A fieldwork of the future with user enactments

Designing radically new technology systems that people will want to use is complex. Design teams must draw on knowledge related to people’s current values and desires to envision a preferred yet plausible future. However, the introduction of new technology can shape people’s values and practices, and what-we-know-now about them does not always translate to an effective guess of what the future could, or should, be. New products and systems typically exist outside of current understandings of technology and use paradigms; they often have few interaction and social conventions to guide the design process, making efforts to pursue them complex and risky. User Enactments (UEs) have been developed as a design approach that aids design teams in more successfully investigate radical alterations to technologies ’ roles, forms, and behaviors in uncharted design spaces. In this paper, we reflect on our repeated use of UE over the past five years to unpack lessons learned and further specify how and when to use it. We conclude with a reflection on how UE can function as a boundary object and implications for future work

Living with the user: Design drama for dementia care through responsive scripted experiences in the home

Participation in forms of drama and narrative can provoke empathy and creativity in user-centred design processes. In this paper, we expand upon existing methods to explore the potential for responsive scripted experiences that are delivered through the combination of sensors and output devices placed in a home. The approach is being developed in the context of Dementia care, where the capacity for rich user participation in design activities is limited. In this case, a system can act as a proxy for a person with Dementia, allowing designers to gain experiences and insight as to what it is like to provide care for, and live with, this person. We describe the rationale behind the approach, a prototype system architecture, and our current work to explore the creation of scripted experiences for design, played out though UbiComp technologies.This research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, (AH/K00266X/1) and Horizon Digital Economy Research (RCUK grant EP/G065802/1)

On Speculative Enactments

Speculative Enactments are a novel approach to speculative design research with participants. They invite the empirical analysis of participants acting amidst speculative but consequential circumstances. HCI as a broadly pragmatic, experience-centered, and participant-focused field is well placed to innovate methods that invite first-hand interaction and experience with speculative design projects. We discuss three case studies of this approach in practice, based on our own work: Runner Spotters, Metadating and a Quantified Wedding. In distinguishing Speculative Enactments we offer not just practical guidelines, but a set of conceptual resources for researchers and practitioners to critique the different contributions that speculative approaches can make to HCI discourse

The Caretaking of EVE Online: Institutional Ethics and Enactments at CCP Games

This ethnography examines the Icelandic video game developer CCP Games, the makers of EVE Online—a massively-multiplayer online game (MMO) that takes place in a star cluster far, far away. Through my exploration of CCP Games as an institution over the span of fourteen months, I highlight how corporations are culturally-situated, enacted entities. Simultaneously, I demonstrate that these culturally-located actors who serve as the architects of our digital infrastructures undertake such efforts from their situated vantage points, thereby embedding particular ethical commitments into the digital landscapes they craft and within which we live our social lives. Created with the intent to be a ‘virtual world more meaningful than real life,’ EVE Online serves as the focal point of my observations of the quotidian practices of CCP Games’s employees as they enact multiple versions of the company and, in doing so, show that it, like any corporation, is not a singular being, but rather a composite of social actors and commitments. Simultaneously, I uncover how the Icelandic context of the company informed the company’s creation and the original development of EVE Online while also showing how the evocation of said Icelandic context impacts the company’s development practices to this day. In doing so, I highlight how this “Icelandic” approach to game development impacts the way in which ethical commitments are made and thereby architected into the game. While my ethnographic focus is that of an Icelandic video game maker, this ethnography demonstrates the impact of cultural situatedness on the architecting of digital infrastructures and the importance of further research at the intersection of technology, ethics, and culture

Using participatory, observational and ‘Rapid Appraisal’ methods: researching health and illness

This chapter reports on the experiences and lessons learned through the use of participatory, locality-based data generation methods to research the intersections between long-term illhealth and poverty among four different ethnic 'communities'

Assemblages of solar electricity: enacting power, time and weather at home in the United Kingdom and Sri Lanka

