Hi Everyone, my name is Heidi Biggs and I, along with Cayla Key, Audrey Desjardins, and
Afroditi Psarra will be presenting our pictorial called Moving Design Research: GIFs as Research
Tools. We would also like to note that two of our projects received funding: Voices and
Voids was funded by a UW Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Arts and Proceed with Care received
funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under
the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813508;
In this pictorial, we ask how GIFs are used to conduct and communicate design research.
We think of pictorial as an annotated portfolio showcasing four different cases of our own
design research where we used animated GIFs for ethnography, speculative design and arts-based
research. We showcased our GIFs using a QR code that
led to a website where our GIFs were displayed Ultimately our goals in this pictorial were
to: Highlight the craft & effort that go into
artful creation of GIFs and discuss how that contributes to design research
Offer an example of a mode of making artifacts for knowledge production in Research through
Design (RtD) [a]
And to demonstrate how GIFs helped us explore speculative, imaginative and entangled spaces
quickly in thoughtful, colorful and animated ways.
GIfs have been studied as ways to quickly share information and augment text heavy digital
communications. But To discover how designers use GIFs, we
did a light-weight survey finding they are often used to show interior details of designs
in bite-size stories, and demo material properties and or processes[b][c].
Also related to design, we suggest GIFs operate much like sketching -- a way to ideate on,
synthesize and communicate findings. Our methodology was to create an annotated
portfolio using examples from our own research. We first wrote about our own research with
GIFs responding to a unified set of prompts: such as:
[d] Why did you choose to use gifs for this project?
How were they made, what did you learn making them, how were they disseminated, what aesthetic
choices did you make? Were they part of a group of GIFs?
Inspired by duoethnography, [e][f]we commented on each others narrative reflections, drawing
out details and themes. [g] We then created a Miro board to organize our
examples and solidify themes.
The first set of GIFs we explore in this pictorial are from a project where GIFs were used as
speculative provocations for home IoT. The goal of the project was to use feminist notions
of care to reimaging home IoT. So, these GIFs needed to embody those theoretical ideas while
still feeling personal, crafted with care and lively.
The 4 GIFs were co-embodied by short audio vignettes told from the thing’s perspective.
By playing with each GIF’s loop I found I could differentiate temporalities in the
narratives like reveries or past experiences. For example in this concept, the blanket goes
into a rambling tangential reverie, 90’s sitcom style jazz begins to play and the GIF’s
irregular frame transitions help evoke an unpredictable and slightly off kilter vibe.
I arranged the frames almost randomly and set the frame delay anywhere from .2 - 2 seconds
(a 10X range). It was important that these GIFs felt sketchy,
slightly abstracted, and just ungrounded enough to suspend disbelief. That way reactions to
them weren't about their feasibility but their situated ethical implications. This was accomplished
by using grey scale, a watercolor brush and subtle animations as in this example where
I represent the IoT’s subtle yet active and literal voice by keeping all but 1 or
2 elements static and focusing attention on just those elements.
But the abstract open-endedness of the GIF imagery and style sat in juxtaposition to
the intimate and rooted telling of the audio narratives. I was the hand, the mind, the
voice, and the motion behind these multimodal representations. As a researcher this made
me feel conflicted at times - they were, after all, empirical tools for speculation.
In this case, I examine the ways I used GIFs to help me prototype a speculative research
through design project where I built a mechatronic pair of pants that rise in areas of Seattle,
WA where climate change will cause sea level rise in 30-80 years. The initial concepts
for these pants were vague and I needed to work through the material and mechanical constraints
and metaphors simultaneously. I used GIFs to do this at an early prototyping stage.
I saw this as a way of testing my design on the body in motion before I had any real artifact
built yet. I created these prototypes by building a template of a cyclist in motion using video
stills and then drew my favorite designs in motion over the template.
This helped me think through material problems -- for example I thought beads would be cool
because they are sloshy and cold like water, but, would beads swing into the chain? Would
they be too heavy and clunky? The GIFs had a wavery, jittery quality instead
of being too mechanical or precise, which incorporated a speculative quality to the
pants, and due to their looping nature, they helped me bring small details of the design
to life like beads swinging or pant legs interacting with the leg.
