Stan Ruecker

• PhD
• Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Designers and digital humanists have successfully worked together for over twenty years, but many people from both fields have yet to enjoy the many opportunities such collaborations represent. This guide prepares readers for working together, outlining disciplinary perspectives, lessons learned and practical exercises.

Looks at the use of prototyping in design research across a range of disciplines. Uses case studies to demonstrate theoretical and methodological transferability among disciplines not typically thought to be related to one another. This is an important contribution to the emerging field of integrative design.

Looks at the use of prototyping in design research across a range of disciplines. Uses case studies to demonstrate theoretical and methodological transferability among disciplines not typically thought to be related to one another. This is an important contribution to the emerging field of integrative design.

This article presents an argument to extend possibilities and discussions about the role of design in democratic participation. We ground this argument in case studies and observations of several grassroots experimental participatory design workshops run with the intention of producing spaces for community deliberation and a tangible transformation...

Esta pesquisa aborda a leitura em voz alta entre adultos com foco no entretenimento. O projeto foi inspirado na percepção de como os livros infantis se tornam um mediador da interação entre o adulto e a criança. Nesta proposta, intenta-se replicar entre adultos essa conexão percebida; agora não mais por uma necessidade de auxílio, mas sim, por uma...

The concept 'risk' carries great theoretical potential for a better comprehension of the design process. The purpose of this paper is to identify and think about risk in the design process as it has been treated by authors of the area. In the same way, it tries to investigate how other areas of knowledge approach the theme. The exploratory nature o...

This paper argues that materializing data may be a useful methodology in intersectional feminst digital humanities, because it requires close attention not only to the content of data and the contexts in which it is produced, but also to the individual, situated, differing knowledges that researchers leverage in the processes of generating, analyzi...

O objetivo deste estudo foi testar o novo modelo de livro Leitura Distribuída comidosos. O experimento avaliou como a leitura em dupla pode aumentar a sensação de place attachment, promovendo a interação e a proximidade entre eles. Este trabalho caracteriza-se como um estudo exploratório qualitativo. Foram observados quatro tipos de duplas de idoso...

Este capítulo apresenta o percurso percorrido para o desenvolvi-mento do novo modelo editorial "Leitura Distribuída". O diferen-cial desta edição é que o seu design editorial foi projetado para ser lido por duas pessoas juntas, incluindo a leitura em voz alta e a colorização de desenhos relacionados ao texto. O conteúdo do livro é distribuído de fo...

Designers have been interested in the relationship(s) between design theory, practice, and pedagogy ever since the field emerged as a scholarly discipline. In this article, we recount how we took a design theory originally developed for use in grassroots policymaking and redeployed it in the graduate classroom. The theory posits that visions of the...

Design’s arguments of innovative transformation and its constant search for a preferred future have become a contemporary principle of the discipline, and yet most design models limit their process to the production of the next stage of incremental innovation. This approach to the future carries significant systemic problems that can go from unexpe...

It is conceivable that capitalism and the new market economy as it currently operates is unsustainable despite the bullish opinions of businessmen and entrepreneurs. There are many obvious concerns surrounding an economy without money the most basic of which is the accounting of productivity. However, if we are seriously engaged in this thought exp...

In this paper, we discuss how taking a speculative feminist approach, as proposed by some members of the human-computer interaction (HCI) community, results in a radically different design of software for project management. As we interpret it, speculative feminist design in HCI demonstrates attention to the following six principles: challenging th...

For many decades, we recognized four human factors: physical, cognitive, social, and cultural. Approximately at the turn of the millennium, we increasingly began to recognize, based on a variety of evidence from psychology, physiology, neurophilosophy, and other fields, that affect should be added as a new category. To understand the human, the arg...

In this paper, we argue that there is an opportunity to develop a new process for the creation of interactive data visualizations by applying and extending the methods of empathic design. In particular, we consider the criteria summarized by Thomas and McDonagh (2013): “empathic research strategies incorporate shared language, collaboration, ethnog...

