Experiential Role of Artefacts in Cooperative Design

The role of material artefacts in supporting distributed and co-located work practices has been well acknowledged within the HCI and CSCW research. In this paper, we show that in addition to their ecological, coordinative and organizational support, artefacts also play an ‘experiential’ role. In this case, artefacts not only improve efficiency or have a purely functional role (e.g. allowing people to complete tasks quickly), but the presence and manifestations of these artefacts bring quality and richness to people’s performance and help in making better sense of their everyday lives. In a domain like industrial design, such artefacts play an important role for supporting creativity and innovation. Based on our prolonged ethnographic fieldwork on understanding cooperative design practices of industrial design students and researchers, we describe several experiential practices that are supported by mundane artefacts like sketches, drawings, physical models and explorative prototypes – used and developed in designers’ everyday work. Our main intention to carry out this kind of research is to develop technologies to support designers’ everyday practices. We believe that with the emergence of ubiquitous computing, there is a growing need to focus on personal, emotional and social side of people’s everyday experiences. By focusing on the experiential practices of designers, we can provide a holistic view in the design of new interactive technologies

Usability and open source software.

Open source communities have successfully developed many pieces of software although most computer users only use proprietary applications. The usability of open source software is often regarded as one reason for this limited distribution. In this paper we review the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discuss how the characteristics of open-source development influence usability. We describe how existing human-computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities, of developers and users, to address issues of usability

Discursive leadership in technological change

Phd ThesisThis thesis is contributing to a greater understanding of discursive leadership by exploring as it happens in situ and by looking more closely at the daily interactional work of leadership actors in the process of technological change. In this thesis, I argue that many of the existing accounts of leadership in organisational studies have contributed to a widely accepted ‘grandiose’ image of leadership conceptualising the phenomenon as a pre-existing entity and a taken-for-granted privilege of people on the top of organisational hierarchy who are responsible for making the executive decisions. My view on leadership is different. It is less grandiose, more mundane, and fundamentally a reality-defining activity. Being intrigued by daily discursive practices of doing leadership - as moments of providing an ‘intelligible formulation’ of reality - I contribute to the discursive leadership agenda by following a social constructionist path. The ‘linguistic turn’ in social sciences is my point of departure towards embracing the social and linguistic aspects of leadership. My thesis contributes to the field of management and organisation studies by developing an analytical framework to study discursive leadership as an interactional accomplishment by elaborating and synthesising theoretical insights from organisational sensemaking, discursive leadership and the social studies of technology. The value of this framework informed by the principles of ethnomethodology is that it has the potential for providing a better understanding of how technological change is constructed, negotiated and accomplished through the daily discursive practices of leadership actors who make sense of and give sense to processes of technological change in organisations. Responding to the empirical challenge of tracing the everyday interactional constitution of discursive leadership, my study is based on an extensive dataset, including meeting observations, interviews, and documents obtained during a twelve-month fieldwork. Drawing on this data, I use a range of interpretive approaches; namely, ethnomethodologically-informed discourse analysis (EDA), conversation analysis (CA), membership categorisation analysis (MCA) and organisational ethnography that iv enabled me to undertake a painstaking exploration of discursive micro-granularity of members’ sensemaking accounts which I used as units of my analysis. My study advances the existing research on organisational sensemaking by analysing reasoning procedures through which leadership actors construct a meaningful sense of the technological change through accounts. By setting a micro-discursive lens on leadership as a situated discursive practice and giving priority to participants’ own sensemaking, I identified a repertoire of discursive devices used by leadership actors to make sense and to give sense to the technological change in an organisation. Through examining the interactional accomplishment of the leadership phenomenon, my research advances the existing work on organisational sensemaking by an empirical demonstration of the organising properties of leadership as ‘sensemaking in action’. My thesis contributes to the discursive leadership field by offering insights into category predication work of leadership actors which enable sensemaking and sensegiving about technological change through the processes of framing and reframing. Three vignettes (each comprising of a set of episodes) demonstrate the membership categorisation work in leadership interaction which includes the following processes: reconstituting a category, characterising a category and generating category constraints thus revealing how technological change is accomplished through discursive practice of leadership actors

The Role of Practical Reasoning and Typification in Consumer Analytics Work: An Ethnomethodological Study

