VIPP in 2008–2010 archive (Academy of Finland decision No. 123445)

Designers are artists? Painters? Hackers? Researchers? Do they design “for all”, i.e. users, or for themselves? Surely designers vary a lot, as the users do. But would it be reasonable to think that designers awareness of the principles of human cognition and biological constraints and collaboration with users will improve the accessibility of project visualisation? Or that designer’s tacit and cultural knowledge of the users supports more accurate project visualisations?

The aim of VIPP is to a) Explain how colours could be used in visualisations to augment accessibility; b) Find interdisciplinary tools and methods for project visualisation practises, which can be understood equally by all technical and artistic project members; c) Clarify how design for all principles could be rationalised in project visualisations; d) Describe what are the constraints and limits of the design for all principles in complex technologically driven media projects, and e) Generate cross-disciplinary dialogue between art, design and technology projects.

The methodology is based on participatory action research and advanced codesign (collaborative design having a focus on human and social factors in design) due to complexity of the phenomena involved. Triangulation for the data collection will be used, thus the research questions will be studied from versatile data and points of view. Data will consist of researcher’s observations in the research log, recorded e-mail comments by participants and designers, results of the eye-tracking tests, concept maps made by participants and project visualisations of the design experiments.

Expected results will — hopefully — contribute to design of accessible and universal interfaces for information and communication technology (ICT) in rich media project management. I like to think that results will improve and propagate the project visualisation methodology in media and design productions to augment better financial and content conduction of the projects.

– Antti