities associated with semantic long-term memory. We use a multimodal approach, drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, which places gestu...

The aim of this special issue is to continue and contribute to the debate around the conceptu- alisations and understandings of participation in Participatory Design (PD) and related areas of human–computer interaction (HCI) research, recently invigorated by Vines et al. (2015), Halskov and Hansen (2015) and Saad-Sulonen et al. (2015). Ongoing tran...

[Open access] Participatory design (PD) research has historically strongly focused on the reporting of design events (e.g. workshops and prototyping activities with participants), where issues such as ‘involving users’, including the users’ point of view, and participation as a matter of mutual learning have been in the foreground. The need to furt...

Developing creative abilities is an important part of 21st century skills, and yet remains challenging. In this paper1 we describe a study investigating small-scale creative strategies that groups of Scandinavian high school students use when collaboratively building LEGO models. We recorded thirty groups of students building three models each. We...

This paper contributes an analytical framework to improve understanding of the composition of recognized creativity methods used in design. Based on an extensive literature review, our framework synthesizes key concepts from design and particularly creativity research, and is further supported by significant experience with creativity methods in de...

This workshop will examine and discuss the role and nature of design tools and materials in creative work, and explore how to meaningfully combine existing and novel tools to support and augment creative work. By exploring and combining methodological, theoretical, and design-oriented perspectives, participants will examine the potentials and limit...

Machine learning (ML) is now a fairly established technology, and user experience (UX) designers appear regularly to integrate ML services in new apps, devices, and systems. Interestingly, this technology has not experienced a wealth of design innovation that other technologies have, and this might be because it is a new and difficult design materi...

The Post-It note is a frequently used, and yet seldom studied, design material. We investigate the functions Post-It notes serve when providing cognitive support for creative design team practice. Our investigation considers the ways in which Post-It notes function as design externalisations, both individually and when grouped, and their role in ca...

INSIGHTS → We identify a significant increase in digital distractions and the rise of what we call Do Not Disturb software designed to decrease, delimit, or discard these digital distractions. → Our basic typology and framework can help us understand how Do Not Disturb software is, ironically, designed to ensure digital freedom through digital cons...

We argue that documenting, revisiting and reflecting on the design space of a project provides three important benefits. First it increases our awareness of the constraints introduced by particular design choices. Second, this qualifies our understanding of the way a design space has been filtered by design activities. Third we are prompted to chal...

For 25 years the Participatory Design Conference (PDC) has been concerned with the understanding and development of Participatory Design in theory and practice. The main contribution of this paper is an informed understanding of how the participatory design tradition formed the early PDC community and how the PDC community's understanding of PD dev...

Documentation of Research through Design (RtD) processes is essential for capturing and translating design knowledge into broader academic knowledge. Moreover, it can support both design and research objectives internally in RtD projects, as well as external concerns such as project management, knowledge dissemination, and education. In spite of th...

The aim of the workshop is to examine and discuss how design research processes can be documented, and what the implications, potentials, and limitations of different approaches to, and types of, documentation. Participation in the workshop requires participants to actively document a design research process, and the resulting documentation materia...

In this chapter, we focus on design techniques that employ a particular form of design materials, namely design cards. Design cards can support different phases of a design process, from initial ideation through ongoing concept development towards evaluation of design concepts. We present three different techniques, namely PLEX Cards, Inspiration C...

We introduce the participation gestalt framework for analysing participation in public interactive installations. Building on the concept of interaction gestalt, we define the participation gestalt as the unified perception and experience of participatory qualities as they unfold through interaction with the installation in a socio-cultural setting...

We propose combining shape-changing interfaces and spa- tial augmented reality for extending the space of appearances and interactions of actuated interfaces. While shape-changing interfaces can dynamically alter the physical appearance of objects, the integration of spatial augmented reality additionally allows for dynamically changing objects’ op...

Media Architecture is reaching a level of maturity at which we can identify tools and approaches for addressing the main challenges for HCI practitioners working in this field. While previous influential contributions within Media Architecture have identified challenges for designers and offered case studies of specific approaches, here, we (1) pro...