Traditional scholarship views quantitative people-categorization in the workplace—i.e. the use of big data to group consumers and categorize their cultures—as primarily a problem of technical and statistical optimization. By contrast, my thesis emphasizes a very different research dimension: namely, the role that practical reasoning plays as workers organize themselves locally to categorize and apply data-based groups. Drawing on the ethnomethodological understanding of practical reasoning, I focus on the way the locally organized talk accomplishes people-categorization as a self-contained activity. Specifically, I will argue that practical reasoning shapes the way workers, through their talk, combine technology, conversation, and everyday practice to render scenes as reasonable and accountable in their attempt to anticipate, understand, and apply consumer preferences, behaviors, and so on. To do this, analysts should go beyond standard empirical methods to adopt a more radically reflexive stance toward workplace discourse. Next, I will argue that the benefits of adopting such an interpretive methodological stance in this setting are threefold: first, this approach will help market researchers and design professionals rethink how they conduct market segmentation and persona development, two important techniques debated in academia, but used extensively in professional settings to design products, processes, and marketing plans. I will show that “practical” actors, through their locally organized practices, make and find in ordinary taken-for-granted ways “market segmentation” and “persona development” as reasonable ways of assembling the world of people-categorization in the workplace. Second, this approach broadens arguments about the “social life of methods” to include professions outside of the academy that apply statistical methods to big data, and to radically consider our relationship with technology. Furthermore, I will argue that part of understanding practical reasoning in the workplace includes identifying the hold that the unquestioned commitment to expanding technology has on discourse. For the latter, I adopt a radical interpretive perspective in order to reveal the irony of our focus on expanding our human powers through technology. To support my claims, I have divided my argument into four main sections, each one given its own chapter. Chapter 1 reviews how digital advertising workers combine big data about groups of people and their culture with other resources to build to a finished technical product. Chapter 2 outlines how these same workers rely on interpretive methods during the conceptual development of big data people segments. Chapter 3 demonstrates how analysts rely on interpretive methods and background expectancies during the process of accessing, extracting, and analyzing big data about groups of people and their culture. These methods can help professionals achieve a richer understanding of consumer culture, and consequently, can help them make better big-data application decisions throughout the design cycle. Chapter 4 takes a radical interpretive case study format and demonstrates how treating digital advertising worker dialogue as discourse reveals important methods for designers, for workers and for social inquirers. In this final Chapter, I show how a very particular example of a stretch of talk about a piece of technology can be examined as a cultural expression of the desire to expand human powers, and I show how the abstract idea of the desire to expand human powers can be critically addressed as a possibility and actualization in its own right. The analysis in Chapter 4 reveals the seen but unnoticed assumption embedded in the culture concerning the unquestioned commitment to expanding technology, which, it can be argued, has undermined our capacity to talk about purpose or point; instead, the talk takes for granted the assumption that there is only one purpose: expanding our human powers. The principle of expanding our human powers through technology does not just have to be assumed; it can and should be critically engaged. This engagement is accomplished by drawing on radical interpretive approaches to modernity, including Grant (1969), and Arendt (1958)

“It becomes more of an abstract idea, this privacy”—Informing the design for communal privacy experiences in smart homes

In spite of research recognizing the home as a shared space and privacy as inherently social, privacy in smart homes has mainly been researched from an individual angle. Sometimes contrasting and comparing perspectives of multiple individuals, research has rarely focused on how household members might use devices communally to achieve common privacy goals. An investigation of communal use of smart home devices and its relationship with privacy in the home is lacking. The paper presents a grounded analysis based on a synergistic relationship between an ethnomethodologically-informed (EM-informed) study and a grounded theory (GT) approach. The study focuses on household members’ interactions to show that household members’ ability to coordinate the everyday use of their devices depends on appropriate conceptualizations of roles, rules, and privacy that are fundamentally different from those embodied by off-the-shelf products. Privacy is rarely an explicit, actionable, and practical consideration among household members, but rather a consideration wrapped up in everyday concerns. Roles and rules are not used to create social order, but to account for it. To sensitize to this everyday perspective and to reconcile privacy as wrapped up in everyday concerns with the design of smart home systems, the paper presents the social organization of communal use as a descriptive framework. The framework is descriptive in capturing how households navigate the ‘murky waters’ of communal use in practice, where prior research highlighted seemingly irreconcilable differences in interest, attitude, and aptitude between multiple individuals and with other stakeholders. Discussing how households’ use of roles, rules, and privacy in-practice differed from what off-the-shelf products afforded, the framework highlights critical challenges and opportunities for the design of communal privacy experiences

