Collaboration between RCA and INCITE
The INCITE/RCA collaboration was a week-long event during which six interaction design students from RCA Interaction design unit collaborated with six sociologists from University of Surrey and Goldsmiths College. It was run by Nina Wakeford, Lucy Kimbell and Nina Pope and hosted by INCITE and the RCA.

The aim of the project was for participants to;
- be exposed to and make use of each other’s knowledge, skills, experience
- share their research and their ways of working
- reflect on how they research and what kinds of knowledge they produce from different ways of working

The collaboration ran from Friday 29th April to 6th May 2005. More information about the week is here.

May 3, 2005
Collaboration - It's on.

Jon Arden is my designer (and yes I heard him say - "that's kat - my sociologist". I can't say I have ever heard anyone say that before). Jon is a first year design student with a fine art background. His work (and please forgive me Jon if my description is much less poetic than yours) reveals, creates and translates patterns of the intangible and invisible. One of his projects - Power Point - makes visible the amount of power being consumed by electric appliances that are both on and on stand-by. By making information available to users he hopes an iteration like this might change patterns of power use and non-use behaviour. Another project looks at capturing the temporal patterns created through sound. Using the vibration of speakers and powdered paint he has a created a series of 'sound paintings'. Other works employ lasers and mercury and other exotic materials. I am drawn by the ways he visually articulates invisible and fleeting moments of interacting elements.

Whilst Friday consisted of a series of introductions (to each other and to respective disciplinary ways of working) and a special sponsored dinner, today was the real start to the event. Today we worked in pairs, feeling our way over uncommon ground, through different experiences, alternate skill sets and histories. As mentioned Jon comes from a fine art background and is relatively new to the Interaction Design scene. Similarly I bring to sociology (and my PhD) an MA in visual culture and commercial media experience. So our shared ground could be either more familiar than other pairs or no advantage at all. Our task is to explore ways of working and potentially realise the collaboration in some form of artefact.

So what has this got to do with the bus?

read more here

May 13, 2005
The pocket conductor - a design response

It's been a week since the end of the INCITE/RCA collaboration and I should have blogged earlier but it was pretty exhausting and I needed time to chew over the experience. Last friday (6.05) all six design/researcher teams presented their iteration/ideas, methods, challenges and frustrations.

Jon and I worked hard for four long days, looking through all the bus stories, driver and conductor interviews and blog posts, digging at themes in my brain as well as embarking on various field trips together to gain more insight into the bus experience. Our task was to investigate the difference in experience between the old routemaster bus and the new bendy bus using the opportunity to ride both buses whilst they are still in operation.

It seemed a timely project given we could literally hop off and on between these two buses - something that will not be possible in a short time - as well as draw from the data I have been collecting before, during and after the transition of the No.73 from RM to BB. Here's a very brief overview. I will link our presentation to the website soon.

So what did we find?

read more here