Entertaining situated messaging at home

Leisure and entertainment-based computing has been traditionally associated with interactive entertainment media and game playing, yet the forms of engagement offered by these technologies only support a small part of how we act when we are at leisure. In this paper, we move away from the paradigm of leisure technology as computer-based entertainment consumption, and towards a broader view of leisure computing. This perspective is more in line with our everyday experience of leisure as an embodied, everyday accomplishment in which people artfully employ the everyday resources in the world around them in carrying out their daily lives outside of work. We develop this extended notion of leisure using data from a field study of domestic communication focusing on asynchronous and situated messaging to explore some of these issues, and develop these findings towards design implications for leisure technologies. Central to our discussion on the normal, everyday and occasioned conduct of leisure lie the notions of playfulness and creativity, the interweaving of the worlds of work and leisure, and in the creation of embodied displays of affect, all of which may be seen manifested in the use of messaging artefacts. This view of technology in support of leisure-in-the-broad is strongly divergent from traditional entertainment computing models in its coupling of the mechanics of the organisation of everyday life to the ways that we make entertainment for ourselves. This recognition allows us to draw specific implications for domestic situated messaging technologies, but also more generally for technology design by tying activities that we tend to regard as purely functional to other multifaceted and leisure-related purposes

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

A sense of place and pervasive computing within the urban landscape

In this paper we report on recent investigations within an ongoing research project, which aims at developing a better understanding of the urban landscape augmented with the digital landscape in the heritage City of Bath. Here we describe early findings from the deployment of a socialiasing digital installation in various locations in the city. The aim is to create a novel urban experience that triggers shared social encounters among friends, observes or strangers. The installation is implemented in the form of a digital urban ground , embeded in the physical surrounding, which acts as a non-traditional interface and a facilitator between people and people and people and their surrounding environment . In this paper we explore the relationship between the urban space and technology driven encounters. We outline initial findings about how people move, congregate and socialize around the digital ground and illustrate the impact of the spatial and syntactical properties on the type of shared interactions in a city context. Finally we discuss initial results and mention briefly our on going work

Sonic souvenirs: exploring the paradoxes of recorded sound for family remembering

Many studies have explored social processes and technologies associated with sharing photos. In contrast, we explore the role of sound as a medium for social reminiscing. We involved 10 families in recording 'sonic souvenirs' of their holidays. They shared and discussed their collections on their return. We compared these sounds with their photo taking activities and reminiscences. Both sounds and pictures triggered active collaborative reminiscing, and attempts to capture iconic representations of events. However sounds differed from photos in that they were more varied, familial and creative. Further, they often expressed the negative or mundane in order to be 'true to life', and were harder to interpret than photos. Finally we saw little use of pure explanatory narrative. We reflect on the relations between sound and family memory and propose new designs on the basis of our findings, to better support the sharing and manipulation of social sounds

Mutual learning as a resource for research design

Copyright 2014 ACM. Mutual learning processes provide the context for this paper. We reflect on the early research design process of an ongoing project that is investigating the potential contributions of the Internet of Things (IoT) to ageing well. While mutual learning is assumed and embedded in Participatory Design tools and methods, it was only when we explicitly used mutual learning processes, as a resource in the research design of the project, that we could make clear and accountable decisions about how to proceed. The paper ends with a reaffirmation of the importance of mutual learning processes in Participatory Design, noting the opportunities, even imperatives, for foregrounding mutual learning processes in the design of IoT applications

ECSCW 2013 Adjunct Proceedings The 13th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 21 - 25. September 2013, Paphos, Cyprus

This volume presents the adjunct proceedings of ECSCW 2013.While the proceedings published by Springer Verlag contains the core of the technical program, namely the full papers, the adjunct proceedings includes contributions on work in progress, workshops and master classes, demos and videos, the doctoral colloquium, and keynotes, thus indicating what our field may become in the future