Category Archives: Design

The collateral damage of a closed ecosystem

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There are lots of people willing to engage on the debate between iOS devices (iPod touch, iPhones, iPads) and Android devices (phones and tablets of all kinds).
For me it comes down to this: the closed technological ecosystem of iOS provides a better user experience for the majority of users. Apple’s tight integration of both hardware and software create something that is beautiful to look and is seen as highly desirable. For all iOS devices there is only one UI, once you get the hang of it (and for many people it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to do all the basics). More importantly though is the fact that there is only one official application (app) store. There are others out there, but in order to use them you have to jailbreak your phone, something most people wouldn’t do anyway.  By keeping this tight control Apple exerts control over what is available, approving not only apps, but updates to them, as well as asking developers to drop some parts of them. One reason (though there are others) they do this is that every purchase made, whether for the app itself or for in-app purchases brings revenue to them. Apple takes a cool 30% off the top of all revenues.

One reason this makes for a better UX is that users know that any app in the app store will work for their device. This is not the case with Android with several different flavors of the OS available, and of course a multitude of different hardware platforms and screen resolutions. This has advantages for those creating the apps as well, but I won’t get into that.

But what happens when a well known product, and brand such as Audible (owned by Amazon) has an app that even links to their mobile site to go and purchase more audio books?  They were asked to remove it as evidenced by the email I received:

This is what I received from Audible. They present a workaround, but I wonder how many people will do it?

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes thought Audible was flouting the rules, but as one commenter said the link has been there for months, indeed for as long as I’ve had the app (since early this year) there has been a link to the mobile store.

Ideally one could search and make purchases in-app, but I can see why Audible wouldn’t want to give away 30% of it’s revenue to Apple.  The most ironic thing though is that Audible subscribers pay a monthly fee in return for credits. So I’ve already paid audible for the credits, why not be able to spend those in-app.  I suppose though that would open up the flood gates of games where you buy credits outside on the web and then bring them back into the game.

In an ideal world one could have the great UX of a closed ecosystem and situations like this wouldn’t arise. Given that it has I wonder what I would do if I were in the strategy team at Apple. Would I allow it? Where does one draw the line?

From a UX or User-centered perspective I would say it makes a lot more sense to let people buy in-app, and any who don’t want to pay the Apple tax have to deal with it. This grates against my idea of fairness though. This is a great example of how design always offers alternatives that often are in conflict with each other. This example also shows how business decisions and strategy come into play in design.  Typically designers consider the people and the materials (technology), but increasingly we need to be mindful of the business considerations involved.

DESIRE Summer School Day 5

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John Gero

Computational models of creative designing

Creativity- what is it? We’re not going to define it, as there are SO many definitions, but we’ll see as we go.

If you want to model something you have to assume it’s a process.  What is computation?  It’s Representation and a process.  When we’re trying to solve a problem we often end up in a subset of solutions

Lunch and now:

Creativity and the Development of Interactive Systems

Sara Jones from the Center for HCI Design at the Centre for Creativity

S-creativity is what they were interes`ted in (Situated, new to that domain)

Creativity types: combinatorial, exploratory, transformational (Boder)

Types of creativity: Inspirationalist, Structuralist, Situationalist (Schneiderman, 2000)

Inspirationalist Creative Processes from Henri Poincare: 1) Preparation 2)Incubation 3) Illumination 4) Verification.

They run creativity workshops over two days using a kind of converge, diverge model.  So after one of these things there are tons of post-it notes and a lot of energy, but then what?

In Jones et al 2008 they evaluated S-creativity with domain experts after the workshop and then 6 months later.

Guilford’s definition of flexibility and fluency Sustar (2010) they analysed the creative process and count number of ideas, different types of ideas, stimuli used and blocks encountered.

We are going to now reflect and talk about: What have we seen before, and what would you like to see more of?

I’ve certainly seen diverge-converge and some of these models, but I’d be very interested in seeing other measurements of the output of the workshop, measured in market impact or organizational impact.

Shon quotes I didn’t quite catch, but design should create a common language and reflection among others.

Some useful tools are already out there. Google wonder wheel, Compendium.

Arias et al 2000 collaboration to create shared understanding, boundary objects etc.

DESIRE Summer School Liveblog Day 3

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The morning poster discussion session was quite good.  Stefan and Joao coordinated a session where people would go around and put comments and chances for collaboration on each others posters, then we had a chance to digest a bit the things that were put oni our posters then we had a kind of unconference style discussion on topics proposed, two sessions of 20 minutes each.  I tip my hat to Stefan for making it all work.

