Kinetic Architecture: A Methods Workshop for Designing Pathways of Participation in Complex Ecosystems

By Dave Jones and Jonathan Lamb of The Nerdery – http://nerdery.com

User experience researchers and designers are facing increasingly complex and participatory information ecosystems which span diverse digital and physical media. Static consumption platforms are evolving into dynamic networks of people, data, information, and supporting tools which interact extensively across channels to collaboratively create knowledge and shape behavior. To better understand these spaces, researchers and designers must stretch their skills to become architects of large-scale experiences focused on the way people and information travel from one place to the next, shifting context and meaning in the process.

Kinetic Architecture is an approach drawing from fields including actor network theory, object-oriented programming, and game design, to address this movement of people, data, and information, and support the continuous recontextualization of information as it moves. In contrast to the traditional Information Architecture emphasis on taxonomies and set patterns, Kinetic Architecture establishes a dynamic field of components—participants, spaces, objects, pathways, and signals—that help people and their communities coordinate their movements with one another and structure data in a way that is most useful to them.

The Workshop Experience

Part 1: Theory

• Describe Kinetic Architecture and its foundations
• Outline theoretical underpinnings for the approach
• Describe its application to a design project

Part 2: Application

• Small teams working on an example problem space
• Physical prototyping of an architecture for an ecosystem
• Summative discussion of lessons learned