Fictional Game Elements: Critical Perspectives on Gamification Design

Gamification has been widely accepted in the HCI community in the last few years. However, the current debate is focused on its short-term consequences, such as effectiveness and usefulness, while its side-effects, long-term criticalities and systemic impacts are rarely raised. This workshop will explore the gamification design space from a critical perspective, by using design fictions to help researchers reflect on the long-term consequences of their designs

Alternate endings: using fiction to explore design futures

Design research and practice within HCI is inherently oriented toward the future. However, the vision of the future described by HCI researchers and practitioners is typically utility-driven and focuses on the short term. It rarely acknowledges the potentially complex social and psychological long-term consequences of the technology artefacts produced. Thus, it has the potential to unintentionally cause real harm. Drawing on scholarship that investigates the link between fiction and design, this workshop will explore “alternate endings” to contemporary HCI papers. Attendees will use fictional narratives to envision long-term consequences of contemporary HCI projects, as a means for engaging the CHI community in a consideration of the values and implications of interactive technology

Fictional game elements 2016

Gamification has been widely accepted in the HCI community in the last few years. However, the current debate is focused on its short-term consequences, such as effectiveness and usefulness, while its side-effects, long-term criticalities and systemic impacts are rarely raised. This workshop explores the gamification design space from a critical perspective, by using design fictions to help researchers reflect on the long-term consequences of their designs

Visions, Values, and Videos: Revisiting Envisionings in Service of UbiComp Design for the Home

UbiComp has been envisioned to bring about a future dominated by calm computing technologies making our everyday lives ever more convenient. Yet the same vision has also attracted criticism for encouraging a solitary and passive lifestyle. The aim of this paper is to explore and elaborate these tensions further by examining the human values surrounding future domestic UbiComp solutions. Drawing on envisioning and contravisioning, we probe members of the public (N=28) through the presentation and focus group discussion of two contrasting animated video scenarios, where one is inspired by "calm" and the other by "engaging" visions of future UbiComp technology. By analysing the reasoning of our participants, we identify and elaborate a number of relevant values involved in balancing the two perspectives. In conclusion, we articulate practically applicable takeaways in the form of a set of key design questions and challenges.Comment: DIS'20, July 6-10, 2020, Eindhoven, Netherland

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds

Envisioning scenarios in designs for Networked Learning: Unfolding value tensions between technology and social learning

This article presents an application of a design methodology to envision implicit value hierarchies in the design process of a digital learning platform meant to encompass learning processes and activities conducive to experiential collaborative learning (ECL). The authors argue that many technologies for the field of education fall short of their purposes and neglect intended underpinning pedagogy and didactics. Previous research efforts in networked learning have primarily focused on conceptual critiques of the implementation of EdTech and warned of technological euphoria undermining relevant caution. This means, that when a design team tries to conceptualize technological artefacts into a script the more ethical and value-oriented parts of the learning process tend to be ignored.  While we agree with the conceptual critiques, our approach has instead been to engage with the design process and implement appropriate methodologies in an attempt to highlight implicit value hierarchies in the underlying learning theory. When using technologies in Networked learning we thus emphasize that both designers and stakeholders should engage in a systematic discussion and reflection of values and related judgements while constructing a value hierarchy. Through a Value-based design methodology based on semantic zooming we thus present 7 interconnected envisioning scenarios developed in the UnFoLD project to demonstrate how it is possible to operationalize values into detailed design briefs or technological scripts. This article will through presented experiences from a design process, show how the methodology of envisioning scenarios can be applied to mitigate the risks of implementation technology in a learning situation. We argue that an awareness and mapping of values as a part of the design process is essential and that an increased focus on the ethical and moral responsibilities of designers and involved researchers are important as technologies should not be seen as isolated, value-neutral, or uncomplicated translations of analogue teaching activities. The purpose of the article is to inspire other researchers and designers to implement value hierarchies, envisioning scenarios, or other similar methods to ensure that pedagogical and didactic priorities are not lost in accommodating marketability, practicalities, or technological constraints

Operationalizing Culture With Design Cards in Cross-Cultural Design: Translating Critical Knowledge Into Provocative Insights

Operationalizing culture is “one of the most fundamental issues cross-cultural researchers face” (Matsumoto & Jones, 2009, p. 324), as stated in The Handbook of Social Research Ethics. Inconsiderate research design could “ignore the large degree of individual differences that exist in human behavior” (p. 325) and eventually “vindicate” cultural stereotypes the researchers mean to avoid. In the field of cross-cultural design, a big challenge is how to inform and guide the design process with a sophisticated understanding of culture. This design challenge is a contextualized problem of operationalizing culture in practice. Insensitive design recommendations could end up strengthening the cultural essentialism designers want to leave behind in this increasingly globalized world. For example, designers should be more careful when recommending an online event scheduling system for American users that includes more granular and precise time units (e.g., options at 15 minute precision level) than what is recommended for Mexican users. The recommendation makes sense as American culture is considered monochronic, which prefers punctuality for meetings, while Mexican culture is not. However, what if some individual Mexican users might want to take more proactive actions to counteract their polychromic cultural influence for intercultural collaboration

Problematising upstream technology through speculative design: the case of quantified cats and dogs

There is growing interest in technology that quantifies aspects of our lives. This paper draws on critical practice and speculative design to explore, question and problematise the ultimate consequences of such technology using the quantification of companion animals (pets) as a case study. We apply the concept of ‘moving upstream’ to study such technology and use a qualitative research approach in which both pet owners, and animal behavioural experts, were presented with, and asked to discuss, speculative designs for pet quantification applications, the design of which were extrapolated from contemporary trends. Our findings indicate a strong desire among pet owners for technology that has little scientific justification, whilst our experts caution that the use of technology to augment human-animal communication has the potential to disimprove animal welfare, undermine human-animal bonds, and create human-human conflicts. Our discussion informs wider debates regarding quantification technology