A colleague of mine once told me that “Designers are thieves, they steal bits from here and there and put them together in new constellations”. This professor, Simon Clatworthy, inspired me to use a design method during my Master project (at KHiB), which I call Inspirational Cards. The most important thing about them is to extract knowledge from something that inspires me, and transfer the core of the knowledge into my own topic. I've developed the method to fit my own needs, and the cards has proven very useful also during my PhD, and this is why:

1) Initiating complex challenges: the method helped me to start working on this PhD when I had no idea what I was doing, and only had the topic youth, social media and society. In the beginning I would make a card for everything that inspired me, even though I didn't know what to do with it.

2) Research diary: The method works almost like a research diary for me. Ideas and sources of inspiration behind my theories can be tracked in time, as they all contain month/year and chronological number.

3) Mapping of how I got to my results:The cards, now around 150 of them, shows very much the way I got to my results and what I've been interested in along the way. They show inspirational sources, but also reflections, ideas and other design research.

4) Understand my project: I have layed out the cards, sorted them in different ways, just looked at them to see patterns, and used them to explain e.g. my supervisor what I'm working on. So the cards help me gain an understanding of what I'm really into, the overall patterns of my design- and research interests.

Feel free to download my inDesign-template here, but please refer to me or my PhD when using it.

Here is a selection of the cards, see close-ups on press (totally about 150 cards, as of today, august 2015):

Four categories of cards:

Yellow cards: Inspiration from others; an idea, a design, a detail or a concept I’ve come across somewhere, that somehow is relevant for my process –indirectly or directly. See for example the cards "The Confessional", "Sonder", or "The Knitting Clock".

Red: Personal reflections on process. Paradoxes, questions to myself, epiphanies.

Green: My own ideas for designs and smaller features of design. This can also be ideas developed in corporation with student assistents working on my topic.

Blue: Research discussing design concepts in some way. For research I normally keep track of it in Mendeley - a reference tool software, so this category is mostly for research that is related to visual stuff or design.

IDEO Method cards

I used the IDEO Method cards during my Master degree, and really like how IDEO works and how they make their methods accessible to everyone. This is a deck of cards with a design method on each one, and tips on how to use it in projects. And these are really not just useful for designers. They are divided into the categories Ask, Watch, Learn and Try. http://www.ideo.com/work/method-cards (they also exist as an app)

Touchpoint cards

Simon has also written an article on the use of a card-based toolkit in service design: "The card-based approach offers a tangibility that teams find useful, and that offers multiple usage alternatives."

Clatworthy, S.(2011). Service innovation through touch-points: Development of an innovation toolkit for the first stages of new service development. International Journal of Design, 5(2), 15–28.

PhD-school and all the hand-ins of literature review and project proposals are finally done! Though not done, of course – the project develops and changes continously. BUT; it feels good anyway, so as for spring 2015, this is my project:

the long run…

PhD-school became a long run for me due to a big crash & burnout situation after my first semester of the PhD. That's life. And doing a PhD is tough. But now I'm here, I have learned a lot, and I've manage to submit the damned proposal I hated a while back. Not just that, I enjoyed writing it as well!

I used to be afraid that doing a PhD would be too theoretical for me–I'm after all trained as a designer and love doing stuff. But now I see that this is also design. Just in a different way. The project changes all the time, new patterns and theories occurs, but this is the current proposal (valid for spring 2015, written after a bit more than a year at PhD-school):

Download project proposal PDF (April 2015)

For someone who is concidering to do a PhD, it might also be interesting to see the project proposal I handed in when I applied (if you can even recognize that it's the same project…:/

Download the first project proposal/application PDF

The proposal is written during a course lead by Tim Anstey and Cheryl Ball; the "apparatus course" that focuses on writing process, research questions, methods, analytical framework and the most important thing: red thread through it all - does it all align? E.g how does my specific research questions match the framing and analytical framework I've chosen? We have handed in and developed reading lists, to "annotated bibliographies", to literature review, into project proposal. I've probably learned most about writing processes; how to find the right words that describes what I want to study?

Abstract (from the proposal)

In this thesis, I will study the designs of commenting sections in online magazines and newspapers. These are interfaces consisting of a variety of designed choices, such as layout, typography, moderation system and a recommender system that helps us to decide which comments to read first. Within each of these choices there are many possibilities that affects our use experience, whereas few of them are explored in research. In my research, I seek to study and visualize concept designs for the holistic use experience of these choices, with emphasis on enhancing the expressive possibilities and engagement.

The framing of the project is based on the idea of designs and artefacts as producers of social and cultural meaning. Existing research in this context is mainly focused on a functionalistic approach, as opposed to the discursive and semiotic approach I adopt. What does the design mean for us, and how does the designs of buttons, layout and typography effect our use experience?

As social media and technology has expanded our possibilities for expressing ourselves in the public sphere, rational arguments and emotional stories lives side by side, communicated in the same ways graphically; same fonts and few possibilities for communicating tone-of-voice. I will view the variety of these expressions as a design material for future concept designs.

I view the variety of expressions in dialogic interfaces – such as emotional expressions, arguments, questions, suggestions and personal stories – as a design material itself.

I divide the process into three stages; 1) in the first stage I will gain knowledge and analyse existing commenting sections and the various features these consists of, 2) in the second stage the focus is on gaining knowledge on how to visualize and prototype alternative concept designs for a fictional magazine commenting section, and 3) in the third stage I will evaluate, analyse and further develop these concept designs in collaboration with experts in the field, editors and designers.

My thesis will be an article-based contribution, with three articles, based on these three stages. The project will be finished in the spring 2017.

Inspirational Cards as design method

IDEO Method cards

Touchpoint cards

Project proposal – The Design of Dialogic Interfaces

the long run…

Abstract (from the proposal)