Bas Raijmakers
Research Interests: Summary
Bas Raijmakers, managing director STBY, PhD candidate RCABas Raijmakers is currently a PhD candidate in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art, next to running his own user research consultancy STBY with Geke van Dijk. During his training in cultural studies at the University of Amsterdam, he focussed on how people use media, from magazines to tv. Early 1990s he co-founded internet company ACS-i that was later acquired by Lost Boys/IconMedialab. With his company he developed methods to research how people use interactive media. He published about these methods in e.g. Usability – Nutzerfreundliches Webdesign, Springer (2002) and Webontwerp, [Z]OO (2004). His current PhD research focuses on how documentary film can be used for design research. The new research method Design Documentaries he is developing helps multidisciplinary teams to explore the rich fabric of everyday life as a source of information and inspiration for their concepts. He has published about Design Documentaries in Designing Interactive Systems proceedings, ACM Press (2006). For his research he co-operates with industry and academia, for instance HP labs (UK), Philips Medical Systems (US and NL), the Equator network (UK), Goldsmiths College (UK), Intelligent Textiles (UK), DesignPlus (UK), France Telecom/Orange (F) and the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre (UK). www.rca.ac.uk/pages/research/bas_raijmakers_1495.html www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/people/phds/bas-raijmakers.html Design DocumentariesThrough his PhD research, Bas Raijmakers aims to develop a new method for design research, called Design Documentaries. The method is inspired by documentary film with its long history of representing daily life in very considered and engaging ways that leave the erratic, elusive fabric of the everyday intact. This may be valuable as interaction design has moved beyond a purely utilitarian agenda to embrace issues of engagement, expression and emotion. The research discusses a number of key documentary approaches, with different degrees of explicit involvement on the part of the filmmaker, and suggests that a purely observational approach may not be most valuable for design research. Instead, the dialectic between the perspective of the designers/filmmakers and the everyday reality they are designing for is expected to be more informative and inspirational during the design process. Part of the research is doing experiments with filmmaking in design research to discover how documentary approaches and techniques need to be appropriated to work in the design discipline. The Design Documentaries method is expected to be beneficial for design practices in academia and businesses that aim to develop products and services that are grounded in people’s everyday lives. |