Toolkits, cards and games–a review of analogue tools for collaborative ideation

Analogue tools offer distinct benefits for collaborative design ideation and can take a variety of tailored forms including card decks, templates, toys and board games. However, owing to the disparate and multidisciplinary sources of these tools, there is currently no easy way to gain a coherent view of the tool landscape. To resolve this, we conducted a survey of analogue ideation tools within the design and HCI literatures, and within commercial practice. Of 3,395 results, 76 met the inclusion criteria. The resulting collection is presented and classified according to 10 descriptors including a novel taxonomy for distinguishing 7 tool types (methods, prompts, components, concepts, stories, embodiment, and construction). We also discuss gaps and opportunities for future tool development in inclusivity, cultural-tailoring and embodiment. Our aim is to help designers and design teams more fluently select, customize, critique, analyse and/or build tools to support collaborative designerly inquiry

Ctrl Shift: How Crip Alt Ctrl Designers Change the Game and Reimagine Access

My journey as a disabled arts practitioner has been one of invention, hacking, and re-imagining what input systems could be. I have created my own modalities for creating work, rather than relying on commercially available options. This is a common practice within the disabled community, as individuals often modify and hack their surroundings to make them more usable. For example, ADAPT activists took sledgehammers to smash curb cuts and poured curb ramps with cement bags, ultimately leading to the widespread adoption of curb cuts as a standard architectural feature. As Yergeau notes, this type of "criptastic hacking" represents a creative resistance.(Yergeau, 2012) My interfaces and art projects are a combination of science fiction world-building, technology prototyping, and experimentation with novel ways of experiencing the world that work for my ability. I have been building interactive objects for over 20 years, and my bespoke controller games are both pieces I find comfortable to play and conceptual proposals that I share with the games community to spark consideration for alternative ways of interacting with games culture. This interdisciplinary design research herein crosses a range of disciplines, drawing inspiration from radical forms of cognitive science, games studies, feminist studies, HCI, crip technoscience, radical science fiction, disability studies, and making practices. What has emerged through studying my own practice and the practices of others during this research is a criptastic design framework for creating playful experiences. My research aims to gain a deeper understanding of the ways that hacking and remaking the world manifests as modifications to the design process itself. I created four versions of a physical alt ctrl game and conducted a design study with disabled artists and alt ctrl game creators. The game, Bot Party, was developed through a series of public exhibitions and explored my relationship between criptastic bespoke interface design and embodied experiences of group play. Bot Party involves physical interaction among players in groups to understand my own ways of designing, while the study looks three other disabled designers to understand the ways in which their process is similar or different to my own. By conducting this work, I aim to contribute to the larger conversation within the games studies community about the importance of accessibility and inclusivity in game design. The results highlight the need for continued exploration and development in this area, specifically in design methods. The study’s findings as they relate to my own practice revealed the importance of considering a set of values and design processes in relation to disability when creating games and playful experiences. With this perspective, I propose an initial framework that outlines possible key themes for disabled game designers. Using values as a starting point for creating deeply accessible games, this framework serves as a starting point for future research into accessible game design. This framework seeks to subvert the notion that accessibility is a list of UX best practices, audio descriptions, captions, and haptic additions and moves towards embedding within game design the values and practices used by disabled designers from the outset of the creative process. Access can be a creative framework. An important point to make is that my efforts to do a PhD resist the academic ableism limiting the participation of people who are not from a normative background. The act of creating this PhD has eaten at the edge of my ability, and the research here was often conducted in pain under extremely trying circumstances. This perspective is relevant because it often informed my design choices and thinking. Additionally, it was conducted at a university where I experienced active discrimination from members of staff who simply refused to believe in disabilities they could not see, and in one case writing down my disability was, “self-ascribed.” To work, I had to move outside the academy and seek out workshops which gave me accessible, ergonomic equipment as is discussed in the Bot Party section. This bears mentioning because it reflects on how threatening disabilities can be within academic settings and how even providing basic levels of accessibility remains a challenge for academic institutions. The above framework could benefit academia if used to redesign postgraduate academic research practices within the academy from a place of Crip-informed pedagogy. This is future work that this academic researcher hopes to explore in depth within their academic journey. It is important to note, much of the most relevant research to this thesis around disability studies and technology has emerged in recent years and as a result, was included iteratively in the literature review. It has informed the third study and my iterative design practice as part of the journey; however, I began this work before much of the writing in the literature review existed, including the creation of Bot Party’s first iterations. Finding this scholarship and these authors has been a kinning. Kinship, according to Gavin Van Horn, “can be considered a noun…shared and storied relations and memories that inhere in people and places; or more metaphorical imaginings that unite us to faith traditions, cultures, countries, or the planet…Perhaps this kinship-in-action should be called kinning.” (Horn et al., 2021) Kinning happened throughout this work and this thesis served me as a place for discovery, contemplation, and empowerment. It is my hope sections of it will serve this function for others within my community. I found kinship with other authors working in the field of disability studies and technology, particularly with Alison Kafer, who offers a critique of Donna Haraway's cyborg in her book "Feminist Queer Crip." (Kafer, 2013) Kafer's work highlights the limitations of Haraway's cyborg as a figure of empowerment for marginalized bodies and identities, and instead advocates for a crip-queer-feminist perspective on technology and embodiment. Additionally, the author has also found resonance in the work of Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsh, whose work in disability studies and HCI has been instrumental in shaping this research. Specifically, their concept of "crip technoscience" has been a key framework for understanding technology creation by disabled technologists. (Hamraie and Fritsch, 2019) Overall, it is my hope that this thesis will serve as a generative resource for others within the community on this journey, particularly for those who are working towards a more inclusive and intersectional understanding of technology and embodiment