The digital humanities (DH) has a long and successful history of creating, using, and maintaining DH centres, as evidenced by the vast centerNet network. Furthermore, some of the most successful centres are constantly evolving in form and function. In this paper, we propose that the next phase in the evolution of the DH centre may involve a related...

Collaboration is a complex process that involves human and non-human factors. Although technology has improved and facilitated collaborative projects, interpretation, as the process of discovering and creating meaning, is often perceived as an individual act. This research aims to facilitate collaboration by better understanding how groups of peopl...

En este artículo, se presenta el desarrollo experimental del sistema analítico físico 3D para la realización de análisis cualitativos y cómo ha contribuido al proceso de reflexión ente los miembros del equipo de diseño. El objetivo principal de este proyecto ha sido incrementar el involucramiento de los diseñadores en los análisis colaborativos y m...

This special issue of Diseña seeks to articulate and describe interdisciplinary examples of design-led research, posing questions such as: in what ways are such projects addressing matters of concern, what are the defining traits of such projects, and what has design brought that other disciplines could not? What legitimates the designer as a leade...

We consider the means by which the process of co-design can contribute to reconciliation among the various groups in a post-conflict zone. We propose that through collaboration to achieve a shared outcome, people find themselves in close physical, mental, and emotional proximity. Building a prototype together can also produce a sense of closeness t...

In this interview conducted by Stan Ruecker, Frascara and Noël describe their design work involving distributed leadership on interdisciplinary teams. They emphasize that designers bring unique skills to bear, especially in the design of interactions among people, and that design education needs to change to provide designers with the necessary ski...

In this interview conducted by Stan Ruecker, Laura Forlano gives some clues of what designers can learn from the critical thinking the social sciences have developed for decades: challenging key terms, overturning narratives, and being critical about the way new technologies are being framed and presented. She asks for designers to commit to a posi...

Collaboration is a complex process that involves human and non-human factors. Although technology has improved and facilitated collaborative projects, interpretation, as the process of discovering and creating meaning, is often perceived as an individual act. This research aims to facilitate collaboration by better understanding how groups of peopl...

Based on the study of recent research regarding the development of smart cities, this paper develops a critical reflection about the reasons why not every citizen in a smart city can be considered a smart citizen. We point out some of the primary causes and the role of design to help to develop possible solutions. The paper uses the concept of the...

This paper argues that design research has an epistemological mode that differs from those in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, but is shared with other generative fields such as engineering and computer science. Because the mode is generative, it relies to a heavier degree on creative practices, which means that some of its standards...

This paper discusses how to shape a new kind of scenario-writing, which is more sensitive to the dynamics of change during the transition from the present state to the preferred future. Therefore, it is speculated how the meta-model in anticipatory systems, but also the changes and the learning process during the anticipation process can contribute...

Concept models are common guides to living, and some more specialized ones, which have been developed and validated in other fields have been adopted by designers for use in their work. In particular, concept models serve as templates for decision-making and action, and valid concept models make decision-making and action faster, more efficient, an...

Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia was launched in January 2001, and its articles now represent a major resource for understanding the world. Many of these articles have been negotiated and edited for a decade or more, and the history of that editing can provide insight into the recent history of ideas. This paper describes the development of a tool...

This paper presents the results of a master ́s thesis that aimed to provide a better understanding of the use of intuition during scenario building activities. The research assumes that design projects can be considered a process of knowledge creation. A special kind of knowledge refers to scenario building activities, which can be characterized as...

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that the adoption of the four criteria we outline will strengthen future design theories and encourage existing design theories to expand or reconfigure in useful directions. We propose four criteria for design theory creation and evaluation. These are (1) the theory should have substantial design applicatio...

Traditionally, design has been about planning for the creation of products or communications. More recently however, the design remit has expanded to include less tangible results, including interactions, services, speculative design, and even design fiction. Possibly of most interest for the digital humanities (whose makerspace has tended to opera...

Background: The history of reading, writing, and the dissemination of technology is one of epochal change, and each transition – indeed the history of the book – is marked by hybridity. In the mature years of print, publishers, librarians, and scholars had clearly defined and segregated roles. In the digital realm, the boundaries have broken down....

