HCI, politics and the city: Engaging with urban grassroots movements for reflection and action

Grassroots initiatives enable communities of stakeholders to transform urban landscapes and impact broader political and cultural trajectories. In this twoday workshop, we present opportunities to engage HCI research with activist communities in Vancouver, the city hosting CHI’11. Working directly with local activist organizations, we explore the processes, materials, challenges, and goals of grassroots communities. Our bottom-up approach, including explorations of urban spaces and activist headquarters, participatory design sessions, reflection, critique and creative design of political artifacts will bring together a diverse group of HCI researchers, activists and artists. The workshop will result in concrete strategies for bottom-up activism and serve to inform the design of future interactive systems in the domain of political computing

Making Sustainability Fashionable: Understanding Fashion-Making in Technology-Mediated Social Participation

Recently, the notion of fashion has been embraced and considered a useful paradigm of thinking to address challenges in HCI and sustainability. One of the suggested ways to learn from fashion is to make sustainability fashionable in order to increase uptake, interactivity, and proliferation of sustainability initiatives. This paper reports an exploratory study on the use of fashion-inspired ideas around the use of interactive technologies as a strategy to augment social participation in sustainability. Through an interpretive case study of an urban agriculture community in Indonesia, the paper illuminates the potential of using fashion thinking as a lens to examine techno-cultural aspects of human behavior. Implications of the study findings on the design, evaluation, and implementation of interactive systems in organizational and cultural contexts are also discussed

Information sharing, scheduling, and awareness in community gardening collaboration

Community gardens are places where people, as a collaborative group, grow food for themselves and for others. There is a lack of studies in HCI regarding collaboration in community gardens and considering technologies to support such collaborations. This paper reports on a detailed study of collaboration in community gardens in Greater Vancouver, Canada. The goal of our study is to uncover the unique nature of such collaborative acts. As one might expect, we found considerable differences between community gardening collaboration and workplace collaboration. The contribution is the articulation of key considerations for designing technologies for community gardening collaboration. These include design considerations like volunteerism, competences and inclusion, synchronicity, and telepresence as unique aspects of community collaboration in community garden. We also articulate the complexities of community gardening collaboration, which raise ibues like control, shared language, and collective ownership that exist more as conditions within which to design than "problems" to solve through technologies

“Proof in the Pudding”: Designing IoT Plants for Wellbeing

This paper contributes a participatory design case study that used workshops and ideation frameworks to scaffold a conceptualisation of ‘user data-actuated’ plants. The framework combines ideation cards, worksheets and facilitated co-design, guiding non-experts to conceptually connect personal data, health/wellbeing goals, plants and people. We demonstrate how the framework enabled participants to envisage ‘connected’ plants, linking personal data outputs with inputs to actuated growing environments, creating biofeedback. From the results of design work carried out by participants, we synthesise and present four themes. The themes provide a spectrum of values that participants embedded in their connected plants, and in the act of gifting their connected plants to other people. The results of these workshops sign- post a new design space for personal data embodied in plants that could be taken forward by the DIS community

Use-oriented & Result-oriented Product-Service Systems and sustainability

ope

Talking Plants and a Bug Hotel: Participatory Design of ludic encounters with an urban farming community

Due to environmental concerns, sustainability is a growing field of research in HCI. But utilitarian approaches for individual behaviour change that are typical within HCI have been criticised as being too simplistic and failing to take into account the complexity of people’s lives. This thesis contributes a design approach grounded in community-based Participatory Design, and drawing on ludic design, to expand the design space of sustainable HCI beyond individual behaviour change. The thesis demonstrates how the commitments, practices and values of community based Participatory Design and ludic design can be used effectively with a diverse and non-settled urban agricultural community. The research outlines how this approach can support the values, needs and practices of the community, and allow for holistic understandings of sustainability to emerge. This is achieved through three case studies conducted at Spitalfields City Farm, in inner East London. The first study was a way to get to know the farming community and to ground the subsequent work in the values, practices and needs of the farm. This was followed by two research through design studies to investigate designing ludic encounters with and for the community: i) the Talking Plants, a playful encounter with edible plants to support community engagement and learning, and ii) the Bug Hotel, a large musical sculpture for interspecies living, reflection and relaxation. After describing each case study individually in rich detail I turn to a comparison of their respective processes and the artefacts that each produced in the final chapter. These reflections include a manifesto for community-based sustainable HCI, through a Ludic Participatory Design methdology, as well as strategies and challenges to serve as guidance and inspiration for other researchers wishing to do similar kinds of work with similar kinds of communities

ECSCW 2013 Adjunct Proceedings The 13th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 21 - 25. September 2013, Paphos, Cyprus

This volume presents the adjunct proceedings of ECSCW 2013.While the proceedings published by Springer Verlag contains the core of the technical program, namely the full papers, the adjunct proceedings includes contributions on work in progress, workshops and master classes, demos and videos, the doctoral colloquium, and keynotes, thus indicating what our field may become in the future

Clemson Newsletter, 1987-1989

Information for the faculty and staff of Clemson Universityhttps://tigerprints.clemson.edu/clemson_newsletter/1020/thumbnail.jp

2011, UMaine News Press Releases

This is a catalog of press releases put out by the University of Maine Division of Marketing and Communications between January 3, 2011 and December 30, 2011