A competencies framework of visual impairments for enabling shared understanding in design

Existing work in Human Computer Interaction and accessibility research has long sought to investigate the experiences of people with visual impairments in order to address their needs through technology design and integrate their participation into different stages of the design process. Yet challenges remain regarding how disabilities are framed in technology design and the extent of involvement of disabled people within it. Furthermore, accessibility is often considered a specialised job and misunderstandings or assumptions about visually impaired people’s experiences and needs occur outside dedicated fields. This thesis presents an ethnomethodology-informed design critique for supporting awareness and shared understanding of visual impairments and accessibility that centres on their experiences, abilities, and participation in early-stage design. This work is rooted in an in-depth empirical investigation of the interactional competencies that people with visual impairments exhibit through their use of technology, which informs and shapes the concept of a Competencies Framework of Visual Impairments. Although past research has established stances for considering the individual abilities of disabled people and other social and relational factors in technology design, by drawing on ethnomethodology and its interest in situated competence this thesis employs an interactional perspective to investigate the practical accomplishments of visually impaired people. Thus, this thesis frames visual impairments in terms of competencies to be considered in the design process, rather than a deficiency or problem to be fixed through technology. Accordingly, this work favours supporting awareness and reflection rather than the design of particular solutions, which are also strongly needed for advancing accessible design at large. This PhD thesis comprises two main empirical studies branched into three different investigations. The first and second investigations are based on a four-month ethnographic study with visually impaired participants examining their everyday technology practices. The third investigation comprises the design and implementation of a workshop study developed to include people with and without visual impairments in collaborative reflections about technology and accessibility. As such, each investigation informed the ones that followed, revisiting and refining concepts and design materials throughout the thesis. Although ethnomethodology is the overarching approach running through this PhD project, each investigation has a different focus of enquiry: • The first is focused on analysing participants’ technology practices and unearthing the interactional competencies enabling them. • The second is focused on analysing technology demonstrations, which were a pervasive phenomenon recorded during fieldwork, and the work of demonstrating as exhibited by visually impaired participants. • Lastly, the third investigation defines a workshop approach employing video demonstrations and a deck of reflective design cards as building blocks for enabling shared understanding among people with and without visual impairments from different technology backgrounds; that is, users, technologists, designers, and researchers. Overall, this thesis makes several contributions to audiences within and outside academia, such as the detailed accounts of some of the main technology practices of people with visual impairments and the methodological analysis of demonstrations in empirical Human Computer Interaction and accessibility research. Moreover, the main contribution lies in the conceptualisation of a Competencies Framework of Visual Impairments from the empirical analysis of interactional competencies and their practical exhibition through demonstrations, as well as the creation and use of a deck of cards that encapsulates the competencies and external elements involved in the everyday interactional accomplishments of people with visual impairments. All these contributions are lastly brought together in the implementation of the workshop approach that enabled participants to interact with and learn from each other. Thus, this thesis builds upon and advances contemporary strands of work in Human Computer Interaction that call for re-orienting how visual impairments and, overall, disabilities are framed in technology design, and ultimately for re-shaping the design practice itself

Artful Systems: Investigating everyday practices of family life to inform the design of information technology for the home

