Richard Coyne’s keynote has starte, in Architectural design there has been much reductionism via cartesian coordinate systems CAD, CAV (visualitzations) and CAM (manufacturing).  Even when working with meaning in design reductionism was present in goals and subgoals.  Romanaticism reacted against all that.

McCluhan in Richard’s opinion has made many overstated claims, but yet must be quoted.  Talking about the ear vs the eye and how the ear held sway.  Tribe v civilization.  There were still lots of ideas of disconnection and reduction.

What is it to be engaged in cultures of the ear.  In his work they’ve been playing with this idea.  A series of sound boxes.   The main point was the importance and value of looking at sound and understanding the antagonism that’s there.  There the4 (re)turn to the body. Embodiment and gesture among many others. McCluhan talks about sound and gesture.  The gestures according to Ingold is about thinking, embodied thinking.

Tuning as a sonic metaphor, this seems to be the big message here.  Sonic objets trouves, with teapots and cups with sensors.  The line between tweaking, calibrating, and performance was very blurry.  Richard calls that tuning, distuning, or playing around with tuning.

Tuning involves mechanical components, tolerance, adjestment, calibation.  These are all small repetitive invremental movements.  There is a lot of synchronization .  Mumford, who to some extent inspired McCluhan, talked about clocks.  Clocks don’t keep track of the hour but synchronizes the actions of men. (From technics and Civilizations he also goes into historical aspects like Roman water clocks etc).

Calibration is really key in science.  Gallileo talking about all the adjustments he had to make with his early equipment.  So as scince is so dependent on instruments, there is a lot of calibration.  Standardization implicates ideas of small adjustments and coming into alignment.  When we think about interaction design and in computer animation motion capture systems there has to be calibration between the sensors and the system.  In all of these sensor systems there is tuning and adjustments in all of this.

Now back to Vitruvius one of the first design theorists.  Proportions and keep coming up.  There is a word that keeps coming up is adjustment, and can be understood as tuning.  Adjustments for proportions and and other ways of adjusting things.

Tuning in the environment.  Mary Shafer wrote the tuning of the world, somewhat based on McCluhans idea of returning to the world of the ear.  The earth forms the body of an instrument across which strings are stretched and are tuned by a divine hand.  We need to find the secret of that tuning.

Heidegger talks about attunment in being and time (Stimmung) and Alfred Schutz talks about mututal tuning-in relationship.

Now we’re moving into what a metaphor is.  The relationship of  ’is’.  Metaphor and misclassification, this is a kind of mistuning.  Ricouer talks about this. Metaphorical truth and literal falsity.

Tuning as a metaphor is where Richard wants to go here.  The mobile device as theatre, globe, navigator, etc.  So mumford’s idea of clocks as syhcronization the mobile device as synchronizing and so we tune our interactions between ourtselves and the environemnt.

Vincente Rafael, the cell phone and the crowd, an essay about how demonstrations in the Philippines were facilitated by cell phones.   This is one example of technology and esp mobile devices tuned and synchronized.  They enabled estrangement, I’m not really sure what he means here.

This idea of practices, and how they change and are tuned with emerging micro pratices and short lived practices with emerging technologies.  Examples of phones in public environements with camera and how things come and go.  We try different things and try different things and tune.  Michael bull talks about ipod culture, creating a sonic bubble.  Using technology to mediate the environment and this is also a kind of tuning.

In museums people take pics with their phones because there is no flash, do this over and over again, and why and for what purpose.  So we take pictures holding the device away from ourselves, and how this has changed from traditional cameras, but we stoop over computers.

Mashups as tuning as well.  Instatracker is an example.  This is reminscent of bricolage, objet trouve etc bringing all kinds of things together and adjusting them.  These adjustments and mashing together is a kind of tuning.

John Urry writes about tourism, and tourism with mobile devices.  The gaze of the tourist renders extraorinary activites that otherwise would be mundane and everday.  Tourist desitinations can be “sensuously other” in everday practices.  We’re hybrid assemblies of humans objecgts and technologies that travel around and configure the environment.

From concentrations of expertise to a demovratizations of inovation, crowd sourcing, shareware, open source, gift society etc.  I’m really not clear how this relates to tuning and metaphor at all.  From mobile phones to fully-featured smartphones.  From users to actors.  These are shifts in metaphor.

Detuning estrangement, defamiliarization, desnsitizations, distinction. difference.  Why tuning, it shifts the focus to the faltering aspects of equipment rather than its idealized seamles operation. Standardization and recalibraion.  MObility and tuning. How individuals use devices to tweak and tune their interactions.  In military terms there is the idea of sending out scouts and getting the information back and then retuning plans, just as technological systems sending out packets.