In this course participants are introduced to the theory and practice of Participatory Design. The course offers an overview of state of the art Participatory Design literature, practices and methods, and provides participants with the opportunity to work practically on a Participatory Design case. The instructors have substantial experience in Par...

“Media architecture” is a term for installations in which displays are integrated into architectural structures. In this chapter, we address five unique qualities of media architecture displays: scale, shape, pixel configuration, pixel shape, and light quality. We exemplify this through two media architecture displays, Aarhus by Light and The Danis...

div class="page" title="Page 1"> 1975-1985-1995-2005 — the decennial Aarhus conferences have traditionally been instrumental for setting new agendas for critically engaged thinking about information technology. The conference series is fundamentally interdisciplinary and emphasizes thinking that is firmly anchored in action, intervention, and scho...

div class="page" title="Page 1"> The aim of the Unfolding Participation workshop is to outline an agenda for the next 10 years of participatory design (PD) and participatory human computer interaction (HCI) research. We will do that through a double strategy: 1) by critically interrogating the concept of participation ( unfolding the concept itsel...

This article starts from the paradox that, although participation is a defining trait of participatory design (PD), there are few explicit discussions in the PD literature of what constitutes participation. Thus, from a point of departure in Actor-Network Theory (ANT), this article develops an analytical understanding of participation. It is argued...

“Media architecture” is a term for installations in which displays are integrated into architectural structures. In this chapter, we address five unique qualities of media architecture displays: scale, shape, pixel configuration, pixel shape, and light quality. We exemplify this through two media architecture displays, Aarhus by Light and The Danis...

Creative processes involve a repertoire of digital devices ranging from mobile phones over tablets and desktop computers to electronic whiteboards and wall-sized displays. While some integration across multiple devices is supported more sophisticated kinds of integration that connect devices and amplify their potential are limited. Many creative pr...

This paper proposes a series of techniques for improving the precision of optical fiducial tracking on tangible tabletops. The motivation is to enable convincing interactive projection mapping on tangibles on the table, which requires a high precision tracking of the location of tangibles. We propose a new fiducial design optimized for GPU based tr...

Tangible 3D tabletops are a novel type of interface, which combines tangible tabletop interaction with 3D projection in such a way that the tangible objects can be augmented with visual content corresponding to their physical shapes, positions and orientations on the tabletop. We present a specific tangible 3D tabletop installation, Projected Play,...

We investigate how the interaction with tangible interactive tabletops can be seen as a material exploration of form and sound. As the theoretical foundation for our analysis we build on John Dewey's pragmatism as well as recent efforts to appropriate pragmatism for interaction design research. As the research platform for this investigation we dev...

There has recently been a dramatic increase in multitouch tabletop interfaces, but like most physical tabletops, these interfaces are flat and two-dimensional. In our research laboratory, CAVI, we have for the past four years examined the potential of extending the tabletop interface into the third dimension. We have drawn inspiration from interfac...

In this article, a conceptual framework for analysis of 3D projection installations is presented. Three-dimensional projection installations are particular kinds of augmented spaces in which a digital 3D model is projected onto a physical three-dimensional object, thereby fusing the digital content and the physical object. The conceptual framework...

This paper introduces the idea of craftsmanship as a way of understanding the shaping and re-shaping of code as a material crafting practice. We build our analysis on a qualitative study of a coder engaged in creative and expressive programming on an old hardware platform. The contribution of the paper is a set of conceptual categories: craft engag...

This paper examines how the dynamics between design and research interests shape and influence the development of design concepts in collaborative design projects. We introduce the concepts of boundary zones and emergent boundary objects in order to account for how different project stakeholders align their interests and move towards shared project...

This paper suggests a framework for understanding and manoeuvring design spaces based on insights from research into creativity constraints. We define the design space as a conceptual space, which in addition to being co-constituted, explored and developed by the designer encompasses the creativity constraints governing the design process. While de...