After the coffee break we’re coming into the next session given by Joao on Qualitative Analysis: Structure locations.  The why and how choices of desire.  Qualitative research is the method of inquiry that invetigates the why and how of desig, choices, decision making, not just what, where, and when.  Smaller but focused samples are more often needed, rather an large samples.  The results of such are only hypotheses says Joao, not real conclusions, and I would agree that is true if they are taken outside of the context originally being studied.

What approach will we take in qualitative research? A grounded theory practice, ethnography, organizational narratives, shadowing, etc.

The why and how, while dealing wand collecting data from people with different backgrounds.  We use words in different ways, use different words for the same concepts etc.  A context for this, the vocabulary/language issue.  A Design Dictionary by Michael Erlholf and Tim Marshall is a very interesting attempt to make a kind of universal set of meanings.

Analyzing enormous amounts of data: use systematic terminlogy, then validation, and we’re going to talk more about structural common places and isotopes.  Isotopes, from the greek, “at the same place”  The research from Raquel Antunes (who presented her work here at the summer school via a poster and with whom I think my project may have some interesting overlap is studying this.  It’s a case study of 26 medium and large companies that make decorative ceramics.  Structural Common places is an idea talked about by Salana and Albarello et al (in pratiques et methodes de rescherche en sciences sociales)  Finding these structure common places may be better according to Joao because the “original meaning” of the person interviewed may be lost in codes and the inexperienced researcher may have a hard time.

From the slides “However we may assume, that a possible path is that the interpretation of data is a process of translation.  The terminology used for those structural locations comes not from the specific vocabulary used byu the interviewed/researcher, instead comes form the terminology used by the stakeholders of the field of knowledge in discussion.  at the same time that new structural locations are added, they are by inherence shaped by the previous ones.  A collection of interdependent structural locations shape an isotope.

Now a picture of the isotope of design engineers a 3d hill plot of various terms such as product development, aesthetic, product quality etc.  Each of these terms has a consistent place across various isotopes like designers, creative managers etc.

The audience is fairly confused on why the 3d plot is used, as it doesn’t seem to add any layer of meaning, and 2d would be clearer.  I’m also quite confused on what the difference is between these isotopes and coding is, how it really helps in the way described.  Joao says we’ll see as we go along.

The 3d plot “Fails the law of parsimony” says Erin, and I agree, Stefan Sloegl is agreeing with this as well and trying to explain that it’s just kind of confusing.  Joao says that this is a kind of stepping stone, part of a work in progress.

Now we’re seeing a stratified representation of the structural locations of design management definitions by all interviewees. It has a number of different layers with the various terms listed by frequency in various layers.

He’s now giving us a kind of “homework” to use a more traditional coding method and this method.

This seems to be the end of the session, and we’re heading to lunch soon.

Now up is Alan Dix, he’s talking about what he won’t talk about, but are his other interests.  From conceptual to computational models.  What do I mean by computation model?

1) I don’t know just a title

2) A model of a phenomenon (creativity!) that can run on a computer.

3) using a computation analogy to understand creativity.
150 years ago we used electricity to understand our world, 300 years ago it was steam, now it’s computation, none are better, but it’s helpful to understand things.  The moment we think we truly understand something that’s when we’re on dangerous ground.

Ways of using computation model?

  1. Simulation (a model for the phenomenon of interest only accurate to the level of interest)
  2. Inspiration (maybe existing algorithm technique as analogy)
  3. Prediction (often, though not always, quantitative)
  4. Insight (qualitative)

Simulation: The example of rabbits on an island and how populations relate to grass on the island and how they alternate between across years.  so while the simulation is quantitative you can get qualitative ideas from it too.  Hilliard, a syntax of space.  They model people going from one intersection to another in a city and individual behaviour is not realistic, aggregate behavior is.

Inspiration from computation.  Finding good/creative ideas, it’s a bit like optimization/solution finding.  Lots of algorithms in AI and operation search.  So if you have similar problems you often have similar solutions.  Generate and test.

Prediction: Prototyping as hill-climbing, you need to start at a good point, you need to understand what is wrong.  a clever person will look at the map. Genetic algorithms.

Is all of this reallyt like human creativity? What’s different?

Guided, not blind. I.e. we can step back, look outside of the process and evaluate, understand the territory. So we’re better.  ’Best’ design, or some design?  Evaluation: hard, word suggests a fixed context but there is co-evolution of problem and solution space.  From evaluation to en-valuation: in what context does it have value, what are the values in it?

Modeling regret

It’s modal/counterfactual ‘what if’ analysis, it’s worst when you ‘nearly’ averted disaster, it seems to be about learning.  So how do we learn…?

