Waarde promovendus, beste Lukas,

What I much appreciate about your thesis is that you design, make and present with clear designerly quality. It’s a joy to see the attention to detail you put into the interaction, the models and the photography of the storyboards. The opportunity to join the committee of a design PhD who actually cares about the ‘thing being designed’ – and not just about design process or design theory – is quite a treat.

My first question concerns aesthetics and context. Your introduction contains two stories of which your youth reminiscence is particularly evocative. Both are contextually rich: they describe in detail what makes and breaks the payment experience and contain many inspiring pointers for design. As I understand it, the faculty of design here at TUe adheres to the view that meaning does not live in the product, not in the thing itself, but that meaning – and therefore also aesthetic meaning – emerges in interaction. In line with that view, I would argue that the actions and reactions that people can handle, the actions and reactions that they prefer and the actions and reactions that are deemed appropriate very much depend on the context. Aesthetics is not a matter of taste, it is situated and embodied.

You mention a couple of times, for example on page 290, that the third stand – the approach you advocate – is a design perspective on single purpose digital products while the second stand is mainly concerned with multi-purpose products. Indeed your experimental payment terminal has only one function: to pay electronically. But your design approach to the EPT is context-agnostic: there is no mention at all of the use situations for which you designed your EPT. It has to work – and I mean not just functionally but also culturally and aesthetically – in many different situations, whether it is paying for petrol or dinner in an upscale restaurant. To me that sounds like a multi-purpose product. In your process, you ask your subjects post-hoc in what kind of establishment they would expect the EPT. Now to me, this is the world upside down: you design a product to your liking, you ignore the context, present it in a generic environment, make up a use situation (the winestore) and then ask the user whether they like it and finally where they’d imagine it.

My question then is, if we can talk about aesthetics without considering situatedness and the aesthetic quality is not in the object itself either, then in your view what dominates the aesthetics of interaction? Put simply, where does aesthetics of interaction live?

 

My second question concerns page 170, which summarizes the results of your experiments. I’m interested in the differences between the online and the physical study. Now what one would hope for with tangible interaction and re-materialization, I think, is that when the design is presented on a screen its qualities may not be obvious, but when experienced in the flesh it would provide an Aha-Erlebnis: the quality of the full, embodied experience can only come across during actual, physical interaction. But alas, it is exactly the other way round: when the stimuli are presented on a screen in the online experiment nearly 70% of the subjects prefer the EPT but in the population confronted with it in reality this percentage lies considerably lower. Isn’t this a sign that the EPT leans too heavily on semantics and re-presentation – the graphical flow of money, the toggling of the traveller – and does not fully exploit the quality of situated human actions? Semantics and re-presentation comes across in an online presentation just fine, but the quality of human situated action is hard to get across.

Waarde promovendus, beste Jelle,

From your thesis, I sense you were determined to pursue a highly purist phenomenological take on design research. My interest is in the exemplars which are really the proof of the pudding. I particularly like The Augmented Speed Skate, a highly elegant solution for honing bodily skill. I applaud you: no screens, no graphs, no post-hoc analysis. The skates truly allow for meaning in interaction, in the moment, through exploiting human perception and synaesthesia. I completely get the link with the theory.

Then I turn to the next exemplar: the Sensible Alternative. And I think: “Hey, a smartphone with a graphical user interface. Surely that’s rooted in a completely different philosophical tradition than phenomenology. Cognitive psychology, semiotics, metaphor, representation: the diametric opposite of everything you stand for.” And then I wonder: “So maybe this very purist take on phenomenology isn’t really so necessary?” You even describe it as ‘an alternative layer on top of hierarchical system architectures’. It appears to me that the heavy lifting is done by a UI rooted in a design philosophy which you fundamentally reject and then you strap some phenomenological features onto it.

On page 68 you also add notes on how several smartphone manufacturers had developed related technologies by 2013, 2014. Your own concept is from 2009. If I calculate backward from 2014: half a year to ramp up production, a year of production engineering and co- developing components with suppliers, maybe two years of research and development. I reckon that conceptually iOS and Android engineers were on a similar track at roughly the same time as you.

