Situated dissemination : critiquing the materiality and visuality of HCI knowledges through a local dissemination practice

PhD ThesisThis practice-led thesis investigates how research dissemination is currently understood as a practice in HCI. The focus on understanding research dissemination as a practice is motivated by recent debates within HCI communities about the disciplinary basis of HCI, by increasing competition amongst HCI conferences to expand their audiences, and by the emergence of new dissemination forms to accommodate growing interdisciplinary work in HCI. Organisations such as the ACM SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction) regularly promote new dissemination forms, however these top-down calls for submissions have not yet generated critical discussions about the materiality of HCI knowledges, and the impact of new dissemination media on that materiality. This is the focus of this thesis, which investigates the way macro dissemination cultures in HCI impact on micro dissemination practice in an HCI workplace and identifies how the future practice of dissemination in HCI may be implicated. The investigation is carried out through three workplace-based case studies, which draw on ethnographic principles, and are informed by selected feminist critiques of science, theories of representation and by performance arts practice. These case studies form an overarching process of critiquing research dissemination in situ, as well as illustrating the developing methodological approach, which moves from participant observation to performance and practice based engagements. All three case studies are located in Open Lab, Newcastle University, where I worked and where I was based as a PhD student between 2013 to 2016. Chapters 4-6 document and critique how research dissemination is organised as routine work in an HCI workplace, and discuss how reflexive accounts of research may be suppressed or diminished by routinised dissemination practice. I describe the production of CHI videos as a genre of research videos in HCI. I present the results of focus groups and surveys on CHI video, in which I draw from my freelance videography experience and new membership of the HCI workplace to unpick the visuality of CHI videos as a new medium of dissemination in HCI. Secondly, I discuss my participation in the organisation and production of another dissemination artefact, the CHI booklets. I illustrate how the production of the booklets is routinised and carried out by different members of the research group. I draw connections between local dissemination practice to a wider network of the ACM SIGCHI iv community. I discuss how the materiality of HCI knowledges is addressed through the production of dissemination artefacts. Lastly, in chapter 6, I present the process of making research fictions (RF). I develop such making as a concept to engage HCI practitioners in performatively critiquing local dissemination practice. Based on my arts practice I interrogate the materiality of dissemination and utilise the theory of reenactment from performance arts to produce a series of alternative dissemination artefacts in the workplace. In conclusion, I identify the shortage of critical dialogues and methodological resources within HCI for fully understanding and engaging with dissemination practice. Drawing on the case studies, I offer a theory of ‘Situated Dissemination’ (SD) which contributes to the literature in HCI on embodied thinking/interaction/design, as well as extending HCI methodologies on workplace studies. The theory of SD is offered as a framework for critiquing dissemination practice in HCI and as providing innovative alternatives to routinised dissemination practice as situated and embodied practice in HCI workplaces

An Uneasy Terrain: An Immersive and Speculative Research-Creation

This thesis contemplates the “politicization of vision” by exploring contemporary visualizing technologies that use body and facial recognition to map data in physical and virtual spaces. Through a technological review, this thesis analyzes the emergence of the “social media filter” and examines how this technology not only allows users to morph, alter and extend their digital bodies, but also creates data. Through the literature review I argue that this data contributes to “knowledge creation” for artificial intelligence systems, hence politicizing technologies of vision. Informed by my role as an “active subject” living in a surveilled urban environment, I pay attention to emotions as a guide throughout my creative process. Methodologically, this research-creation renders an immersive and speculative installation engaging bodies in physical space, whereby the audience-participant is materially and virtually present in the projected and captured data. This research-creation contains two pieces that work in tandem; the written document and the installation together make up “An Uneasy Terrain”

Charting a course to an emerging field of ‘research engagement studies’: A conceptual metasynthesis

The past decades in the UK have witnessed renewed interest by policymakers, research funders and research institutions in the engagement of non-academic individuals, groups and organizations with research processes and products. There has been a broad consensus that better engagement leads to better impact, as well as significant learning around understanding engagement and improving practice. However, this sits in tension to a parallel trend in British higher education policy that reduces the field to a narrow definition of quantitatively measured impacts attributed to individual researchers, projects and institutions. In response, this article argues for the mobilization of an emerging field of ‘research engagement studies’ that brings together an extensive and diverse existing literature around understandings and experiences of engagement, and has the potential to contribute both strategically and conceptually to the broader impact debate. However, to inform this, some stocktaking is needed to trace the different traditions back to their conceptual roots and chart out a common set of themes, approaches and framings across the literature. In response, this article maps the literature by developing a genealogy of understandings of research engagement within five UK-based domains of policy and practice: higher education; science and technology; public policy (health, social care and education); international development; and community development. After identifying patterns and trends within and across these clusters, the article concludes by proposing a framework for comparing understandings of engagement, and uses this framework to highlight trends, gaps and ways forward for the emerging field

