Between Emic and Etic:A Design Pedagogy with Older People

The case study describes the pedagogy and the theoretical underpinning of an architectural design unit run in 2016 within the 3rd year “Explorations” course at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA). The unit Domesti-city drawn on tools borrowed from visual ethnography, interaction design and psychogeography to set up an inquiry on the socio-spatial conditions affecting a specific social group: the elderly. It focused on the construction of a narrative at the intersection of the etic (students’) and emic (elderly’s) perspectives to ground design interventions in the urban context of local town centres in Edinburgh. The paper explores how the brief fostered this emic-etic connection to transcend the studio and engage outer socio – spatial reality

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

Designing online social interaction for and with older people

This thesis describes my explorations and reflections regarding the design of online social interaction for and with older people. In 2008 when I started my doctoral investigation only a third of people over 65 years in the UK were using the Internet. This number has now increased to half of the population of 65-75 year-olds being connected to the Internet. From 2000 onwards EU wide directives increasingly encouraged research in the development of online technologies to manage the needs of an ageing population in the EU. Alongside health-related risks, the issue of social isolation is of particular interest to be tackled, considering there is a rapid development of new forms of communication and interaction media based on online technologies that could help in maintaining contact between people. A beneficial design strategy is to involve older people in the design process to ensure that technological developments are welcomed and actually used. However, engaging older people, who are not necessarily familiar with digital technologies, is not without challenges for the design researcher. My research focuses both on design practice (the development of artefacts) and the design process for online social interaction involving older people. The thesis describes practice-led research, for which I built the Teletalker (TT) and Telewalker (TW) systems as prototypes for experimentation and design research interventions. The TT can be described as a simple TV like online audio-video presence system connecting two locations. The TW is based on the same concept has been built specifically for vulnerable older people living in a care home. The work described involves embodied real-world interventions with contemporary approaches to designing with people. In particular I explore the delicate nature of the researcher/participant relationship. The research is reported as four sequential journeys. The first design journey started from a user-centred iterative design perspective and resulted in the construction of a wireframe for a website for older users. The second journey focused on building the TT and investigated its use in the real world by people with varied computer experience. The third journey involved designing the TW system specifically for elderly people in a care home. The fourth journey employed a co-design approach, with invited stakeholders, to reflect on the physical artefacts, discuss narratives of the previous design journeys and to co-create new online social technologies for the future. In summary, my PhD thesis contributes to design theory by providing: a reflected rationale for the choices of design approaches, documented examples of design research for social interaction and a novel approach to research with older people (the extended showroom). It further offers insights into people's online social interaction and proposes guidelines for conducting empirical research with older and vulnerable older people

Mobility is the Message: Experiments with Mobile Media Sharing

This thesis explores new mobile media sharing applications by building, deploying, and studying their use. While we share media in many different ways both on the web and on mobile phones, there are few ways of sharing media with people physically near us. Studied were three designed and built systems: Push!Music, Columbus, and Portrait Catalog, as well as a fourth commercially available system – Foursquare. This thesis offers four contributions: First, it explores the design space of co-present media sharing of four test systems. Second, through user studies of these systems it reports on how these come to be used. Third, it explores new ways of conducting trials as the technical mobile landscape has changed. Last, we look at how the technical solutions demonstrate different lines of thinking from how similar solutions might look today. Through a Human-Computer Interaction methodology of design, build, and study, we look at systems through the eyes of embodied interaction and examine how the systems come to be in use. Using Goffman’s understanding of social order, we see how these mobile media sharing systems allow people to actively present themselves through these media. In turn, using McLuhan’s way of understanding media, we reflect on how these new systems enable a new type of medium distinct from the web centric media, and how this relates directly to mobility. While media sharing is something that takes place everywhere in western society, it is still tied to the way media is shared through computers. Although often mobile, they do not consider the mobile settings. The systems in this thesis treat mobility as an opportunity for design. It is still left to see how this mobile media sharing will come to present itself in people’s everyday life, and when it does, how we will come to understand it and how it will transform society as a medium distinct from those before. This thesis gives a glimpse at what this future will look like

Comics, robots, fashion and programming: outlining the concept of actDresses

This paper concerns the design of physical languages for controlling and programming robotic consumer products. For this purpose we explore basic theories of semiotics represented in the two separate fields of comics and fashion, and how these could be used as resources in the development of new physical languages. Based on these theories, the design concept of actDresses is defined, and supplemented by three example scenarios of how the concept can be used for controlling, programming, and predicting the behaviour of robotic systems

The Making of Online Identity. The use of creative method to support young people in their reflection on age\ud and gender

In the .GTO.project our ambition is to study how young people (10 to 14 years old) in Estonia and Sweden construct and normalise gender and age, as markers of identity and identity development, in their online interactions. After\ud conducting interview studies on how young people experience on- and offline interactions, and their intertwining, as well as online ethnographic studies of online presentations, we went on with the third phase of the project: creative\ud workshops with young people. In these workshops, young people in groups of four were to create fictitious online characters. In the analysis of these, we focus on how power differentials and identity markers such as age and gender are constructed and negotiated.\u

Tracking the dynamic nature of learner individual differences: Initial results from a longitudinal study

Individual differences (IDs) have long been considered one of the most important factors explaining variable rates and outcomes in second language acquisition (Dewaele, 2013). While traditional operationalizations of IDs have, explicitly or implicitly, assumed that IDs are static traits that are stable through time, more recent research inspired by complex dynamic systems theory (Larsen-Freeman, 1997, 2020) demonstrates that many IDs are dynamic and variable through time and across contexts, a theme echoed throughout the current issue. This study reports the initial semester of a diachronic project investigating the dynamicity of four learner IDs: motivation, personality, learning and cognitive styles, and working memory. In the initial semester, data from 323 participants in their first year of university-level Spanish were collected and analyzed to determine what type of variability may be present across learners with respect to the four IDs studied at one time point and to discern possible learner profiles in the data or patterns via which the data may be otherwise meaningfully described. The results revealed four types of learner profiles present in the dataset

Making Public Media Personal: Nostalgia and Reminiscence in the Office

In this paper we explore the notion of creating personally evocative collections of content from publicly available material. Compared to the personal media that we look at, reminisce over, or personalise our offices with, public media offers the potential for a different type of nostalgia, signifiers of an era such as entertainment, products, or fashions. We focus on an office environment, where the use of filtered public media may mitigate concerns over protecting privacy and disclosing too much of one's identity, while keeping the existing benefits of office personalisation in terms of reminiscence, improving mood, and developing identity. After preliminary explorations of content and form, we developed a two-screen ambient display that cycled through 500 images automatically retrieved based on four simple user questions. We ran a two-week trial of the display with six users. We present qualitative results of the trial from which we see that it is possible to bring the delight associated with personal content into the workplace, while being mindful of issues of appropriateness and privacy. Images of locations from childhood were particularly evocative for all participants, while simple objects such as stickers, music, or boardgames were more varied across participants. We discuss a number of avenues for future work in the workplace and beyond: improving the chance of an evocative moment, capturing the mundane, and the crowdsourcing of nostalgia