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The research in this thesis was motivated by an interest in understanding the work and effort that goes into organising family homes, with the aim of informing the design of novel information technology for the home. It was undertaken to address a notable absence of in-depth research into domestic information and communication technology in the fields of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). To that end, this thesis presents an ethnographic study of everyday routines in thirteen family homes. Following an established tradition within HCI and CSCW, the study applies qualitative fieldwork methods as a means to investigate and interpret the empirical materials. Periods of extended observation and semi-structured interviews with the thirteen families over a three-year period form the basis of the empirical material. The materials are analysed using a hybrid perspective composed of a combination of influences from the study of material culture, to interaction analysis and ethnography. The hybrid analytical perspective draws out insights regarding the families’ mundane practices and the artfully devised solutions they use to organise daily life. Four household activities and artefacts are given specific focus: (i) household list making, (ii) the display qualities of refrigerator doors, (iii) the organisation of household clutter, and (iv) the devising of bespoke solutions in organising home life. Broader findings include the observations that people tailor solutions to meet their needs, that optimum efficiency is not the pre-eminent determinant in what method or artefact people choose to organise themselves and their homes, and that homes determine their individual characters in part by how everyday tasks and organisation are accomplished. In short, the personal qualities of these mundane practices are part of what makes a home a home. These findings are used to elicit implications for information technology design, with the aim of encouraging designers of domestic technology to be aware of and respectful towards the idiosyncratic nature of the home, and, wherever possible, to design in such a way as to allow the technology to be appropriated for families’ bespoke tailoring. To evaluate and address this point, two design projects, one on augmented magnets and another on a “media bowl”, are used to develop and test out this approach. Both projects are critically examined to reflect on the efficacy of the design approach and what lessons might be learnt for future studies and design exercises. The combination of detailed ethnographic fieldwork on family homes combined with the development of experimental design projects is intended to deepen the understanding of the mundane behaviours and everyday routines of family homes, in order to better inform the design of information technology for the home

The UX of things: exploring UX principles to inform security and privacy design in the smart home

Smart homes are under attack. Threats can harm both the security of these homes and the privacy of their inhabitants. As a result, in addition to delivering pleasant and aesthetic experiences, smart devices need to protect households from vulnerabilities and attacks. Further, the need for user-centered security and privacy design is particularly important for such an environment, given that inhabitants are demographically-diverse (e.g., age, gender, educational level) and have different skills and (dis)abilities. Prior work has explored different usable security and privacy solutions for smart homes; however, the applicability of user eXperience (UX) principles to security and privacy design is under-explored. This research project aims to address the on-going challenge of security and privacy in the smart home through the lens of UX design. The objective of this thesis is two-fold. First, to investigate how UX factors and principles affect the security and privacy of smart home users. Secondly, to inform product design through the development of an empirically-tested framework for UX design of security and privacy in smart home products. In the first step, we explored the relationship between UX, security, and privacy in smart homes from user and designer perspectives: through (i) conducting a qualitative interview study with smart home users (n=13) and (ii) analyzing an ethnomethodologically informed study of six UK households living in smart homes (n=6); and, we then explored the role of UX in the design of security, privacy and data protection in smart homes through qualitative semi-structured interviews with smart home users, designers and business leaders through two rounds of interviews (n=20, n=20). In the second step, using conceptual framework analysis, we systematically analyzed our previously collected data and the literature to construct a framework of design heuristics for consent and permission in smart homes. We applied these heuristics in four participatory co-design workshops and reported on their use. We further analyzed the use of the heuristics through thematic analysis highlighting how the heuristics were used, their purpose, and their effectiveness. By bringing UX design to the smart home security and privacy table, we believe that this research project will have a significant impact on academia, industry, and government organizations. Our thesis will improve design practices for security and privacy in domestic smart devices while addressing wider challenges, opportunities, and future work

A competencies framework of visual impairments for enabling shared understanding in design

