Undertaken as a speculative experiment, engaging creative writers in the design research practice has proved to be a breakthrough in eliciting feedback on evocative objects. This exercise, part creative collaboration and part user testing, has fostered creative directions in designing interactions and behavior that would not have surfaced from more objective research practices.

Although in the greater design community, design research has been carried out in the hopes of ambiguous and inspiring results, sometimes, in their manifestation as artifacts of ethnography and candid self-reporting, these results are too easily interpreted factually and emotionally. When working with creative writing as design research, there can be no mistaking it for anything other than ambiguous and inspirational, a positive thing for designers who work best in the muse’s messy territory. It was a process that kept the designer on her toes and prevented the creative process from becoming overly programmed. Ultimately, these writings inspired the details of the interaction design and the imagined worlds portrayed in the films.

Six writers crafted responses to the Switch Critter prototypes. The proposal was left open-ended as to elicit any and all possible interpretations of what was going on with the Critters. Annotated texts with the designer’s notes can be downloaded as PDFs from each page.

The instructions given to the writers were as follows:

switch objects | object #2 introduction
when held very still in the position where its light is on,
the object will do something. when it is moved, it does
something else.

| writing project |
choose a light that you use daily and plug it into the
socket on the black box. plug the black box into a wall
socket. for a week, use the attached object as the
switch for your light.
please write a piece, 1 - 10 pages, that is inspired by
your experience with this object. it can be fiction,
non-fiction, poetry, journal, or any style you create in.
i am especially interested in having you articulate the
intentions, life, connections, and questions that stem
from the objects.

The methods of interpretation and reintegration into the design were varied. “Turn the Lights Off,” by Taffeta Wood, offered themes of darkness, nocturnal activity, and information overload. Designing interactions to support these imagined themes resulted in a Switch Critter that seems to come alive at night as the load on the power grid diminishes. Another instantiation of the same writing is a Switch Critter who acts as a repository and filter for the data streams, to whom one could choose to “listen” to what it’s telling, or to ignore.

The poem “little cold day – little day / big cold, a little day,” by Allison Carter, seems to move along in a heartbeat-like rhythm spewing the needs of a child in shifting tenses and perspectives. The film and interactions influenced by this piece focus on caring, daydreams and flashbacks. The Switch Critter plays the double role of a mesmerizing, needy object and local memory. When it opens up to release the signal that turns on the light, it also records the immediate sounds in the space. These sounds are remixed and replayed when there is abrupt change in the situation on the energy grid or global carbon index. Positive change is reflected by distant memories, while negative change replays more recent ambience.

“Nature’s Prostitute,” a fairly literal illustration of parts of Alex Foreman’s “oject b,” is a tease, withholding the light at the expense of caresses — more so at certain times. It responds to the load on the grid to be stingy when demand is high and generous when demand is low.

All in all, the creative writing provided inspiration, in various ways, for how behavior can be designed to create situations that support myths, specific stories, and playful engagements. →Revisit the films and interaction descriptions on the first page…