Katharina's thoughts

Participatory Design Conference Report

Katharina — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:45:19 +0200

First I was intimidated by the idea to go to Bloomington for the PDC 2008, as I imagined there would probably be no sidewalks. Instead, it was very cute. The university campus takes half the city, and so do probably the students. The buildings look a little harrypotterish with they gothic ornaments, and they have their own hotel, which is very nice. (Still each room has incredibly loud ventilation that can be turned off, but I did not manage to tell the reception to do so. My own fault.) And there is a huge shop with Indiana University shirts, sweaters, socks, underwear, plush bears, golf towels, if you need a gift for your beloved ones at home, or a uniform to disappear in the crowd.

There was one day with a number of workshops prior to the conference that you had to apply and register for in advance. To me, this was the most interesting and informing part of the whole conference. I attended a workshop run by Katja Battarbee and Andrea Botero that dealt with the issue of how to design for user co-creation. As for the whole conference, the workshop assembled a wild mixture of people with various backgrounds like computer science, anthropology, psychology and design. There were short presentations (5-10 minutes) and extended discussion about the issue raised by every presenter. This concept proved to be very successful, as it encouraged people to first argue among their table neighbours and then face the presenter with the comments and questions they had. Besides, it created a comfortable atmosphere of equality and constructive criticism.

All in all, I was happily surprised by the PD conference and the community as such. The theme is reasonably focused while bringing together totally different people. Still there is a high awareness and somehow agreement of the problems and challenges of participatory design (even if there was no agreement on how to face them). PD practitioners seem to be very grounded and pragmatic (and pragmatist, often) because of their work practice, their serious problems (health, famine, crime etcetera) and the frequent contact with real people. And although there is a core community of PD practitioners attending the conference every time, they are also open for the newbies.

The format and amount of both long research papers and short exploratory papers was well chosen, with a good average quality. There were quite a couple of well-done and interesting presentations. The political difficulties to establish participatory design in organizations and companies was one of the dominant issues, as well as how to scale participation up for large systems. One recurring field for case studies were e-health applications like electronic patient records in hospitals.
My favourite presentation was Pelle Ehn’s critical consideration of the professional designer’s role in participatory design, drawing on Latour. And I loved Natalie Jeremijenko’s final keynote when she showed her amazing artistic participatory interventions with regard to ecological and environmental concerns.

Research Colloquium: Bill Gaver

Katharina — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:06:38 +0200

Bill Gaver is going to give a talk at the Research Colloquium!

:on October 13th, 2008
:14.00h
:at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories
:Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, Berlin
:Auditorium 1, 20th floor.

Please come and join!

Bill Gaver is Professor of Design at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he heads the Interaction Research Studio. His research interests concern the design of computational devices and systems for everyday life, and the development of new methodologies for informing and assessing design. Currently his work focuses on possibilities to support playful engagement and open-ended interpretation, particularly in domestic environments.
Also take a look at the projects, he is doing great stuff!

DRS Conference Report

Katharina — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:26:38 +0200

This year, the Design Research Society organized their biennial conference in Sheffield, England. Its title was „Undisciplined“. Parts of the Design Research Lab in Berlin have been there, so here is a report of how it went.

The place
Sheffield is a small, wallace-and-gromitish english working-class town with some cute brick houses and less cute concrete tower blocks. The wood panelling of the pubs and shops give you some dollhouse feeling. An airport just doesn’t fit in, I guess. That makes it more challenging to get there.
At least everything is clearly arranged. Dropping out of the train station, you can’t miss the university campus. They like huge water fountains (there are severals in the town centre). People have a pretty accent. You get endeared by perfect strangers. There was a Vivienne-Westwood exhibition. We should have stolen one of the dresses as a souvenir. Unfortunately, nobody dared to.

The organization
Nothing to complain about. Everything was in time, it was amazing. Hopping between different panels was easy. I barely got lost. The most exciting thing was a false fire alarm, chasing us from the 10th floor to the building’s creepy backyard, and finding the way back to the entrance. No, seriously, the whole conference was so much on time it was almost creepy.

