Method card design dimensions: a survey of card-based design tools <s> Toward Patterns of Design <s> You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today. <s> BIB001 </s> Method card design dimensions: a survey of card-based design tools <s> Toward Patterns of Design <s> TIlls paper discusses the evolution of a CARD-based interactive research tool developed to incorporate cross-cultural users in the process of building a representation of work. The technique is highly visual and interactive and does not depend on capturing information textually, or on ethnographic investigatory techniques. We discuss the context in which the tool was developed and its use in a field study in rural India, as well as the kind of data which was gathered and lessons we learned. <s> BIB002 </s> Method card design dimensions: a survey of card-based design tools <s> Toward Patterns of Design <s> CARD (Collaborative Analysis of Requirements and Design) is an influential technique for participatory design and participatory analysis that is in use on three continents. This paper reviews three case studies that document the development of a layered CARD approach, which distinguishes among the following: (1) observable, formal components, (2) skill and craft, and (3) interpretative description. The layered approach simplifies the CARD materials, and moves the deliberately informal technique toward a more principled analysis. <s> BIB003 </s> Method card design dimensions: a survey of card-based design tools <s> Toward Patterns of Design <s> Researchers have explored the design of ambient information systems across a wide range of physical and screen-based media. This work has yielded rich examples of design approaches to the problem of presenting information about a user's world in a way that is not distracting, but is aesthetically pleasing, and tangible to varying degrees. Despite these successes, accumulating theoretical and craft knowledge has been stymied by the lack of a unified vocabulary to describe these systems and a consequent lack of a framework for understanding their design attributes. We argue that this area would significantly benefit from consensus about the design space of ambient information systems and the design attributes that define and distinguish existing approaches. We present a definition of ambient information systems and a taxonomy across four design dimensions: Information Capacity, Notification Level, Representational Fidelity, and Aesthetic Emphasis. Our analysis has uncovered four patterns of system design and points to unexplored regions of the design space, which may motivate future work in the field. <s> BIB004 </s> Method card design dimensions: a survey of card-based design tools <s> Toward Patterns of Design <s> In this paper we start from the position that sources of inspiration play an important role in the design process albeit in a frequently intangible way. We present the Inspiration Card Workshop as a collaborative method for combining findings from domain studies, represented in Domain Cards, with sources of inspiration from applications of technology, represented in Technology Cards, to create new concepts for design. We report our findings from three projects in which we have used the method and argue that the use of Inspiration Cards can successfully frame and guide workshops with disparate participants and bring various sources of inspiration into the design process. We furthermore compare the method to four related methods in the design process, namely Future Workshops, Metaphorical Design, Interaction Relabelling and Lateral Thinking. <s> BIB005 </s> Method card design dimensions: a survey of card-based design tools <s> Toward Patterns of Design <s> Involving users in scenario development within participatory design is challenging as it places users at the same level with designers. In our research we stated a need for a structured scenario development process, which is suitable for various research areas. Following the tradition of card-based techniques, we aimed at developing a technique, which is easy to apply and modify. The "Instant Card Technique" (IC-Technique) presented in this paper offers a typology of instant cards, which enables a formalized development of scenarios together with a group of users. The technique was tested and improved through its evaluation in three case studies. In this paper we provide a description of this technique, including the step by step preparation and usage process. <s> BIB006 </s> Method card design dimensions: a survey of card-based design tools <s> Toward Patterns of Design <s> Ideation Decks is a project that explores the development of a methodological tool for design ideation It involves the creation and use of bespoke project-specific card based systems which help to define constrained design problems within a broader overall problem space. Use of this system is intended to support the practice of parallel design by design practitioners, and to help more effectively explore specific problems by aiding in iterative design explorations. <s> BIB007 </s> Method card design dimensions: a survey of card-based design tools <s> Toward Patterns of Design <s> Playfulness can be observed in all areas of human activity. It is an attitude of making activities more enjoyable. Designing for playfulness involves creating objects that elicit a playful approach and provide enjoyable experiences. In this paper we introduce the design and evaluation of the PLEX Cards and its