Existing work in Human Computer Interaction and accessibility research has long sought to investigate the experiences of people with visual impairments in order to address their needs through technology design and integrate their participation into different stages of the design process. Yet challenges remain regarding how disabilities are framed in technology design and the extent of involvement of disabled people within it. Furthermore, accessibility is often considered a specialised job and misunderstandings or assumptions about visually impaired people’s experiences and needs occur outside dedicated fields. This thesis presents an ethnomethodology-informed design critique for supporting awareness and shared understanding of visual impairments and accessibility that centres on their experiences, abilities, and participation in early-stage design. This work is rooted in an in-depth empirical investigation of the interactional competencies that people with visual impairments exhibit through their use of technology, which informs and shapes the concept of a Competencies Framework of Visual Impairments. Although past research has established stances for considering the individual abilities of disabled people and other social and relational factors in technology design, by drawing on ethnomethodology and its interest in situated competence this thesis employs an interactional perspective to investigate the practical accomplishments of visually impaired people. Thus, this thesis frames visual impairments in terms of competencies to be considered in the design process, rather than a deficiency or problem to be fixed through technology. Accordingly, this work favours supporting awareness and reflection rather than the design of particular solutions, which are also strongly needed for advancing accessible design at large. This PhD thesis comprises two main empirical studies branched into three different investigations. The first and second investigations are based on a four-month ethnographic study with visually impaired participants examining their everyday technology practices. The third investigation comprises the design and implementation of a workshop study developed to include people with and without visual impairments in collaborative reflections about technology and accessibility. As such, each investigation informed the ones that followed, revisiting and refining concepts and design materials throughout the thesis. Although ethnomethodology is the overarching approach running through this PhD project, each investigation has a different focus of enquiry: • The first is focused on analysing participants’ technology practices and unearthing the interactional competencies enabling them. • The second is focused on analysing technology demonstrations, which were a pervasive phenomenon recorded during fieldwork, and the work of demonstrating as exhibited by visually impaired participants. • Lastly, the third investigation defines a workshop approach employing video demonstrations and a deck of reflective design cards as building blocks for enabling shared understanding among people with and without visual impairments from different technology backgrounds; that is, users, technologists, designers, and researchers. Overall, this thesis makes several contributions to audiences within and outside academia, such as the detailed accounts of some of the main technology practices of people with visual impairments and the methodological analysis of demonstrations in empirical Human Computer Interaction and accessibility research. Moreover, the main contribution lies in the conceptualisation of a Competencies Framework of Visual Impairments from the empirical analysis of interactional competencies and their practical exhibition through demonstrations, as well as the creation and use of a deck of cards that encapsulates the competencies and external elements involved in the everyday interactional accomplishments of people with visual impairments. All these contributions are lastly brought together in the implementation of the workshop approach that enabled participants to interact with and learn from each other. Thus, this thesis builds upon and advances contemporary strands of work in Human Computer Interaction that call for re-orienting how visual impairments and, overall, disabilities are framed in technology design, and ultimately for re-shaping the design practice itself

Understanding planning practices: insights from a situated study on an Italian airport

This research projects examines planning as an instance of instructed action - that is, by focusing on how plans are designed and changed to anticipate actions, by competently using the instructions that regulate work. It does so by drawing on ethnomethodology and membership categorization analysis to understand the empirical materials collected over the course of ethnomethodologically informed ethnography in an airport center for the handling activities coordination. By focusing on plans, this research aims to foster understanding of cooperative dynamics in workplace settings. By approaching the study of plans as instructed actions, this research makes a new and original contribution to the understanding of plan use and planning as coordinative tool, and so unveils previously unnoticed aspects of plan use. In fact, it explains plans as artifacts that make it possible to maintain a consistent relationship between planning instructions and lived events, and to therefore link local and more transcendental aspects of work, such as the need to face patterns of organizational failure and maintain temporal coordination. This, in turn, has made it possible to challenge preconceptions in the study of plans. Indeed, by comparing the operators' practices for the competent setup and change of plans with literature on temporal coordination, it was possible to contradict current understanding of the role of plans in temporal coordination, which acknowledges that plans are difficult to use as temporal coordination devices. Moreover by comparing data analysis with the literature on organizations' capability to face the unexpected it was possible to challenge the received understanding of plans put forward by the mainstream theories on this topic, which recognize that plans and planning are not suitable for managing the unexpected or that they might even threaten the organizations' capability to face the unexpected. In addition, inspired by understanding anticipation as an embodied accomplishment forwarded by the concept of instructed actions, it was possible to engage with the understanding of the capability of plans to anticipate events as a distributed, artifact-mediated and dynamic accomplishment and, as a consequence, to challenge the received understanding of plans as artifacts whose capacity to anticipate future ways of performing activities is an immutable feature. Last but not least coupling the understanding of planning as an instance of instructed actions with the analysis of planners' interactions in light of the conceptual apparatus provided by membership categorization analysis has made it possible to go into the study of planners' interactions to explain re- planning as the effort to meet the outcomes of instructions with the local contingencies of work and to show how decisions about changes in the information content of the plans are made. In studying plans as instructed actions this study seeks to guide research on planning towards a more extensive understanding of plans as the outcome of the 'tendentious use of instructions'