The presentations
The presentations’ topics were diverse. Still it was sometimes difficult to pick one among the six parallel tracks, each dealing with very specialized topics that I just couldn’t relate to. I am sure that my own presentation was also one of those that were a little too special, because of a hundred conference attendees, only five showed up. Two of them were presenting in the same panel. In front of such a small audience, at least you don’t have to be nervous, even as a newbie.
My experience was also that people were friendly and polite even when being critical. There were usually some complaisant comments and questions at the end of each talk, and sometimes nice short discussions. However, the questions after my own presentation were more related to the work of the questioners than to my own. No wonder I had trouble finding a satisfying answer.
In the end, there were just a few presentations that I found exciting and challenging (among which one was dealing with a high-speed composting machine). It was just such a big conference that it is hard to be focused. In such cases, the social aspect becomes more important. As for me, I am just bad at networking for the sake of it. I prefer to have some substance to talk about. And a seat sometimes. So both the lack of sofas in the courtyard and the potpourri of different themes was disturbing for me. Neither did I carry home a stack of new friends, nor the amazing feeling of having been intellectually overcharged. This is a pity, because I had the impression that there could have been a productive exchange among participants if everyone just would have been more prepared.

The keynote speakers
Unfortunately, there were no role models among the two keynote speakers that I saw (I missed the first one). However, they were reasonably exotic and therefore approximately matched the conference theme. But still I want to be impressed, or inspired, when listening to a keynote, and leave with the feeling of having learned something new. Maybe I asked too much. So I was somehow dissatisfied after the talks, not having been fed with controverse and radical ideas. What is it worth being young anyway, if there is no superbrain to intimdate you? Is the design research world so small that they have run out of impressing speakers? If they borrow one then from another discipline, why not some philosophical big shot?

The food
I wish I could tell that the food was amazing. Probably I am just not used to English meals. Still the lunch seemed somehow modest considering the importance of the lunch breaks. After having spent the whole day starving and gasping for air in small rooms taxing one’s brain, it’s frustrating when all you get as a reward is a floppy sandwich. And pubs stop serving food at 7 p.m., so you better hurry or schedule some more time finding an affordable restaurant.

Ok, enough weeping. I'll be positive and try again, next time.
Katharina.

translate.eipcp.net

Katharina — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:56:40 +0200

translate.eipcp.net "aims at exploring the political articulation of the notion of cultural translation in artistic practices as well as in political social movements through a number of arts and exhibition projects, discursive events and networking practices" (so says the concept section).
This is where I found a review of Bruno Latour's "Parliament of Things". At least this one is quite useful if you are not familiar with Latour's four guarantees for the modern constitution. After having read this one it is still a confusing concept, but you get an idea.
They also offer a couple of other articles about socio-cultural issues that I haven't looked into yet. Maybe worth a read?

Lucy Suchman: Human-Machine Reconfigurations

Katharina — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:18:13 +0200

The book is the updated and extended version of her 1987 dissertation „Plans and Situated Actions“, a frequently cited classic in HCI literature. Suchman critisizes the (back at the time) predominant cognitivist planning view on human-machine interaction, describing the connection between an action in the world and its mental representation (e.g., as a plan) as rather weak. Consequently, the tracking of an action does not automatically reveal a distinct intent. An identical aim can be achieved through different courses of action, each responding to the requirements of the respective situation. In this respect, plans can be seen not as a precondition for action, but as a form of situated action themselves.
In her case study, Suchman examines the intelligent expert system of a complex copying machine that is supposed to give interactive and situational instruction to the user, comparable to a human coach. Comparing human interaction with human-machine interaction, Suchman describes the encounter of users with the artificially intelligent expert system. She sees the very limited access of the machine to the world and therefore the assymmetric ability of human and machine to make sense of the interaction as the important problem in human-computer interaction. The user’s actions as well as the machine’s reaction can be ambiguous. While in human interaction, there are several mechanisms to regain mutual intellibility, the machine does not track some of the important events to catch the user’s intent.
In the new chapters, Suchman critizes her former view on the relation of humans and machines as having reserved agency exclusively to humans. She revises this perspective by referring to several resources like feminist theory and science and technology studies and advances in her recent work. In the following, she gives an updated overview of reseach into the role of plans and ordering devices, the agency in humans and artefacts, and the role of figure and embodiment on our image of an autonomous intelligent other. She concludes with a chapter on how a shift in our perception of the human-machine relationship might open up new possiblities to reconfigure it.

