Diffract me! – using a skills-based approach in design practice

The potential of skills in design is intriguing; as skills open up new perceptions of the world they allow meaning to arise as we engage with the world. Several skills-based techniques that leverage this potential have been developed, and integrated into the Designing in Skills framework. The framework builds on personal engagement of designers in their practice, and promotes them to take a first-person perspective, enabling designs to be enriched with meaning. In this paper, we present the most recent workshop based on this approach, which specifically focuses on employing the Designing in Skills framework as a starting point and catalyst for design practice. We briefly introduce the Designing in Skills framework and present the DiffractMe! project in which we built on this approach to explore its potential for design practice. We conclude with reflections on the process and result by the involved designers. These reflections offer insights into the value of this approach for enriching interactive design with experiential qualities.