Since the advent of digital scholarly editions, there have been many arguments to the effect that digital versions are able to offer more to humanities scholars than printed ones. Though this opinion is shared by most scholars producing digital editions, a number have also published printed versions alongside or even after launching digital ones. T...

In this paper, we describe our work on producing physical tools for people doing collaborative text interpretation of conversational texts. Recognizing that although there is a linearity to conversation, we nonetheless believe that in many cases the content might better be represented as a physical, spatial object, where parts of the discussion can...

If we consider interface design for the digital humanities, we have interfaces of three types. They are for collection access, text analysis, and experimentation. Adopting the lens of actor-network theory, we have in each case a set of actors, of which the interface is one. It plays a unique role in that it is a mediating actor - it exists primaril...

If we think of the smart city as a reading environment, we can use it to change what it means to be a citizen, to improve how public topics are addressed, and to democratize how decisions are made. The starting point is text, supplemented with the various other kinds of data that can be gathered through digital means. In this chapter, we discuss tw...

In principle and in practice, the use of prototypes in the companion “interdisciplines” of design and the digital humanities is perhaps surprisingly similar, given the many other differences that exist between the two fields. However, in both cases there are important distinctions to be made between various categories of prototypes. In general, the...

An Application Programming Interface (API) can serve as a mechanism for separating interface concerns on the one hand from data and processing on the other, allowing for easier implementation of alternative human-computer interfaces. The API can also be used as a sounding board for ideas about what an interface should and should not accomplish. Our...

Poster presented at the Digital Humanities, Sydney, Australia.

In this paper, we discuss the conceptual and practical relationships of three common products of design and design research: designs, prototypes, and scenarios. In addition, we examine the related actions of designing, prototyping, and writing scenarios. We suggest that rather than accepting the common understanding of these three artifacts and pro...

This paper presents the findings of research into a digital learning knowledge management tool that uses an interactive surface to manipulate a design project in multiple stages. The research aim was to understand how designers might replace the traditional model of one device per person and use digital space as an alternative for analyzing data co...

INKE is a Canadian 7-year SSHRC-funded Major Collaborative Research Initiative. INKE, as it has evolved, has had 5 thematic groups that focused on: Interface Design, Modelling and Prototyping, User Experience, Textual Studies, and Information Management. After 5 years, over 200 collaborators have written, presented, and published more than 580 work...

Academic prototyping, like ethnography or bench studies, is a way of producing new knowledge about an idea. It can result in a kind of evidence that can be used to strengthen or weaken an argument. A prototype is an artifact, but it is not just an artifact; it may be a phase in product development, but it is not necessarily so. It is also, and perh...

Two decades of destabilizing developments in Shakespeare studies, theatre and performance studies, theatre history and historiography, and dissemination technologies remain largely unacknowledged in the print-based editorial conventions of most editions of Shakespeare’s works (Roberts-Smith et al. 2009; Hirsch 2011). Among the challenges to Shakesp...

Conversational models are a means to capture and effectively represent the complexity of discussions by applying a process to create interactive three-dimensional outcomes. Whereas a conversation proceeds linearly in time, the relationship between the topics covered can often be decidedly nonlinear, as the interlocutors build on previous parts of t...

Why is big data such a big deal? Modern digital communications are producing and recording data at a feverish rate, with 90% of the world’s recorded data, most of it unstructured, having been produced in just the last two years (Dragland, 2013). In addition, more traditional texts are being digitized all the time, and Crane (2006) tells us that whi...

It is a fundamental precept of Digital Humanities (DH) that the work be multilingual and multi-disciplinary. In support of this, we have developed a serious game, in the form of a customizable, updatable digital board game, intended to promote awareness and interdisciplinary collaboration among the international DH community. As Gee argues, games...

The process of modeling workflow for editorial purposes might be seen as a laborious and tedious experience. The interactive nature of our Visual Workflow Interface tool (Frizzera et al, 2012) can easily be transformed into a ludic environment. We propose incorporating the affordances of board games into the current tool iteration, creating a coope...