The book is definitely worth reading for designers in HCI. It presents some very valuable critique on the views on human-computer interaction established in the natural an engineering sciences and names some intriguing alternative perspectives. It is amazing how current even Suchman’s 1987 analysis still is (even if the machine itself now looks a little outdated). The new chapters expand and update the basic critique with recent developments and examples. However, this book is no bedside reading and requires a lot of attention, as it is densely written and refers to a lot of concepts that at least I was not aware of before.
I also attached an (almost complete) extended summarization of the book for a quick read.

Research Colloquium Usability: Bill Gaver

Katharina — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:14:02 +0200

t.b.a.
Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, 20th floor

Please note that the talk has to be postponed...I will renew the announcement as soon as I can give the exact date.

We had a great interview with Bill Gaver on the DRN Opening cocktail party. Now he is going to visit us in Berlin and give a talk at the usability colloquium. We invite everyone to come, listen and have a good discussion aftewards.

Once again some information about the speaker:
Bill Gaver is Professor of Design at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he heads the Interaction Research Studio. His research interests concern the design of computational devices and systems for everyday life, and the development of new methodologies for informing and assessing design. Currently his work focuses on possibilities to support playful engagement and open-ended interpretation, particularly in domestic environments.

Cultural Probes in HCI

Katharina — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:20:54 +0200

Recently I read some papers about how cultural probes evolved since their introduction by Dunne, Gaver and Pacenti. There is one that I found particularly interesting: „How HCI interprets the probes“ by Boehner, Vertesi, Sengers and Dourish. The paper does not critique on the probes as a method directly, but takes the adaptation of cultural probes in HCI as symptomatic for deeper epistemological concerns in the field, as they claim probes to „frame an alternative account to knowledge production“.
The authors’ basic critique is that there has been a desire in HCI to „domesticate“ the probes into an objective, reliable and formal method. They also claim the same attitude to misconstrue many other reflective and interpretative approaches in HCI.
Having examined a large number of paper mentioning the method, they show that there has been adaptation and variation with regard to the field of investigation (identity probes, urban probes, domestic probes, value probes) and the implementation of the probe (mobile probes, digital cultural probes, cognitive probes, technological probes).
While their material form as a package is frequentyl picked up, they are often used not to gather inspiration, but information. As such, they may complement or even substitute social science approaches or be interpreted with the help of social science methods. However, the probes’ sensitivity and provocative stance is rather neglected in the adaptation. In many cases, the initial subvertive attitude of the original probes has disappeared. Also the uncertainty that probes inherently carry is often regarded as a problem to be solved and not as an opportunity; at the same time, the idiosyncrasie of the probes is further neglected, pushing them towards a standartized method.
The authors finally argue that the probe adaptation reveals two fields of tension within HCI: The handling of interpretation (that tends towards positivist underpinnings) and to apply the method without the corresponding research attitude.

It is somehow interesting to see how a good part of the HCI community seems to struggle with the uncertainty of cultural probes. But even as a designer, you can stumble about your own assumptions and attitude. We tried to design our own probe package and some of the tasks we ended up with clearly aimed at information gathering. (Still it was way nicer to do than a questionnaire!) The more open-ended you want to be, the harder it gets to estimate the quality of your questions.
Also if you judge your probe package in terms of its usefulness, it is hard to predict how well it might do. Obviously the success of the probes depends heavily on the designer and his professional abilities. In the paper, the authors also mention how the part between the probe returns and the final design is often left out in the documentation. They acknowledge the difficulty to relate both, as the designer adds another interpretation layer. At this point, I am not sure to what extend the connection between inspirational material and design can be made explicit.

Interview with Bill Gaver

Katharina — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:06:30 +0100

Together with Tony Dunne and Elena Pacenti, Bill Gaver developed the cultural probes. He also introduced the idea of Homo ludens in interface design. He is a design professor at Goldsmith College, where he heads the Interaction Research Studio, and is also involved in the Equator project.