Imaginative Value Sensitive Design: How Moral Imagination Exceeds Moral Law Theories in Informing Responsible Innovation

Safe-by-Design (SBD) frameworks for the development of emerging technologies have become an ever more popular means by which scholars argue that transformative emerging technologies can safely incorporate human values. One such popular SBD methodology is called Value Sensitive Design (VSD). A central tenet of this design methodology is to investigate stakeholder values and design those values into technologies during early stage research and development (R&D). To accomplish this, the VSD framework mandates that designers consult the philosophical and ethical literature to best determine how to weigh moral trade-offs. However, the VSD framework also concedes the universalism of moral values, particularly the values of freedom, autonomy, equality trust and privacy justice. This paper argues that the VSD methodology, particularly applied to nano-bio-info-cogno (NBIC) technologies, has an insufficient grounding for the determination of moral values. As such, an exploration of the value-investigations of VSD are deconstructed to illustrate both its strengths and weaknesses. This paper also provides possible modalities for the strengthening of the VSD methodology, particularly through the application of moral imagination and how moral imagination exceed the boundaries of moral intuitions in the development of novel technologies

Writing PD: accounting for socially-engaged research

As participants in participatory process, PD academics report on the practices and outcomes of their work and thereby shape what is known of individual projects and the wider field of participatory design. At present, there is a dominant form for this reporting, led by academic publishing models. Yet, the politics of describing others has received little discussion. Our field brings diverging sensibilities to co-design, conducting experiments and asking what participation means in different contexts. How do we match this ingenuity in designing with ingenuity of reporting? Should designers, researchers and other participants all be writing up participatory work, using more novel and tailored approaches? Should we write more open and playful collaborative texts? Within some academic discourse, considerable value is placed on reflexivity, positionality, inclusivity and auto-ethnography as part of reflecting. Yet, PD spends no time in discussing its written outputs. Drawing on the results of a PDC’16 workshop, I encourage us to challenge this silence and discuss “Writing PD”

The Mundane Computer: Non-Technical Design Challenges Facing Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence

Interdisciplinary collaboration, to include those who are not natural scientists, engineers and computer scientists, is inherent in the idea of ubiquitous computing, as formulated by Mark Weiser in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, ubiquitous computing has remained largely a computer science and engineering concept, and its non-technical side remains relatively underdeveloped. The aim of the article is, first, to clarify the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration envisaged by Weiser. Second, the difficulties of understanding the everyday and weaving ubiquitous technologies into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it, as conceived by Weiser, are explored. The contributions of Anne Galloway, Paul Dourish and Philip Agre to creating an understanding of everyday life relevant to the development of ubiquitous computing are discussed, focusing on the notions of performative practice, embodied interaction and contextualisation. Third, it is argued that with the shift to the notion of ambient intelligence, the larger scale socio-economic and socio-political dimensions of context become more explicit, in contrast to the focus on the smaller scale anthropological study of social (mainly workplace) practices inherent in the concept of ubiquitous computing. This can be seen in the adoption of the concept of ambient intelligence within the European Union and in the focus on rebalancing (personal) privacy protection and (state) security in the wake of 11 September 2001. Fourth, the importance of adopting a futures-oriented approach to discussing the issues arising from the notions of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence is stressed, while the difficulty of trying to achieve societal foresight is acknowledged

Introduction:More-than-human participatory research: contexts, challenges, possibilities

This collection arises from an AHRC-funded research project called In Conversation with. . .: codesign with more-than-human communities that ran in 2013, as well as a series of panels held at the RGS-IBG International Conference in 2014 on the Co-Production of knowledge with non-humans. In both cases we sought to explore the notion of a ‘more-than-human participatory research’. Yet to say ‘more-than-human participatory research’ seems like too much of a mouthful. These are words that do not roll easily off the tongue, but instead suggest some kind of cacophony, some noisy dissonance. These are words that seem like they should not really sit beside each other, words that do not quite make sense

Co-designing collaborative care work through ethnography

This paper focuses on instances of ethnographically-informed design ofcollaborative systems as they emerge from two European projects that aim to developsociotechnical infrastructures based on more just collaborative practices. We outline anumber of issues emerged related to the role of language, the relationship betweendigital and physical public engagement, and commonality, and their impact on designprocesses. Our contribution aims to uncover how ethnographically-informed design cansupport caring-based practices of social collaboration in different contexts