Ergonautek meets academia: Last week I followed the invitation of Mario Giudici, Daniel Hunziker (Human Centered Design, Basel) and Andy Polaine to hold a guest lecture at Fachhochschule Luzern/ Switzerland. For the seminar I met a group of well prepared and highly motivated design management students – all of them eager to take a deep dive into design research methodology.

ergonautek guest lecture at Fachhochschule Luzern

The topic was ‘un-design through service design’ – How might we nudge behaviours and develop new services that allow us to move beyond simple consumerism? During the seminar the students were asked to examine the products and consumption in their lives and “un-design” them using service design approaches in order to reduce or remove their negative environmental and ethical impacts on the world.

With my lecture on video as a method for design research I contributed to the method section of the seminar. With telling examples paired with theory and practical exercises I passed on the ergonautek knowledge to the students on using video for design research. Although the seminar was packed with practical hints and activities it seemed to be fun and interesting to all of the participants. For me it got especially exciting when the students presented their results from a tiny field study which they conducted at the end of the day. The video material from these studies highlighted the difficulties people can have while interacting with services. With this input on using video for design research the students got a powerful method at hand for their upcoming student’s projects. Wish you good luck for this, guys!

Analysing the field material and preparing short highlight clips