Your last projects particularly address the domestic use context. What do you think is special in a domestic use context with regard to the designer’s work and methods? What implications do you draw for the designer’s activity?

What I like about designing for the home is that it contrasts so nicely with designing for the workplace. As an interaction designer dealing with computational technologies, it is important to me to get beyond traditional concerns with problem-solving, efficiency, utility and even usability to explore other values and the approaches that are appropriate for dealing with them. The home is a great setting for working these issues through.

Of course the home presents special challenges for design. People tend to be pretty protective of their homes, so you need to be sensitive about the things you seek to introduce and also with how you get access to the home, for instance in initial studies or later field trials with prototypes.
Still, those sensitivities are themselves important topics for design.
And so far we've been very lucky with the people who we've worked with, they've all been very generous about allowing us into their homes, telling us about themselves, trying out the things we've made, and telling us what they like - and dislike - about them. I like to think this is because we've developed appropriate approaches and designs, but perhaps we've just been lucky.

And it's worth noting that the home is not the opposite of the workplace.
People do a lot of work at home, both in terms of their jobs and in terms of the effort needed to build and maintain a running household. Equally, people play and explore and indulge their curiosity while at work. But the home is a place where people have relative freedom to decide for themselves what they want to do, how they want things to look, what sorts of values they want to pursue. So it's been a great place for us to explore designs that are open-ended and that encourage curiosity and exploration. If I can quote Charles H. Parkhurst out of context: "Home is heaven for beginners." It's great to think about what sorts of things one can design for a heaven.

What kind of strategies do you have to develop ambiguous artefacts? According to which criteria do you choose a particular design for prototyping? Which properties do you consider important for ambiguity?

First, it's probably important to say that 'ambiguity' is one point in a shifting constellation of attributes that characterise our designs.
Depending on the particular instance, its sometimes more precise to say that our designs are open-ended, or multilayered, that they provide resources for a space of interpretations, or that they purposely try to create ambivalence. So 'ambiguity' should be read in a fairly broad way, not to suggest that we're providing some set number of interpretations to choose among.

Having said that, there's a few tactics we've used to create ambiguity.
One is simply to create a situation, or provide resources, without saying how people are to properly approach it. So the Drift Table, for instance, simply scrolls aerial photography depending on where weights are, but nothing about its design suggests what it's to be used for. In fact, we even purposely blocked some obvious interpretations - e.g. that its for going to particular places - by making it very slow and offering little in the way of navigation aids. Other tactics have included producing exaggerated outputs, such as the horoscopes used by our Home Health Monitor, which invite people to question the system's authority and instead value their own interpretations. Our latest designs tend to create situations or provide resources that can be interpreted from a multitude of angles. For instance, the Plane Tracker, which imagines journeys based on information picked up from passing aircraft, can be interesting from many points of view - for instance, those of people living on flight paths, or plane spotters, or people who love to travel, or people curious about geography, or environmentalists, or....

As for how we choose what to prototype, that's a complicated question.
It's not a very rational process: we generate lots of design ideas, and a few seem to stick as interesting enough to build. What makes them worthwhile is a set of considerations including the ways they speak to research issues in the communities we address, and whether the technologies they use present an interesting but achievable challenge. But paramount is whether the situation they create seems to us to be rich enough to engage us and others for a good amount of time. Some ideas are great, but don't really need to be prototyped - the proposal is enough.
Other things really need to be built to understand how they will play out in people's lives.

Its really important that it is the making that guides our research. All the methodological and theory work we do is pulled along by the things we make, and that fact is absolutely central to our work.

How do the cultural probes you collect inspire the design process?

What the Probes don't do is lead in any straight-forward way to specific design moves. We rarely if ever have worked from a particular return or set of returns to a design in a way that could be described neatly. When you get Probe materials back, you're still left with the problem of what to do next - they don't really help with that at all, and that can be frustrated to people first starting to work with them.

But the Probes are great at creating a context in which to design.
Returns tend to provide us with a really rich and detailed view into people's lives. At the same time, it's a picture that is fragmented, and often impossible to interpret with any confidence. That is crucial to the approach. Taken the right way, that uncertainty becomes a license to imagine and over-interpret, to tell stories that can lead to designs.
More definite sources of information seem to close down possibilities, to provide rigid parameters for design. When the work, Probes create a productive balance between confronting us with lots of things we didn't know about or expect, while leaving huge amounts of room for us to move.