Another example of a way that I used GIFs from the same project was as a documentation
tool which told mini-stories about my prototyping process to convey my design decisions.
Throughout the course of my making and crafting process I took videos of my ‘completed ideas’
with my phone -- these videos were often messy and imperfect. However, I could take them
into photoshop and crop the perfect moments I thought represented complete ideas.
Making concise stories from my imperfect process videos felt like communicate my thinking and
embodied the spirit of prototyping aesthetically. This GIF [pull] shows a material prototype.
The image goes kind of sideways and offscreen because i’m filming and pulling on it at
the same time. Other prototypes capture ‘failures’ but
still helped me show the breadth of ideas that I tested and which I counted as ‘complete’
[flip] These GIFs really helped me communicate my
design rationale and process -- where in this case I was often developing rather strange
prototypes where hardware was mounted on soft fabrics, in venues like medium articles and
presentations, GIFs helped reduce the cognitive work of me, the author and the audience to
grasp the physics and workings of my prototypes. I also surrounded my GIFs with context like
words, captions and other still images to build arguments around my design process and
rationale. The last case we look at is Voices and Voids.
The goal of the project was to reclaim voice assistant data, as a way to subvert who commonly
uses, benefits and controls these data. Through our multidisciplinary work, we created
12 vignettes, transcoding data through movement, sound, spoken word, and interactive visual
compositions. While originally intended as a live performance and installation, the Covid-19
pandemic pushed us to create a website to disseminate the work.
The long scrollable home page includes animated GIFs, interactive typography, and still images
acting as buttons to each vignette. Inspired by early net art aesthetics, we leaned towards
fast moving, off beat, unpredictable, and colorful GIFs. Their non-synchronized rhythms
created enough tension to draw attention to the many portals at once, allowing visitors
to freely scroll up and down the page and choose their own path.
Together, they present a common aesthetic language, offering thematic links between
the vignettes. For example, the irregular and unnatural looping of these GIFS intensifies
the eerie feeling that voice assistants might not remain disembodied voices.
The GIFS also worked as micro-performances. Everyday artifacts became characters on the
homepage white background ‘stage’. The rhythm, timing, and movement of these animated
GIFs each told short stories, further uncovering new perspectives of voice assistants.
In our discussion we reflect on the unique qualities of GIFs as design research tools.
We expecially reflect how the aesthetics of movement of GIFs as well as how GIFs can be
used as as rich, concise and contextual artefacts helped us think through and convey research
questions and design concepts. GIFs have their own aesthetics of motion which
employ loops, rhythms and temporalities, and speculative qualities.
Looping was used in various ways throughout our research -- Audrey and Afroditi used weird-feeling
loops to challenge viewers to rethink voice assistants’ relationships to bodies. While
Cayla and Heidi used more subtle loops to highlight details of designs.
Rhythms and temporalities helped create either steady or off-beat feelings in GIFs, such
as the way cayla used either steady or a-rhythmic GIF timings depending on the concept narrative
she was weaving. GIFs also took on speculative qualities, balancing
levels of fidelity and whimsicality -- concretizing some details while leaving ambiguity.
Motion was used to give life to the design and art concepts.
And some GIFs had jittery and imperfect or dreamy qualities.
We also found that GIFs were rich, concise and contextual tools;
GIFs conveyed a lot of information very quickly, telling min-stories or giving mini-performances,
or quickly fill in many details about the functioning and concept under development.
But we also found that, GIFs were complemented by and complimentary to surrounding contexts
like still images, text, narration or, fellow GIFs, bringing life, emotion, open-ended exploration
and additional layers of meaning to GIFs. First, By reflecting on our process of making
GIFs, we hope this work both inspires others to use GIFs, but also adds to the cannon of
the potential of RtD and making-based knowledge production.
Second, As more design researchers might choose to use media like GIFs in their work, and
as ACM SIGCHI is slowly moving to more flexible, online publications, we find it important
to consider how GIFs and media might exist in archival forms of research publications.