Now a break then a workshop, no notes on the workshop for now.

DESIRE Summer School Liveblog Day 2

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The morning session

Balder, Stefan, and Erin

After a description of the three different projects and the approach they’ve taken, then a discussion of  how we tend to simply select the methods we’re familiar with that are part of our disciplinary training.  The example of Erin’s work with how poets are creative and then comparing that to the design process.  She shows some examples of a recorded session of a study and a transcript then we break into groups and talk about how we would analyze it.

The second morning session with Nigel Cross

The title is Understanding Design Cognition:
Case Study: Philippe Starke as written about by Lloyd and ? from Delft.
Alessi asks him to design a kitchen tool, then Phillipe goes to a small island off Italy and has dinner, the Primo Piatto has baby squid and he begins sketching the lemon squeezer progressively and over the course of the meal he goes through several stages.

We are able to get a more general idea of the process from this even if Starke does not describe it himself  it is something like Analogy, Evaluation, Improvement, Precedant (bringing in things from one’s past) then final product sketch.

Goel & ? (Neuroscientists) have a patient who’s an architect and they ask him to redesign an office space. Essentially he’s unable to complete this fairly simple task, for control they have a similarly trained and experienced architect who is able to do it. 2 90 minute sessions.

Protocol studies:
Design a new litter colection system for the dutch railways system. Again done with colleagues at Delft. They were familiar with the current system. People are brought in for 90 minute design session. They had a large file of information from which they could draw if they asked for. There were lots of stakeholders, the railways, the company that produced it, the janitors, and others as well. 9 experienced industrial designers. Their designs were then normalized in terms of how they were presented and then these designs were given to others to assess. These people were from the University and used to grading design concepts. Creativity, materials were all factors. The problem that emerged early was that of newspapers. This came from the survey of cleaners they identified this as a problem. It’s the largest ingredient of the litter (bulkiest). Fill up the bines, they are left behind on the seats. The railway company wants to be environmentally friendly.
All of the designers thought that separating the newspapers would be a good idea, they all thought that this was a good idea and no one else would have this. This is a good example of how it may be new to you, but it’s certainly not new to the world.
Designers tend to force some kind of pattern in the information like the example of the pixelated dog. This shows the co-evolution of the problem and solution space. You get a formulation of the problem that is partial then a partial solution then back to a developed problem structure then back to the solution and back again. A scatter plot of creativity v overall and they don’t always correlate.

From an analysis of think aloud protocol one researcher found the following activities.

  • Gather data
  • Assess value and vialifity of data
  • Identify constraints  and reqs
  • mofel behavbioud and environment
  • Define problems and possibilities
  • Generate partial solutions
  • Evaluate solutions
  • Assemble a coherent solution.

Then some scattergrams of some of the levels of some of these activities.  The solution-driven ones have more generate and the problem driven ones talk more about identifying.

The Role of Sketching in Design

Norman Foster sketch of the Gherkin and the restaurant at the top.

Jack howe says, “If I’m stuck I draw something.  Even it’s is silly I draw it.  The act of drawing seems to clarify my thoughts.”

Sketches of Leonardo Davinci, the sketch is not of the thing being designed but many aspects of it, possibly in rapid succession or simultaneously.  Today architects do similar things, James Sterling is an example used here with a page from his sketchbook.  Alvar Aalto is the next example with lots of different parts of it all in a big sheet. Frank Gehry is the next example, and there are two different kinds of sketches one that seems to include details, but the other is more of the overall form. Richard MacCormac and then Gordon Murray.  The drawing is a way of finding out what is good.

Sketches handle different levels of abstraction simultaneously.
Sketches enable identification and recall of relevant knowledge.
Sketches assist problem structuring through solution attempts.
Sketches promote the recognition of emergent features and properties.

What expert designers say about designing:

Santiago Calatrava
“To start with yhou see the thing in your mind and it doesn’t exist on paper, and then you start making simple sketches and organizing things, and then you start doing later after layer.
This is Design Thinking as Reflection.

Kenneth Grange
The designer’s job is to produce the unexpected. No brief of itselft…… you have to find the plums.

Design Thinking as opprtunitistic.

Richard MacCormac
I don’t think you can deisgn anything just by absorbving information and then hoping to synthesise it into a solution.
I or someone else will come up with an idea that seems powerful enough” then
Design thinking is an exploratory process, and as conjectural.

Geoffrey Harcourt
The solution I came up with wasn’t a solution to the problem at all.  But when the chair was actually put togetehr ina way it solved the problem quite well. but from a completely different point of view.

Design Thinking as emergent.