The theme of the workshop is to examine the nature of creative processes as part of designing interactive systems. In particular, the workshop will focus on how to organize design sessions to improve creative processes, for instance by setting up environments or spaces that support creative activities. In order to provide insights for how such envi...

We investigate the diversity of participatory design research practice, based on a review of ten years of participatory design research published as full research papers at the Participatory Design Conferences (PDC) 2002–2012, and relate this body of research to five fundamental aspects of PD from classic participatory design literature. We identif...

In this paper we explore the complex role of constraints as both creative restrainers and enablers. Based on a view of disjointed key contributions to current theory, we introduce ‘decisive constraints’ as a synthesising concept and analytical tool to support the observation that some highly limiting, creative decisions of voluntary self-binding ma...

This paper contributes an exploration of ownership as a dynamic process in community-oriented projects. We use case study accounts of two design projects to consider participation in contexts where social structure is relevant to design outcomes. In studying these dynamics, we consider four aspects: what motivates ownership; how ownership transitio...

Projection installations are part of Spatially Augmented Reality, where the projection medium is used to enrich a fixed, bounded physical space with digital content. Projection technology enables us to turn many kinds of physical objects into displays. In this paper we develop and present a conceptual framework that addresses three aspects of a pro...

In this paper we present an example of how to work with the challenges inherent in media façade design processes. We base the paper on our experiences from the creation of a series of design proposals for a media façade on the Odenplan subway station in Stockholm, Sweden. We approach the question of how to design for media façades by discussing how...

Nearly four decades ago, Participatory Design emerged as an area of research with a strong focus on the political dimension, emphasizing people's democratic rights to influence their own working conditions. During recent years the context of use for information technology has spreads from the workplace to our homes, urban settings, rural areas, art...

PDC 2012 is an excellent opportunity to enter engaging conversations and debates about the status and future of the field of Participatory Design. This issue of the proceedings provides an excellent starting point for debate as it points to a number of trends, challenges and dilemmas for the field. With firm roots in the original Participatory Desi...

In this paper, we investigate Research through Design at a micro-level, by addressing the dynamic interplay of research and design as they unfold throughout a design process. As our principal case, we consider the design of a three-dimensional projection installation, a process that unfolded over a one-year period. We analyse material collected fro...

Interaction design researchers doing research through design face not only the wicked problems in the practice of doing interaction design, but also the wicked problems that exist in the practice of doing research. In this paper we discuss the use of a tool developed for the specific purpose of documenting design projects and prompting reflection a...

In this workshop, we wish to explore how design processes extending longer periods of time, weeks to several months, can be captured and documented, how this data can be analyzed, and what types of research insights such work can yield. Such topics include, but are not limited to, how ideas emerge, how design concepts are manifested in different fo...

The widespread use of participatory design (PD) has meant that different approaches and conceptualisations exist in this field today. In this article, it is argued that one fruitful approach is to rekindle a concern for values in design, focusing upon values as the engine that drives activities in PD. Drawing from the authors‘ own PD projects, this...

In this paper we present the tangible 3D tabletop and discuss the design potential of this novel interface. The tangible 3D tabletop combines tangible tabletop interaction with 3D projection in such a way that the tangible objects may be augmented with visual material corresponding to their physical shapes, positions, and orientation on the tableto...

In this workshop paper we outline how we intend to study DIY digital art creation among hobbyists. We investigate how a group of hobbyists, the “demosceners” collaborate by different design materials to create digital art. We focus on how they sustain their community as makers well as develop and collaborate, through the use of these design materia...

The Process Reflection Tool has been developed by our research laboratory as a general tool for documenting design processes for research purposes. The software tool is structured in a blog-like format as a list of events, which in turn may be described in greater detail as sub-events. It is possible for the project participants to add their reflec...

We present an analysis of three interactive installations in public spaces, in terms of their support of engagement as an evolving process. In particular, we focus on how engagement unfolds as a dynamic process that may be understood in terms of evolving relations between cultural, physical, content-related, and social elements of interactive envir...