What role does irritation play in your work? is it a part of the plan to irritate the users by confronting them with new (and alien) functions of everyday things? or do you consider the familiar part the more important, to make the enhanced artefacts fit well into the domestic use context?

Good lord no! We don't want to irritate people! At the same time, we're not interested in building on warmly familiar objects either - we don't look at dust-covered picture frames and think they'd be better if only we added SMS or whatever.

Instead, we try to create new artefacts that are well suited to the world they are meant to inhabit. We genuinely want people to find the things we do valuable and meaningful. Thus the things we make often draw on a critical awareness of assumptions and trends, but they are not themselves 'critical'. On the contrary, our designs are meant to offer positive alternatives rather than simply highlight what's wrong with prevailing views.

Considering the history tablecloth, you mention the intriguing effect that some random behaviour, caused by unforeseen difficulties with the particular location of the table, had on your test subjects. How did this experience influence your further projects?

Briefly, what we found is that whereas we perceived 'random' behaviour as a problem, the participants who tried the table saw it as an interesting facet of how the table operated - making it something to be influenced rather than controlled. We aren't likely to draw on that in a linear way by, say, introducing randomness to our designs. But it has added to our understanding that people will make sense of systems even if they appear 'noisy' for one reason or another.

That realisation (which wasn't just from the History Tablecloth by any means) underlies a lot of the systems we build. The Home Health Horoscope, for instance, is based on the idea that people will use their own interpretations of their situation to correct or go beyond the inevitably limited interpretations of a sensor-based system. We think this is a key insight for Ubiquitous Computing.

Our two latest designs, the Plane Tracker and Local Barometers, both rely on events in the world (passing aircraft and wind speed) that we don't control, and on 'readymade' information (GoogleEarth and local
advertisements) which we also don't control. This means they can be unpredictable. Changing winds mean aircraft take new routes.
Advertisements depend on whatever people have to sell at the moment. But that noise, that randomness, is okay because people can make sense of it.
Because people are good at dealing with noisy, difficult to predict situations, these systems can be far richer than if we had programmed all their actions and content ourselves.

One of your projects, the home health horoscope, is a system where sensors in the home capture activity patterns and draw assumptions about the well-being of the inhabitants. Based on this, it prints out a horoscope every day in the morning.The system interprets the data, and the ambiguous form enables the user to apply his own understanding. Here, the purpose of the system is more obvious as i.e. for the drift table. Also the interaction with the system is less direct. Where do you see the advantages or disadvantages of both approaches?

I'm not so sure the Hhhoroscope is clearer in terms of its purpose than the drift table. It simply prints out a statement once a day. What are you to do with it? Believe it? Ignore it? Argue with it? Base your life on it? It's not clear - people have to find their own orientations to it, and a number of different ones appeared over time in the family who lived with it.

The Hhhoroscope does have a far less direct interaction than the drift table, however. You can't really play with it in the same way. Our volunteers did fool around with the sensors a bit, but the reaction is so slow (once a day) that I think they lost interest in doing that. Instead they lived with it as another voice in the home. That's a strange sort of relationship; it means the interaction is much more about the idea of the system than any physical interaction.

In fact, most of our recent pieces aren't really built for interaction in the typical sense, not even to the degree the Drift Table was. Instead they simply do their thing, and people can engage with them or not. We think of the systems as offering resources to people that might allow new perspectives or interpretations to form. So the interactions are not physical ones, they're about interpretations or orientations, about how people understand the systems and how they understand themselves and the world based on the systems. Of course, that sort of interpretative appropriation happens with all systems, but the nice thing about building the systems we do is that it allows us to really focus on this sort of interaction as a primary interest.

You also report some scepticism of the home’s inhabitants towards the sensors you installed in their home – that they suspected them to spy the family (and even took one apart to see what’s inside). You mentioned that you tried not to influence the test subjects by revealing too much of the system’s behaviour. Could you comment on their reaction?

