The following are some notes from Mobile Nation, by Martha Ladly and Philip Beesley (2008). I am reading this book to ground my design for mobile experiences. The idea of movement, which mobile devices afford, will play an important role in my design as it goes hand-and-hand with exercise. I believe mobile devices will lend well to sustaining the physical exercise in various contexts of use. As mobile phones become more prevalent, the potential application of an exercise application with adolescents is more realistic.

Mobile Nation: Creating methodologies for mobile platforms

• Park Walk
• Bodystorming | participants use physical improvisation to explore forms of interaction, emotion content, and relationships between individuals and groups
• Place-storming or location-storming | design in situ with their participants in order to bound the imagination of users and designers within an actual location
• Mobile Experience Engine (MEE) | …created to bridge the gap between artist/designer and programmer/engineer. …was developed to give designers, who are familiar with new media design tools such as HTML/CSS, the ability to program and develop hand-in-hand with engineers.
• Design Charette | combines the langage-based approaches of brainstorming with the expectation that an actual series of design and even prototypes will emerge. This format allos for the collaborative participation of artists, designers, engineers, and stakeholders.
• Iterative Design | engineering method aligned with extremem software programming in which an engineering solution is built in small increments, tested, and improved by a team through the process of development.[p4]

Towards Issues-Based Art an Design Research

Anne Galloway, Carleton University

Starting with current understandings of mobile publics and public mobilities, including the manifestly technology, one option is to evaluate the capacity of people and things to move in and out of different contexts and identities. In order to do so, I believe that practitioners need to articulate and develop methods that are able to flex as much as the uncertainty, inconsistency, and instability of our particular situations and concerns demand. But perhaps most importantly, art and design researchers might first turn to particular issues or objects around which people may gather. [p-17]

Morality, New Technology, and Engagement

Suzanne Stein, SMARTlab
The spirit of playful engagement with the world is is a new characteristic afforded by, for example, new technologies embedded in our architecture, wearables, and installations. The past few years have also marked the beginning of the end of the division between physical and digital realities.

Play as Research

Eric Zimmerman, Gamelab

Design is a way to ask questions. Design research, when it occurs through the practice of design itself, is a way to larger questions beyond the limited scope of a particular design problem. When design research is integrated into the design process, new and unexpected questions emerge directly from the act of design.
Iterative Design | a process-based design methodology, but it is also a form of design research. [p25]
In iterative design, there is a blending of designer and user, creator and player. It is a process of design through the reinvention of play. Through iterative design, designers create systems and play with them. They become participants, but do so in order to critique their creations, to bend them, break them, and refashion them into something new.
The process of iteration, of design through play, is a way of discovering the answers to questions you didn’t even know were there. [p35]