two related idea generation techniques. The cards were created to communicate the 22 categories of a Playful Experiences framework to designers and other stakeholders who wish to design for playfulness. We have evaluated the practical use of the cards by applying them in three design cases. The results show that the PLEX Cards are a valuable source of inspiration when designing for playfulness and the techniques help create a large amount of ideas in a short time. <s> BIB008 </s> Method card design dimensions: a survey of card-based design tools <s> Toward Patterns of Design <s> In the context of an initiative to empower non-expert practitioners to perform sound design in games, we have been working on a collection of design patterns and in a deck of cards that function as tokens to those patterns. The deck serves both practitioners and researchers. Practitioners may appreciate a presentation of potential sound explorations in a format that is literally handy, with no need to be familiar with the formalism of design patterns. Researchers who are willing to evolve such patterns may explore the usage of cards as part of a setting designed to be auditable. This paper presents the results of a first experiment with the deck in a scenario of a game design session. The goal is to evidence information supporting foremost enhancements to the deck itself, to the process in which it has being explored and audited, and to the inscribed collection of patterns. <s> BIB009 </s> Method card design dimensions: a survey of card-based design tools <s> Toward Patterns of Design <s> This paper reports findings from a series of participatory design workshops with ten people over eighty years old. The focus of the workshops was new banking technologies for the older old. Participants were asked to discuss their current experiences of banking and given packs of concept cards which contained design sketches and brief outlines of concepts for new financial services. The designs on the cards were deliberately provocative and aimed to encourage criticism and debate. Participants wrote and drew on the cards and the workshops were recorded and transcribed. The participants were extremely critical of current banking practices and most of the new concepts we presented to them. Their questions and comments led to a number of insights and further iterations. The paper argues that critique is an essential resource for design, both in terms of identifying problems and iterating ideas. <s> BIB010 </s> Method card design dimensions: a survey of card-based design tools <s> Toward Patterns of Design <s> Design Heuristics are prompts that encourage design space exploration during concept generation. Design Heuristics were developed by analyzing trends in innovative products and patterns in ideation by engineering and industrial designers of varying experience levels. In this study, 48 freshmen engineering students were given a short design task and a set of twelve Design Heuristics Cards. Each card described a heuristic, and gave two examples of its application in a product. Students were asked to create new design concepts using the heuristics. The results showed that the concepts created without Design Heuristics were less developed, and were often replications of known ideas or minor changes to existing products. However, concepts created using Design Heuristics resulted in more developed, creative designs. Students often applied the same heuristic in multiple ways, supporting our premise that the heuristics lead to exploring multiple solutions. The results also showed that some students readily applied the heuristics, while others struggled to understand how to apply them. <s> BIB011
By plotting the card systems as shown in Figure 1 , there are three archetypes or patterns of design BIB004 BIB001 that emerge: general purpose/repository cards, customizable cards, and context specific cards. Further analysis and refinement of these groupings will be taken up in future work, however we can provide initial comments. Cards that are classified as "general purpose/repository" cards offer either a method repository or aim to stimulate inspiration and lateral thinking. They can be used during the whole process and only have general or no instruction for use. In most cases the deck is split up into different categories yet used without customization. "Customizable" cards are inherently customizable to some degree. Interestingly, we can see that most of these belong to the participatory design group and have specific instructions on PictureCARD (PC) BIB002 Sound Design Deck (SDD) BIB009 SUTD  Layered CARD (LC) BIB003 Questionable Concept Cards (QCC) BIB010 IDEO  Inspiration Cards (IC) BIB005 Instant Card Technique (ICT) BIB006 SILK  Design Heuristics (DH) BIB011 Eco Innovators' Cards (EIC)  DSKD  Ideation Deck (ID) BIB007 Oblique Strategies (OS)  Bootleg (BL) [25] PLEX Cards (PX) BIB008 Visual Explorer Cards (VEC)  MethodKit(MK) [18] Purpose&Scope Duration Customization Formal Qualities System how to use them to engage with end-users and non-designers. They are mainly used at a specific point in the design process and are composed of text and images. The third group includes "context specific" cards that are developed primarily to focus on a specific design agenda or context. They are primarily used at a specific point in time with specific instructions. In the next section we discuss how this exercise of analysis helps the design research community make sense of card-based tools.