Ted Happold
I have perhaps one real talent, which is that i don’t mind at all living in the area of total uncertainty.
He was the chief engineer of Sydney Opera House and Pompideiu center.
Design Thinking as ambiguous.

Denys Lasdun

Design Thinking as appositional.  It doesn’t follow logically from what was said before, but it fits the solution.

Mies van der Rohe
The cleint wasn’t very happy at first. But then we smoked some good cigars and we frank some glasses of good rhine wine and he liked it.
He convinced the client over cigars and wine.
Design Thinking is rhetorical.

Expertise in problem solving

  • tackle the problem in the ‘easiest’ way
  • Accept teh problem rules
  • adopt standard problem representation
  • re-use previous solutions

Expertise in Design Thinking

  • Tackle the problem in a difficult way
  • Challenge problem rules (Murray)
  • Construct novel problem representation
  • Create new solutions from first principles.

Jean Bernard is asking a question about how sketches may be part of working memory, helping them remember things, Nigel says that yes, there has been some work on that, and sometimes it is and sometimes not.

Lunch, in the hotel restaurant

First afternoon session

Real-world studies of design cognition: using cognitive ethnography to understand design behavior

by Linden J Ball & Bo Christensen

Ethnography can be a useful thing for design research and this is from the cognitive science so-called cognitive ethnography, a term Linden coined about 10 years ago.  Reliability and validity is very different in this kind of ethnography.

Overview

1) Antropology and the origins of ethnography

2) Sociology and Ethnography

3) Ethnomethodology and ethnography

4) Ethnography as a ‘radial category’

5) Cognitive ethnography

Traditional Ethnography: what is it?

A form of investigative fieldwork and analysis: Malinowski was the prototypical example.  He was forced to live there initially alone, but then he got lonely enough to start interacting with them.  It involved immersive observation.  It invovled an analytic mentality in something that was “in situ”.

Sociologists from the 1940s-1970s adopted this same method, often studied smaller, disposessed groups, giving them a voice.  i.e. hell’s angels etc.

William Foote Whyte (1943) Street Corner Society is an example.

Garfinkle’s 1967 book critiqued ethnography, saying it misses the activities the “interactional what” of how/what groups do together.  John Hughes’ book “making work visible” is a good example.

Ethnomethodology and systems design

HCI and CSCW has taken up this kind of thing in the 80s and 90s.  Every grant that came through seemed to have a sociologist attached to the project doing ethnography, where this would produce requirements for the computational people could then turn into a system.  Bently et al’s air traffic controller study would be a prototypical example.

Linden’s paper “Putting ethnogaphy to work….. in the IJHCI.  The idea of a radial category from Lakoff is used.  What if enthnography is a radial category?   There are some prototypical characteristics of ethnography: situatedness, richness, participant autonomy, openness, personalization, reflexivity, self-reflection, intensity, independence, historicism.

Cognitive Ethnography identifies the following problems with traditional ethnography for design research: Intensity (You don’t have years, usually only weeks) independence (Whereas theories need to e tested and validated) non-verifiability.

This is importnat if you’re a congnitive psychologist, but I wonder how much this matters if you are not.  This doesn’t lessen the interest however for those that are, as well as knowing more about the history of it.

A cognitive ethnography of design re-use by ball & Omerod (2000).  Identifying the information unit of re-use.  This is a prototypical example of cognitive ethnography.

Stefan asks what about Ed Hutchins Cognition in the wild and his notion of cognitive ethnography, Linden says that there are similarities but perhaps his notion is a bit more laid out but they seem to be compatible.

Studying deisgn coginition int he real-world- combingin ethnography with protocol analysis.

Overview: 1) Studying design cognition in the real world 2) th in vivo methodology 3)DTRS7 4)The use of analogy in design 5) the use of mental simulation in design.

DTRS7 design meetings, 4 camera angles recording in situ real design meetings lasting 1-3 hours and then all materials are collected.  7 hours of total video and then segmentation by turn taking for a total of 3886 data points.

So what is in-vivo methodology? Dunbar 2000-2001, involves ethnography & Protocol Analysis (PA).  Finding and recording suitable real-world design situations, where natural design dialogue occurs., transscription, segmentation and coding along PA lines. No special instruction to ‘think aloud’ involved.

Quite often the amount of data is massive so you need to make selections of the data to code. Segmentation will depend on what is being studied.

So the advantages of in vivo are that it has ecological validity, the possibility of stdying cognition live in the real world etc. the disadvantages are that it may turn into a single case study, it takes a long time etc.

A coffee break then practical exercises with cognitive ethnography and in vivo methodologies.

DIS 2010 liveblog Day 1

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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.