Malcolm McCullough talks about HCI and ubicomp, and even in Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance and a few other references I didn’t catch.

Q&A now

Paul Dourish asks about different types of tuning.  Tuning of a group to a single source or mutual tuning within people.  Which of these two kinds of metaphors can/should we use in design?  Architecture it’s often the first one say s Richard.

Geraldine is asking about appropriation, people are surprised when a system is then appropriated and changing the value and meaning of the system.  It’s usually portrayed as a good thing, but it’s a kind of failure of the design too.  Didn’t catch the response on this one.

Q: In design we often go for tuning and harmony, but there is clearly a kind of distuning that can encourage interaction.  Is there a sweetspot there? A: This needs to be played with.

Big round of applause.  Apologies if I messed up parts of it, this is a best effort kind of thing.

Paul Dourish in next.  Always an excellent entertaining speaker. Title: HCI and Environmental Sustainability: The Politics of Design and the Design of Politics
Abstract: Many HCI researchers have recently begun to examine the opportunities to use ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and ecological consciousness on the part of technology users. This paper examines the way that traditional HCI discourse obscures political and cultural contexts of environmental practice that must be part of an effective solution. Research on ecological politics and the political economy of environmentalism highlight some missing elements in contemporary HCI analysis, and suggest some new directions for the relationship between sustainability and HCI. In particular, I propose that questions of scale – the scales of action and the scales of effects – might provide a useful new entry point for design practice.

The paper has a long history started a few years ago a theme that has been going for a while in CHI DIS and other places combining sustainability and interactive systems. We’ve seen a lot of papers and projects being done on this topic. There are three broad parts of this:Sustainability of our practices, understanding tech use in sustainability, interaction design in support of environmental sustainability.

There are a lot of applications that help people reflect on their everyday life in order to change things that will help make them more sustainable. There is a good paper on mapping all of these in HCI from CHI last year by DiSalvo et al. The assumptions made by these papers is his starting point. Environmental action as individual moral choices. Markets as tool, assuming rational actors, perfect knowledge, self-intrerested choices etc. Environment and environmentalism as stqable, objective, natural facts. This is a kind of idea about the environment used to be something that was going to kill you, now we go out and visit it on the weekends. Scientific citizenship and expertise, Brian Winn’s work in the STS community talks about this kind of thing.

We’re forgetting other things though, the political context of sustainability.  Things such as market regulation, cap and trade offsets and all of these kinds of things to force market economics on this.  Scientific citizenship that has a kind responsible action in the world.  The relationship between individual action and collective action.  What are the implications of focusing on these kinds of things.

In Scandinavia they’ve engaged with design and politics, but in other kinds of HCI we’ve avoided it.  CS doesn’t want to touch politics.  Ferguson, 1994 a developmental anthropologist talks about the anti-politics.

Ecotopianism by David Pepper talks about this in a few papers.  He’s talking about some people who have fairly extreme positions on this.  Change and stasis, local and global, modern and postmodern, scale and action are the four sets of ideas he engages with.

Change and stasis, the regressive nature of ecotopian stasis.  The tension lies in the need to change a series of things in order to get to a sustainable state and once there it must be maintained.  Any deviation from that stasis is not to be allowed.  He equates stasis as regression, and how do maintain all of these things?  Technologies of monitoring and regulation are kinds of things that tend to fit into this category.

Local and global.  Diversity (eco and bio-) and universalism.  What will work in one place won’t work in another.  The forms are universal, but there is a tension what happens on a local level.  We often do an ethnographic study and then we apply it to large groups.  We often

Modern and Postmodern. Polyvocal, provisional v technological progress.  We tend to focus on local needs but we often bring in universal technological solutions.

Scale and action.  Scale is the more important, the relationship between  the knowledge we have and the action that we do.  Scale is both spatial and social.  Spatial is where you can affect things physically, i.e. locally.  Social scale is about how we are all connected socially.  Strategic essentialism in environmentalism, and acting as a member of a collective.

There is a lot of ongoing work.  ”code green” is something that Dourish and his lab have been working on.  Connecting people together through their actions and building a collective frame or frames.  This involves social movement theory.

The design of politics.  Digital media as sites of action.

Rushed through the last bit so I missed it.

Q&A Q:Geraldine asks why he left out the work done in Sweden about ludic ways. A: well the paper already had 60 references and he played with the typography a bit, but he tends to agree there are other ways of doing this.

Q: How are we addressing things on a scale that we don’t really understand.  This was also mentioned by Richard. How are we doing this? A: Playing with notion of scale is something that can be difficult and they’re working on this in the lab now.  Social movement theory again is coming up.