Designing Teenage Emotions with a Life of Their Own

In this chapter, two participatory design activities are described in which teenagers create lo-fi designs describing emotions and explain the rationale for their design choices. Designs annotating and describing emotions are categorised as anthropomorphic, abstract, object based, or biomorphic. The chapter concludes: (i) teenagers use a variety of visual metaphors to describe emotions, (ii) teenagers use anthropomorphic visual metaphors most often to describe emotions and (iii) teenagers make more use of abstract and biomorphic visual metaphors to describe ‘negative’ emotions. The effect of materials on designs is analysed, suggesting that teenagers are more likely to create designs describing emotions featuring anthropomorphic visual metaphors when using malleable three-dimensional materials. Suggestions are made for the use of externalisation and personification as part of interactive emotion displays within affective systems. A focus group evaluation of a prototype mobile app is described, which suggests that teenagers place more importance on an affective systems ability to support social relationships than they do its ability to support psychological development. This research will be of value to interaction designers and Child-Computer Interaction researchers seeking to understand how teenagers use different visual metaphors to describe different emotions

Innovative Learning Environments in STEM Higher Education

As explored in this open access book, higher education in STEM fields is influenced by many factors, including education research, government and school policies, financial considerations, technology limitations, and acceptance of innovations by faculty and students. In 2018, Drs. Ryoo and Winkelmann explored the opportunities, challenges, and future research initiatives of innovative learning environments (ILEs) in higher education STEM disciplines in their pioneering project: eXploring the Future of Innovative Learning Environments (X-FILEs). Workshop participants evaluated four main ILE categories: personalized and adaptive learning, multimodal learning formats, cross/extended reality (XR), and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). This open access book gathers the perspectives expressed during the X-FILEs workshop and its follow-up activities. It is designed to help inform education policy makers, researchers, developers, and practitioners about the adoption and implementation of ILEs in higher education

User Experience for Elephants: Researching Interactive Enrichment through Design and Craft

This thesis explores the challenge for humans of designing and crafting interactive enrichment systems for elephants housed in captivity. Captive elephants may have limited opportunity to express a full range of natural behaviours and therefore benefit from well-designed environmental enrichment. We asked whether technology could support the design and development of novel enrichment for elephants and investigated what kinds of technology-enabled systems would hold their interest. Crucially, these systems were designed to provide the elephants with opportunities to make and enact choices – giving them more control over what happened in their environment. After researching wild elephant lifestyle and characteristics, our fieldwork started with an ethnographic study of captive elephants. We then followed an exploratory approach: Research through Design and Craft. Over several years, a range of interactive systems were crafted for elephants. Each device included embedded technology that enabled elephant interactions to be captured and mapped to associated system outputs. Elephants and their keepers were involved in this cyclical process, and the elephants’ reactions to the devices were noted and interpreted, giving rise to insights that informed the subsequent designs. Analysis of the design and development of the enrichment systems revealed important interface attributes and design considerations that we describe in this document. Finally, we offer five contributions for the ACI community: (i) Research through Design and Craft methodology, which was developed and tested over several years; (ii) ZooJam workshops, which were organised with colleagues over three years; (iii) six key principles of interaction design for ACI development – consistency, differentiation, graduation, specificity, multiplicity and affordance; (iv) an exploration of More than Human Aesthetics focusing on performative aesthetics; (v) a prototype deck of Concept Craft Cards that share theoretical and practical topics with other designers and developers