I am not saying that your design does not have its merits. I can see the incremental innovation here. But if the developers at Apple and Google – who are likely to be less familiar with Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Abrams than you are – end up on the same conceptual track without using your theoretical framework, doesn’t that point at a weak relationship between your research and your designs? So my question is: considering that you are building on top of another philosophical framework and others are able to get to similar thoughts by a different route, aren’t you shooting with a philosophical bazooka at a UI mosquito?

Waarde promovenda, beste Ingrid,

One of the nice things about your thesis is that it further builds this faculty’s reputation as an expertise center on design and sustainability.

At the same time – from an outsider’s perspective – you could say that the faculty is sending mixed and somewhat confusing messages.

On the one hand, a couple of offices away from you, there is a team working on ‘products that last’, investigating approaches to prolong the product’s life cycle.

On the other hand, there is you and others in the Nature Inspired Design team with Cradle2Cradle: solar energy is abundant, we are just not very good yet in harvesting it, and as long as you keep the biosphere and technosphere cleanly separated, you can recycle to your heart’s content.

What strikes me in the Cradle2Cradle philosophy is its narrow engineering understanding of what things mean for us. There seems to be a hidden assumption that when you reshape and repurpose matter into a new useful instantiation according to the two cycles model all is well and nothing is lost.

Yet if you see design as a process which adds value by creating objects which elicit personal and cultural significance, something very essential gets lost or at least reset with every Cradle2Cradle reincarnation.

We all have our own examples; I take my family’s rice spoon. This battered rice serving spoon which I inherited from my grandma could easily be recycled into a new, shiny and far superior rice serving spoon. But then it wouldn’t be my family’s rice serving spoon anymore. I do not need to tell you that a product is far more than its function and appearance. And nature may not be sentimental, but I am.

Is C2C then for the mundane, for the utilitarian? For the things that clearly we need – canteen trays, toner cartridges – but which we do not cherish or bond with?

My question then is, does Nature Inspired Design have ways to prolong personal and cultural significance beyond the next cradle? Do you see possibilities for a design enrichment to the C2C method to keep personal and cultural meaning even though the product an sich is gone?

Waarde promovendus, beste Paul,

Congratulations on your dissertation. It is extraordinary that someone of your experience takes the time to produce a full doctoral thesis. Usually, people of your industrial maturity get an honorary PhD. But as you undoubtedly discovered, having to put your thoughts to more than 250 pages of paper leads to a completely different level of reflection than an honorary guest lecture. Your thesis provides design academics, designers in industry and design managers with something that is very rare: a detailed account of innovation thinking in a corporate design department. It is the unique product of someone who has a highly senior role in industry ánd is willing to structure his experiences in a scholarly manner. I have a lot of respect for this.

At the same time, this unique combination of seniority and academic inquiry brings new questions. As action research, your work hinges on the quality of reflection. You use many Philips examples to convincingly argue the coupling between new theories, processes and innovative results. Yet what strikes me is that the majority of these examples are success stories. I read very little about the projects in which Philips struggled.

From an academic point of view, failed experiments may be disappointing but can be just as illuminating as success stories. This applies just as well to qualitative research. If we take Gibbs’ reflective cycle as a reference, he may start with ‘description-without-judgement’ but he does explicitly include an evaluation step with value judgements: what was good or bad about the experience?

Now is it possible to publicly critique Philips work and run the risk that colleagues feel offended, in the knowledge that on Monday you’ll have to team up with them again?

And considering that you are VP of Design Strategy & Innovation, wouldn’t a public critique of Philips Design projects in a sense undermine your own position?

Or even be seen as a sign of weakness in a corporate culture?

My question then is: Did you yourself experience this tension and how did you secure – waarborgen would be the appropriate Dutch term – fair academic reflection in the context of your responsibilities?