LaDantec et al

Abstract: The design and use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has now evolved beyond its workplace origins to the wider public, expanding to people who live at the margins of contemporary society. Through field work and participatory co-design with homeless shelter residents and care providers we have explored design at the common boundary of these two “publics.” We describe the design of the Community Resource Messenger (CRM), an ICT that supports both those in need and those attempting to provide care in a challenging environment. The CRM consists of three components: 1) a message center that pools messages to and from mobile users into a shared, persistent forum; 2) a text and voice messaging gateway linking the mobile phones of the homeless with the web-enabled computer facilities of the care providers; 3) a shared message display accessible from mobile texting, voice, e-mail, and the web, helping the two groups communicate and coordinate for mutual good. By democratizing design and use of technology at the margins of society, we aim to engage an entire “urban network,” enabling shared awareness and collective action in each public.

Two publics, Dewey introduced this idea in one of his books.  A public is particular and there are many of them.  Publics form via action on issues.  Technology can be a catalyst to create and organize publics.

The homeless shelter was a first time short term shelter for women and their children.  They had to deal with information overload.  So many places they needed to go to take care of paperwork and dealing with case workers.  This was very difficult.  Maintaining social support was hard because they moved, often it was across the city, but people also came from out of state or farther away.  Building trusted relationships was hard, this was primarily with the shelter staff, but also with other mothers in the shelter.  Transience and impermanence was something that was everywhere.  There were distinct generations of families that went through.  So these mothers and children were one public.

The other public is the staff.  There are lots of other publics they could choose, but these are the two they chose.  The staff confronted the following issues.  Managing multiple relationships, dealing with many different women and in a short period of time in the evenings and mornings.  Coordinating cooperative actions between weekend and weekday activities.  Coping with resource constraints was  a big thing they needed to deal with internally and externally.  No one shelter offers all the services that a person needs.  Ideological alignment is something that was a pervasive problem.  There are different ideas of what good care should be and there was some different ideas and having everyone on the same page helped.

So they took all of these ideas and put them into a “pretty standard design process.”  They created a kind of customer relationship management.  There were SMS parts to this and a community message board and a large display in the shelter.  SMS and voicemail, i.e. mobile phones are the main way they communicate.  Familiarity was very high with mobile phones was the best way to do this.  Apps and web sites and apps just won’t do for them.  All they need to know is how to use their phone’s two basic functions.  Almost all the women had mobile phones, and they provided phones to the few that didn’t.

Stepping back there is a deeply optimistic notion in publics as well as people who design technology interventions.  Publics as a framing for democratization.  The challenge of participation is always there in design, but then there’s new people coming in, and how do get those people to use it.

Q: What makes using the notion of publics different than other ways of involving stakeholders? *by me A: He’s working on it.

Q: Did you think of a non technology solution? A: A bit, but the circumstances led us to believe that technology was the best way to go.
Participatory Sensing in Public Spaces: Activating Urban Surfaces with Sensor Probes

Stacey Kuznetsov & Eric Paulos, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract: Recent convergence between low-cost technology, artform and political discourse presents a new design space for enabling public participation and expression. We explore non-experts’ use of place-based, modular sensors to activate, author and provoke urban landscapes. Our work with communities of bicyclists, students, parents, and homeless people suggests design opportunities for merging grassroots data collection with public expressions and activism. Members of each community were given probes that represent the measurement of exhaust, smog, pathogens, chemicals, noise or dust, and asked to engage with them as fully functional sensors over the course of one week. Our findings offer insights into participation, environmental sensing, and data sharing within and across four different communities, revealing design implications for future sensing systems as instruments of social currency and political change.

Using “sensors” to see what people think about various things.  People could put them different places.  None of the sensors actually measured anything but made people think about various things.  It can broadcast concerns about things.  Sorry folks I was distracted during this talk, the presentation had lovely pictures taken by participants throughout.  I like the approach, and the idea, but the design implications weren’t particularly clear.

Break for lunch.  My 20 min nap turned into a 40 min snoozefest so I missed a talk. Picking back up with Social distance, mobility and place: Global and intimate genres in geo-tagged photographs of Guguletu, South Africa
by Marion Walton. A kind of mashup of tourist and local photos posted through MMS and other means give an interesting look at space/place and sociality. All early adopters in this system and a very interesting idea.