Well, it's not surprising that people are suspicious of sensors in their homes, is it? One of the points of the home health horoscope is to turn a skeptical eye towards the culture of surveillance we live in. There's lots of talk about using sensors to control houses, or look after vulnerable people, or even to allow computers to be emotionally sensitive, but a lot of us feel that the potential invasions of our privacy makes these ideas suspect. One of the ideas of building a system that explicitly relies on people's interpretations is to relax demands that sensing be increasingly precise and comprehensive - perhaps a few, indicative ones will serve as well.

But in the case of the Hhhoroscope trial, as you say, we didn't tell the volunteers much about the sensors. Our reasoning was that we didn't want to destroy the novelty of the system, or to encourage the volunteers to develop all sorts of preconceptions about what was, after all, a pretty simple system. We wanted them to discover it for themselves. This turned out to be a huge mistake, obvious in hindsight. Because we didn't tell them what all the sensors were, they were naturally very curious - and sometimes suspicious - about all these boxes in their home. And they couldn't tell much just by looking at them (or even taking them apart).
So for a long time, that curiosity overwhelmed their experience of the system, and coloured the way they interpreted the horoscopes.

We're preparing to do a field trial of a new version of the system -- no longer using horoscopes, I might add -- and this time we're telling the volunteers a lot more about them. In fact, we've done a real U-turn:
instead of trying to set things up so we simply give people the system with no explanation, we're borrowing an idea from Kirsten Boehner, a colleague of ours, and trying to bring them in as participants in the evaluation of the system. We're going to be much clearer about what's going on, and ask them to help us tune the system in situ to work as well as it can. We'll see what happens...

You have a lot of experience with long-term field testing, where you observe the usage of one of your objects in a household over several months, like for the home health horoscope. Here, you have to rely on a few people as tests subjects. What is your strategy to make sure that the people you choose are appropriate? What kind of people are you looking for?

Yes, we tend to try our systems with very few households, but over very long periods of time. The reason for that is that pragmatically we can only spend so much time and energy on testing, and we believe it is really necessary for people to live with the devices for a long time to have any idea of the relationships they will form. With experience, we've begun to see similarities in what my colleague John Bowers calls a 'trajectory of appreciation' over different trials: first people love the novelty of the systems, then they become disillusioned when the thing turns out to be different than what they imagined it was or could be. Then they either get over that and start to engage with the system as it is, or they lose interest completely. That initial process takes a week or two, so we have to test our designs longer than that. And if people do maintain their interest -- and we've been lucky with most trials -- then it takes weeks longer for people to develop stable ways of orienting to the system, and even after months new things keep happening. Given the choice, I'd far rather do a single long term trial than many shorter ones.

As for choosing volunteers, it's important to think about the aim of our field trials. We're not in the business of making commercial products, so these are not marketing trials where we try to assess the potential customer base for our designs. Instead, they're explorations of whether the things we build embody values or encourage activities that people might find motivating. So we're looking for a sort of existence proof with our trials: confirmation that at least some people will enjoy our designs some of the time, and insight into how they enjoy them and how the prototypes fit in their lives over time. That feeds back into the claims we make about the trials -- we're not trying to say that 73% of the population likes them and that they're particularly popular with 28 - 37 year olds, for instance. Instead, we try to tell detailed stories about the particular volunteers who tried them, what their reactions were, and allow our audiences to speculate about generalisability on that basis.

So how do we pick our volunteers? We're pretty open. On the one hand, we definitely look for people who we think might like the prototypes, who seem generally open-minded, and who are willing to talk about what happens. But surprise is extremely important to us as well: it's the reason to work with volunteers either in field tests or initial user studies. So we find people we don't know, and who aren't too similar to us. We've used friends of friends, though I tend to avoid that as I think you're likely to get people to similar to yourself. Lately, however, we've had some luck asking people who've tried our prototypes if they have friends who'd like to work with us. Best, in some ways, is to advertise in newspapers or magazines because you get a much broader and more surprising set of volunteers. On the whole, we've been very lucky -- all our volunteers have been extremely generous with their time and interest, and we've met some really fantastic people. Doing field trials with people you've never met is a huge amount of work, but it's also hugely enjoyable.