This thesis explores what happens to the social enquiry of the powers of energy, if energy technologies and electricity are taken seriously as actants. It questions how photovoltaic solar panels and solar electricity act in everyday lives in domestic homes and how a more material enquiry of them can help shed light on the ways in which photovoltaic technology is made to matter in different places. It proposes to contribute to the social enquiry of energy by providing an example of how the power of electricity can be investigated and analyzed as a contingent achievement of particular assemblages rather than a neutral resource and affordance. Photovoltaic solar panels are enrolled in global discourses of environmental governance and sustainable development, and are employed not merely to generate electricity but also to have particular social powers: they generate electricity in different quantities and for different socio-political purposes in different places. As solar photovoltaic technology has gained momentum as a renewable energy technology that can be scaled and adjusted to fit different local and global matters of concern, it has also increasingly become part of different domestic homes, where it provides small portions of power for individual householders to use. This thesis considers two empirical settings where micro-generation solar is at work: in efforts to provide electricity to rural households in Sri Lanka and in efforts to reduce carbon emissions from households in the United Kingdom. The thesis argues that a tendency to focus on diffusion and social acceptance of solar in both policy and research has left gaps in our understanding of how solar works as a material force in everyday life after installation. The thesis engages with theories of assemblage and material agency and argues that the sustainability or green-ness of domestic solar power should not be considered an attribute of the technology, but rather seen as the achievement of a particular socio-material assemblage. It offers insights into how domestic solar is assembled and illustrates how solar electricity acts not as a neutral resource, which is handled and interpreted by human beings but rather as a spatially and temporally diverse force with properties and propensities, which encourage particular orderings of meaning and matter

Semantic web learning technology design: addressing pedagogical challenges and precarious futures

Semantic web technologies have the potential to extend and transform teaching and learning, particularly in those educational settings in which learners are encouraged to engage with ‘authentic’ data from multiple sources. In the course of the ‘Ensemble’ project, teachers and learners in different disciplinary contexts in UK Higher Education worked with educational researchers and technologists to explore the potential of such technologies through participatory design and rapid prototyping. These activities exposed some of the barriers to the development and adoption of emergent learning technologies, but also highlighted the wide range of factors, not all of them technological or pedagogical, that might contribute to enthusiasm for and adoption of such technologies. This suggests that the scope and purpose of research and design activities may need to be broadened and the paper concludes with a discussion of how the tradition of operaismo or ‘workers’ enquiry’ may help to frame such activities. This is particularly relevant in a period when the both educational institutions and the working environments for which learners are being prepared are becoming increasingly fractured, and some measure of ‘precarity’ is increasingly the norm

A quantified past : fieldwork and design for remembering a data-driven life

PhD ThesisA ‘data-driven life’ has become an established feature of present and future technological visions. Smart homes, smart cities, an Internet of Things, and particularly the Quantified Self movement are all premised on the pervasive datafication of many aspects of everyday life. This thesis interrogates the human experience of such a data-driven life, by conceptualising, investigating, and speculating about these personal informatics tools as new technologies of memory. With respect to existing discourses in Human-Computer Interaction, Memory Studies and Critical Data Studies, I argue that the prevalence of quantified data and metrics is creating fundamentally new and distinct records of everyday life: a quantified past. To address this, I first conduct qualitative, and idiographic fieldwork – with long-term self-trackers, and subsequently with users of ‘smart journals’ – to investigate how this data-driven record mediates the experience of remembering. Further, I undertake a speculative and design-led inquiry to explore context of a ’quantified wedding’. Adopting a context where remembering is centrally valued, this Research through Design project demonstrates opportunities and develops considerations for the design of data-driven tools for remembering. Crucially, while speculative, this project maintains a central focus on individual experience, and introduces an innovative methodological approach ‘Speculative Enactments’ for engaging participants meaningfully in speculative inquiry. The outcomes of this conceptual, empirical and speculative inquiry are multiple. I present, and interpret, a variety of rich descriptions of existing and anticipated practices of remembering with data. Introducing six experiential qualities of data, and reflecting on how data requires selectivity and construction to meaningfully account for one’s life, I argue for the design of ‘Documentary Informatics’. This perspective fundamentally reimagines the roles and possibilities for personal informatics tools; it looks beyond the current present-focused and goal-oriented paradigm of a data-driven life, to propose a more poetic orientation to recording one’s life with quantified data