TouchFace: the Interaction between Cursors and Live Video Images for Casual Videoconferencing by
Yujin Tsukada, Hitachi Ltd. and University of Maryland
Francois Guimbretiere, Cornell University and University of Maryland

This is about adding touch to video conferencing such as skype or ichat. In previous systems there was interaction between images each other images and in games and other applications you can interact between avatars, with Touchface you can do both.  As you mouse over various parts of the generated avatar the cursor changes from pat to stroke, to tocuh, to slap.  Pat is on the top of the head, touch is on the face.  Slap is the sides of the face.  Your own generated silhouette also reacts to the interactions.  It was lol funny to watch the interactions of slapping.  Stroking someones head seems interesting.

Suki Grandhi is next with Telling Calls:Informed Call Handling Decisions. Reducing the negative impacts on one’s local context such as being in a movie, although interruptions can be of potential value. If we provide more information about who is calling and in what circumstances will it help make better decisions on whether to take a call or not. It’s a smartphone application that one uses. 8 types of information one may enter all optional. Subject, location, activity, callers estimated length, people they are with, urgency, and mood. It was implemented on an AT&T Tilt Smartphones on WinMobiloe6. These were determined by a previous survey study. There is a single unified interface between senders and receivers.

Those who received the calls found it very useful, though those who placed the calls found it somewhat onerous.  Design implications: prioritize information presented by caller, make it easy to enter information.

After the break we’re now in Design’s Processional Character by Swan et al.
Abstract: In this paper, we examine the ideas behind and reactions to a prototype online tool designed, in-house, for an art college’s interaction design department. The web-based prototype, the Digital Scrapbook, was initially intended as a tool for tutors to oversee their students’ work. However, our ongoing discussions with the department’s members indicate that it is more interesting to its target audience for a variety of other reasons, including its role in design inspiration; group representation and collaboration; and as a repository for documenting the creative process. We speculate on the reasons behind this by further reflecting on the reactions to the tool. We come to the conclusion that members of the department value the Digital Scrapbook because it is seen to reflect the processional character of design. That is, we suggest the system is seen as promising because it reveals the often messy, unintended and meandering routes design can follow. In closing, we suggest how we might support further ways of displaying design’s processional character and discuss the broader implications of displaying collective processes.
The processional from Ingold Walking the Plank (2006). In walking every step is a development of the one before and preparation for the following. The same is true of every stroke of the saw. Like going for a walk, wsawing a plank has the character of a journey that proceeds from place to place, through a movement that–though rhythmic and repetitive–is never strictly monotonous.

The aims of the talk are: 1 use of a design tool the digital scrapbook 2 a distinvtive design culture, 3) implications of design (?). Reflection in action by Shoen. Because Swan was asked NOT to do ethnography in the department she stared using digital scrapbook. It’s made to help the staff and faculty know what the students are working on. Students were posting things all over and in all kinds of formats. The technical coordinator thought this could be improved and so the digital scrapbook brings together all of these things from all over via RSS and other technologies and it aggregates them together visually. Tutors could use this to monitor students, but it was unexpectedly appropriated to let everyone know what each other are doing. Looking at each others work is what people ended up using it for the most.
Though they has places to go to including a shared space where everyone worked the digital scrapbook made it all accessible in a different way. People expressed repeatedly in using the scrapbook as a source of inspiration. It allowed view into works-in-progress and the process that wasn’t available on a day to day basis. Documenting process is something that many students struggled with and the faculty wanted more. The tutors found that one students photos helped them explain things to other students and eased the burden of documenting. There was unexpected juxtapositions from thing in the department and also showed links to things that were happening in other departments. There was a sense of process, seeing what was happening. I couldn’t capture the lessons and Implications, but they are in the paper. Swan emphasizes that it did these things by accident. It proved very compelling to use, so we may not know to design for emergence.
In conclusion: The department 1) Collective displays of the processional 2) Demonstrations of creativity.

Investigating the Relationship Between Imagery and Rationale in Design by  Shahtab Wahid, Stacy M. Branham, D. Scott McCrickard, Steve Harrison

Abstract: Artifacts can be used to inspire, guide, and create new designs. As approaches to design can range from focusing on inspiration to formalized reasoning, we seek to create and study artifacts that combine the use of images and rationale. In this paper, we contribute an understanding of the relationship between imagery and rationale through an investigation of an artifact made of both. Through a study of group design sessions, we find images can provide access to rationale, moments of inspiration can be balanced with rationale, and differences between images and rationale must be reconciled. We conclude with thoughts on how such artifacts might be leveraged by the design community.

McCrikard is presenting, but Wahid is looking for a job, please hire him.  Hilarious plug by McCrikard.  Starting with definitions of images and design rationale.  Meaning of imagery has to be determined.  Avoiding discrepancies in how the image is interpreted for the system being designed, e.g. spontaneous notification card being used as a phone card. Rationale is used to check interpretation and link to other cards.  Rational often triggers the use of other cards. Conclusions: the key relationships between imagery and rational are access, balance, and reconciliation.  Must provide rationale in a designer digstible and highly accessible format.  Must balance vontrol over design with design to reuse. Ongoing directions: tools for connecting imagery and rationale, real-world usage and more.

