Hybrid Design Tools for Participatory, Embodied Sensemaking

In the world of design, we often come across complicated problems that require a participatory, embodied sensemaking to solve. To help us with this, there are various design tools available, both physical and digital. Digital tools have become more popular in recent years because they are easy to get hold of, more flexible, and can help us work more efficiently. However, many designers still prefer to use physical tools and old-fashioned ways of doing things. To combine the best of both worlds, “hybrid” tools that can be used both physically and digitally are being made. In my PhD, I aim to identify design opportunities for future hybrid design tools, by exploring the characteristics of designing for participatory, embodied sensemaking, in the context of physical, digital, and hybrid tools.

Dorothé Smit, Bart Hengeveld, Martin Murer, and Manfred Tscheligi. 2022. Hybrid Design Tools for Participatory, Embodied Sensemaking: An Applied Framework. In Sixteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 26, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3490149.3501332

Dorothé Smit, Ruth Neubauer, and Verena Fuchsberger. 2021. Distributed Collaborative Sensemaking: Tracing a Gradual Process. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 103, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3430524.3446079