Event Info
About the conference
AWF is a collaborative forum offered by the Institute of Design to address issues within design research. It is targeted at those who develop ideas based on insights into people's behaviors, perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes. Within this forum, we explore a range of methods to uncover insights and translate them into meaningful systems, products, organizations, services and communications.
Our goal is to attract people (students, educators and professionals) from a wide variety of fields. Now in our fourth year, we are growing and continually striving to provide more useful content. Creating an environment for learning together will help us to extend our tools and methods beyond their current boundaries and advance the practice of design research.
AWF 2005 conference theme
People often separate their lives into two separate groups of activity: work and play. Today's households are short on time, and anything that helps make work more like play and less like work is desirable. This conference will examine how products and services, arrived at through user-centered design research, make people's lives more playful as they spend more time working.
For example, cellular telephones blur the work/play line in many different ways. They were originally designed for communication, as is evident in the design of the large 'portable' phones and the car phones of the 1980's. Today, through improved technology, phones are used for many different purposes: as communication, as an accessory, as a gadget, to play games, to take pictures, to IM, to text message, to browse the internet, to listen to music, etc.