Ideation Decks: A Card-Based Design Ideation Tool

Michael Golembewski & Mark Selby, University of Nottingham
Abstract: Ideation Decks is a project that explores the development of a methodological tool for design ideation. It involves the creation and use of bespoke project-specific card based systems which help to define constrained design problems within a broader overall problem space. Use of this system is intended to support the practice of parallel design by design practitioners, and to help more effectively explore specific problems by aiding in iterative design explorations.

Designers can create their own decks of cards that will help them in ideation and exploring a design space. This looks like a very nice idea. This is not meant as a criticism of the method, because I quite like it, but I wonder what the appropriate venue is for things like this. Honestly I love coming to a conference and hearing about new methods, but is this scientific knowledge? Especially considering the number of card-based ideas that are out there. I’m not going to ask this question to the speaker but I ask it to myself. I aspire to creating a new method or way or working as well, but don’t we need to then talk about what we learned from it, how it changes how we work? Do we need still more of that to make it scientific? I’m not sure. Good question in the Q&A about how the making of the cards is actually the most valuable part of the process, not necessarily using the cards in the process. This reminds me of the idea that so much of what we do is not about the product we create, but rather what we learned as we go through the process.

And we skipped this one, they withdrew apparently.

Now we’re on to Open-ended objects: a tool for brainstorming
by Virginia Cruz & Nicolas Gaudron of IDSL
Abstract:This paper describes a new tool for use in the process of brainstorming workshops on HCI called “Open-ended objects”. It is more of a conceptual presentation of the methodology than an experience report. Open-ended objects are open-ended interactive experiences that are used to introduce a brainstorming session. Their aim is to lead participants to reflect on emotions, human desires and make them forget about their expertise often centred on technical questions. These Open-ended objects are a tangible translation of the brainstorming brief to inspire participants beyond words. They are like interaction seeds that people can use to generate ideas. Besides, this shared and playful exercise sets a gentle and participatory atmosphere. In this paper, we describe the features of this tool that we have created and an example of how we have applied it to an innovation

Some reflections on the day

As usual for me the keynotes are inspiring and then the next most valuable thing is the opportunity to meet new people and old friends and talk about what kinds of things are happening in the field.  The presentations are often decent, but it seems like academic audiences and presenters tend to be very straight laced, like we’re not allowed to have too much fun in presentations.  Why should that be so?  I felt like I was the only one really laughing at the one really entertaining presenter (McCrikard, who was great, thank you so much Scott).  I in fact got a kind of stare from a couple people for laughing out loud.  Maybe we just had similar kinds of humor.  I agree that the presentation time slots are quite short, especially for papers, but I doubt that making them longer would really help much.  How one presenter yesterday at the design conference approached it was in his my words this: “I’m not going to present the paper, I’m going to present the topic in such a way to convince you to read the paper.”  Perhaps this is the approach that we could take.

I enjoyed Chris LaDantec’s presentation, and I spoke with him during a break a bit about the question I asked, but we didn’t get to talk much I’ll follow up more.  The notion of a public is an interesting one.  To be quite frank anytime you can pull a concept out of a “older” philosopher (in this case 80 years old, and I’m also alluding the gaffe of one presenter who called participants older than 30 “older”) and apply it into our work is cool, at least to me.  Chris said he’s really engaging with this idea more and had developed it more in a paper he submitted elsewhere, but it’s still something he wants to work on some more.  What struck me however is that I got kind of sucked into this idea of publics, but it’s like so many things in HCI, we borrow something from some thinker or researcher in another field and we only do it halfway or it’s just window dressing.  I am by no means saying that Chris and his co-authors are tricking the audience or just dressing up an otherwise boring paper with this idea because I genuinely believe he is taking this line of inquiry farther and I see this as his first iteration of using, understanding, and engaging this concept in his work.  I do think however it happens in HCI where we just import things willy nilly and we do it half way without understanding.  This has been written about previously (though I’m not at this time going to link to the papers as it’s at the end of a very long day).  It’s certainly food for thought.

In my own work though I think I see where I bring a concept into a project in a later stage and then it ends up framing much of the outcomes of the work.  Is it fair to say that I used this idea fully?  If it really shaped the analysis or conclusions of my work does it count?  How much different could the study have been if I had used it from the very beginning.  Well, without some concrete examples this is all tired ramblings.  Comments and corrections on content are very welcome below.