Artefact Ecologies: Supporting Embodied Meeting Practices with Distance Access

Frameworks such as activity theory, distributed cognition and structuration theory, amongst others, have shown that detailed study of contextual settings where users work (or live) can help the design of interactive systems. However, these frameworks do not adequately focus on accounting for the materiality (and embodiment) of the contextual settings. Within the IST-EU funded AMIDA project (Augmented Multiparty Interaction with Distance Access) we are looking into supporting meeting practices with distance access. Meetings are inherently embodied in everyday work life and that material artefacts associated with meeting practices play a critical role in their formation. Our eventual goal is to develop a deeper understanding of the dynamic and embodied nature of meeting practices and designing technologies to support these. In this paper we introduce the notion of "artefact ecologies" as a conceptual base for understanding embodied meeting practices with distance access. Artefact ecologies refer to a system consisting of different digital and physical artefacts, people, their work practices and values and lays emphasis on the role artefacts play in embodiment, work coordination and supporting remote awareness. In the end we layout our plans for designing technologies for supporting embodied meeting practices within the AMIDA project. \u

Design as conversation with digital materials

This paper explores Donald Schön's concept of design as a conversation with materials, in the context of designing digital systems. It proposes material utterance as a central event in designing. A material utterance is a situated communication act that depends on the particularities of speaker, audience, material and genre. The paper argues that, if digital designing differs from other forms of designing, then accounts for such differences must be sought by understanding the material properties of digital systems and the genres of practice that surround their use. Perspectives from human-computer interaction (HCI) and the psychology of programming are used to examine how such an understanding might be constructed.</p

Service Ecosystem: Empowering Textile Artisans' Communities towards a Sustainable Future

The global economic and environmental crisis is leading to the end of a linear economy based on consumption and waste, while setting the ground for opening up resilient, flexible and redistributed micro-productions, based on new ethics of sustainability. With this in mind, this research is focused on exploring textile artisans’ communities, bottom-up and human-centred economic aggregations embodying the craft atmosphere of a territory due to physical proximity and shared material cultural background. Such communities are engaged in giving form and meaning to local natural fibres and managing the process of making culturally and socially significant garments. Currently, the textile crafts discourse is mainly based on patchy practices and individual making experiences, overlooking the human and social dimension of artisanship. It is still missing a strategic agenda which could create sustainable interconnections within this complex landscape. Therefore, this research aims to explore how service design can strategically drive textile artisans’ communities towards a sustainable future. This will be done through a holistic process based on a triple bottom line: empowering artisans’ creative assets and social bonds, co-designing collaborative services and scaling up initiatives within an enabling ecosystem of inter-networked textile artisans’ communities at glocal level

Situated play in a tangible interface and adaptive audio museum guide

This paper explores the design issues of 9 situated play within a museum through the study of a 10 museum guide prototype that integrates a tangible interface, audio display, and adaptive modeling. We discuss our use of design ethnography in order to situate our interaction and to investigate the liminal and engagement qualities of a museum visit. The paper provides an overview of our case study and analysis of our user evaluation. We discuss the implications including degrees of balance in the experience design of play in interaction; the challenge in developing a discovery-based information model, and the need for a better understanding of the contextual aspects of tangible user interfaces (TUIs). We conclude that learning effectiveness and functionality can be balanced productively with playful interaction through an adaptive audio and TUI if designers balance the engagement between play and the environment, and the space between imagination and interpretation that links the audio content to the artifacts

Proxemics mobile collocated interactions

Recent research on mobile collocated interactions has been looking at situations in which collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their mobile devices. However, existing practices fail to fully account for the culturally-dependent spatial relationships between people and their digital devices (i.e. the proxemic relationships). Building on the ideas of proxemic interactions, this workshop is motivated by the concept of 'proxemic mobile collocated interactions', to harness new or existing technologies to create engaging and interactionally relevant experiences. Such approaches would allow devices to not only react to presence and interaction, but also other indicators, such as the interpersonal distance people naturally use in everyday life. The aim of this one-day workshop is to bring together a community of researchers, designers and practitioners who are interested in exploring proxemics and mobile collocated interactions

The User Experience of Participation: Tracing the Intersection of Sociotechnical Design and Cultural Practice in Digital Ecosystems

In this dissertation, I combine methods from Technical Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, and User Experience Design to trace the social and creative practices of social web participants. Using actor network theory, I explore the concept of participation as social and creative practice that demands coordinative knowledge work enacted within a cultural space. Leveraging the insight gained from this research, I develop the user experience of participation as a research and design methodology that privileges the movement of people and information in order to structure and re-structure social connections. I explore this methodology through three intersections between people and technology. The first is between the practices of digital participants within online cultures and the policies aimed at regulating their social and creative work. Second, participation is defined in the ways that local exigency of participants intersects with the implementation of regulations and policies through technological design. Finally, a third intersection appears when participants work to restructure their relationships to policies and technologies through coordinative knowledge work that uncovers and links information within digital ecosystems

Research Project as Boundary Object: negotiating the conceptual design of a tool for International Development

This paper reflects on the relationship between who one designs for and what one designs in the unstructured space of designing for political change; in particular, for supporting “International Development” with ICT. We look at an interdisciplinary research project with goals and funding, but no clearly defined beneficiary group at start, and how amorphousness contributed to impact. The reported project researched a bridging tool to connect producers with consumers across global contexts and show players in the supply chain and their circumstances. We explore how both the nature of the research and the tool’s function became contested as work progressed. To tell this tale, we invoke the idea of boundary objects and the value of tacking back and forth between elastic meanings of the project’s artefacts and processes. We examine the project’s role in India, Chile and other arenas to draw out ways that it functioned as a catalyst and how absence of committed design choices acted as an unexpected strength in reaching its goals

Materiality and making in experiential ecologies

PhD Thesi