Game design research: an introduction to theory & practice

Design research is an active academic field covering disciplines such as architecture, graphic, product, service, interaction, and systems design. Design research aims to understand not only the designed end products but also how design as an activity unfolds. The book demonstrates different approaches to design research in game design research

Dramatistic User Experience Design: The Usability Testing of an e-Government System in A Non-Western Setting

This dissertation investigates rhetorical situatedness as a factor that culturally designates users’ motives in adopting a new technology. The application of Kenneth Burke’s dramatism extends the discussion about the situation where an interaction takes place to include acting and meaning-making in Non-Western settings as contextual and situated. This expansion is essential to reinforce the understanding of how cultural contexts impact users’ motives, specifically users from Non-Western settings, to adopt a technology. The traditional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research stresses mechanical and technical aspects between a user (agent) and a technology device (agency) in order to reduce user errors. This approach isolates the rhetorical situation of interaction in a computer interface, thus eliding the cultural situatedness by regarding the situation as something fixed, such as in a laboratory. Adding a cultural context provides a fuller picture of this interaction. Using a civic records online system called e-Lampid, which is administered by Surabaya City Government in Indonesia as a case study, I discover five elements of situatedness that contribute significantly to weave acting and meaning-making into a culturally informed interaction. User motives are shaped by internal and external situations that are collective, local, and both onsite and off. Dramatism is a tool for analysis and production that prioritizes cultural awareness. Dramatistic User Experience (UX) design offers analytical, comprehensive, and systematic perspectives on the design process. Dramatistic UX integrates three different approaches: usability testing, rhetorical awareness of situations, and needs analysis. The synergy of dramatism, user experience, and design thinking provides a holistic approach to construct a rhetorically grounded and culturally contingent user experience design

A importância do uso de métodos e ferramentas no apoio à criação de sentido em processos de inteligência coletiva

As organizações enfrentam rápidas mudanças e necessitam estar em constante alerta para possíveis transformações no seu ambiente. Para compreender as informações oriundas dos fenômenos organizacionais, as equipes trabalham de forma coletiva gerando sentido sobre as informações coletadas pelos seus participantes. Este processo é chamado de sensemaking, uma das etapas da inteligência coletiva, criado para apoiar os tomadores de decisão na contextualização de uma pista ou experiência particular para formulação de uma interpretação coletiva comum a todos os membros do grupo. Para realização de tal processo, os atores organizacionais apoiam-se em diversos métodos e ferramentas. Este trabalho propõe, portanto, a investigação de como os métodos e ferramentas podem auxiliar nos processos de criação coletiva de sentido. Para tal, foi delimitado o estudo a quatro métodos (Delphi, Roadmapping, Design Thinking e Brainstorming) e ferramentas associadas. A pesquisa foi conduzida a partir da abordagem qualitativa de entrevistas semi estruturadas com onze profissionais da área de inteligência. O trabalho defende que os métodos e ferramentas possuem papel fundamental na criação coletiva de sentido trazendo diversos benefícios às organizações. Também foi possível inferir que as organizações utilizam mais o sensemaking para atingirem os seus resultados a curto prazo. Para fundamentar esta posição, ao decorrer do trabalho foram apresentadas diversas evidências extraídas a partir dos trechos das entrevistas.Organizations face rapid changes and need to be constantly alert to possible changes in their environment. In order to understand the information arising from organizational phenomena, the teams work collectively generating meaning about the information collected by their participants. This process is called sensemaking, one of the stages of collective intelligence, which was created to support decision makers to contextualize a particular clue or piece of experience in order to formulate a collective interpretation common to all members of a group. For such a process, the organizational actors rely on several methods and tools. This work proposes, therefore, the investigation of how the methods and tools can help in the processes of collective creation of meaning. To this end, the study was limited to four methods (Delphi, Roadmapping, Design Thinking and Brainstorming) and associated tools. The research was conducted based on the qualitative approach of semi-structured interviews with eleven professionals in the field of intelligence. The paper argues that methods and tools have a fundamental role in the collective creation of meaning, bringing several benefits to organizations. It was also possible to infer that organizations use more sensemaking to achieve their results in the short term. To support this position, during the course of the work, several pieces of evidence extracted from the excerpts of the interviews were presented

The Playful Citizen

This edited volume collects current research by academics and practitioners on playful citizen participation through digital media technologies