The research, writing and referencing processes in the humanities differ significantly from those in the sciences (Hellqvist, 2009), in which their traditional citations analysis and the corresponding visualization methods (heatmaps, network maps, etc) are to a large extent inadequate when studying humanist referencing patterns because they are bui...

Franco Moretti rightly claims that what we are reading when we use text mining methods and visualizations are really models of the collections (Moretti, 2013, p. 157). It is important therefore to survey the visual models emerging from Digital Humanities research and question if they can better be designed to suit humanities exploration. In this pa...

In the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, our primary focus of attention has been on text. In this paper, we discuss our recent innovations in finding ways to capture the subjective interpretation of visual information that has in some way been connected with texts. Previous work has focused on test-based semantic differentials...

In this article, we discuss the various ways in which the experiments we have been doing within the INKE Interface Design team and elsewhere are predicated on the availability of " digital apparatus " – various forms of metadata that can be made consistently available. ese include structural, procedural, and semantic markup, digital indexes, textu...

The Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) is an experimental three-dimensional interface for use in blocking plays. Created using the Unity3D game engine, SET allows directors or student directors to associate character movement and speech with a timeline that represents the line of action, as well as to annotate choices, change the script, place...

The aim of this paper is to report on the development of a visual user interface enhanced with a thesaurus to support information retrieval in a multilingual digital library context. The interface provides a design to support seamless access to three spaces, namely thesaurus space, query space and result display space. Résumé : Le but de cette comm...

The paper examines the relationships between users’ cognitive and learning styles, their preferences for visual or faceted search user interfaces, and their information seeking strategies, in the context of a user-centred evaluation of two user interfaces for digital libraries, namely Searchling and T-Saurus (Shiri et al. 2011). Both interfaces pro...

This paper reports on a study designed to build and test a health information system relevant to Canadian consumers’ information needs. The results of 15 qualitative interviews outline key issues that inform the delivery of online health information in a global context and the design of effective web tools.Cet article porte sur une étude conçue pou...

As non-specialist researchers gain increasingly direct online access to digital and digitized theatre archives, archivists can no longer expect to be able to provide essential, post-positivist archival literacy training to individual researchers on a case-by-case basis. Archival literacy training must now be embedded directly into the design archiv...

It is sometimes said that the academy today is undergoing rapid change, and that one of the changes we have been experiencing is in the rate of dissemination of research results. Our previous generation could comfortably spend 10 years on a project, and produce a monograph at the end, confident that they were meeting the expectations of everyone in...

In this article, we provide a discussion of the concept of visual interactive workflows, how they relate to our previous work on structured surfaces, and how they have been adapted to experiments in managing articles for journal publication and managing biographical histories being written and tagged in XML. We conclude with a user experience study...

In this article, we provide a discussion of the concept of visual interactive workflows, how they relate to our previous work on structured surfaces, and how they have been adapted to experiments in managing articles for journal publication and managing biographical histories being written and tagged in XML. We conclude with a user experience study...

With the growing importance of big data, and perhaps more significantly, the application of big data to the quantified self, it is more useful than ever for designers to be conversant with the wide range of measurements that can be obtained from various forms of instrumentation. When chairs can record and communicate details about sitting, sidewalk...

A Short History and Demonstration of the Dynamic Table of Contexts

With the growing importance of big data, and perhaps more significantly, the application of big data to the quantified self, it is more useful than ever for designers to be conversant with the wide range of measurements that can be obtained from various forms of instrumentation. When chairs can record and communicate details about sitting, sidewalk...

How can we study the interface of scholarly knowledge across print and digital epochs? To ask about interface across epochs is to take a concept that makes sense in the digital world and anachronistically bring it to bear on print in a way that could confuse both. Nonetheless we need to develop ways of thinking about the relationship between design...

This article discusses a set of prototypes currently being designed and created by the Interface Design team of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project. These prototypes attempt to supplement the user experience in reading digital scholarly editions, by supporting a set of tasks that are straightforward in a digital environment b...

In this paper, we describe a case study using 3D conversational modeling as an approach to the design of an online interactive system. The system was intended to help customers select electric motors from a wide range of options, and to be used on its own by a customer, or else in conversations between customers and salespeople or motor experts. Th...