Refining Design Principles for Value-Sensitive Digital Social Innovation to Support Homeless Neighbors

Homelessness is a major global challenge. It can have a negative impact on people’s social, physical, and psychological well-being, which makes those experiencing homelessness a particularly vulnerable group in society. Digital social innovations (DSIs) try to address social issues such as homelessness with the help of digital solutions. Since homeless neighbors are vulnerable, DSIs need to be designed and developed to fit their values and needs. Prior research has contributed design principles (DPs) to be acted upon for the creation of value-sensitive DSIs. However, these DPs have only been abstracted based on one action design research project, implicating a low projectability level. By analyzing these DPs’ fitness within currently available DSI applications to support homeless neighbors, we further codify, generalize, and refine them, inducing higher projectability. Researchers and practitioners can draw on our refined DPs to better understand value-sensitive DSI projects and simultaneously use this knowledge for instantiations

The skype paradox:Homelessness and selective intimacy in the use of communications technology

Digital technologies are likely to be appropriated by the homeless just as they are by other segments of society. However, these appropriations will reflect the particularities of their circumstances. What are these appropriations? Are they beneficial or effective? Can Skype, as a case in point, assuage the social disconnection that must be, for many, the experience of being homeless? This paper analyses some evidence about these questions and, in particular, the ways communications media are selected, oriented to and accounted for by the homeless young. Using data from a small corpus of interviews, it examines the specific ways in which choice of communication (face-to-face, social media, or video, etc.), are described by these individuals as elected for tactical and strategic reasons having to do with managing their family relations. These relations are massively important both in terms of how communications media are deployed, and in terms of being one of the sources of the homeless state the young find themselves in. The paper examines some of the methodical ways these issues are articulated and the type of ‘causal facticity’ thereby constituted in interview talk. The paper also remarks on the paradoxical problem that technologies like Skype provide: at once allowing people in the general to communicate but in ways that the homeless young want to resist in the particular. The consequences of this for the shaping of communications technology in the future are remarked upon. © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Provocations from #vanlife: Investigating Life and Work in a Community Extensively Using Technology Not Designed for Them

Research on how lived experiences with technology intersect with home and work are core themes within HCI. Prior work has primarily focused on conventional life and work in Western countries. However, the unconventional is becoming conventional—several rising subcultures are coming into prominence due to socio-economic pressures, aided by social media. One example—#vanlife—is now practised by an estimated three million people in North America. #vanlife combines travel, home, and work by their occupants (vanlifers) living full-time in cargo vans that they usually convert themselves into living spaces. We present a portrait of vanlifers’ current technology practices gleaned through ~200 hours of fieldwork and interviews. Following a thematic analysis of our data, we identified unique opportunities for integrating technology across culture, design, homesteading, offline organization, and gaming. We have distilled these opportunities into eleven provocations to inspire critical design and informed inquiry for technological interventions for #vanlife.Funder 1, NSERC Discovery Grant 2016-04422 || Funder 2, NSERC Discovery Accelerator Grant 492970-2016 || Funder 3, NSERC CREATE Saskatchewan-Waterloo Games User Research (SWaGUR) Grant 479724-2016 || Funder 4, Ontario Early Researcher Award ER15-11-18

Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with

Homeless young people and living with personal digital artifacts

This paper reports on an investigation of how homeless young people hold themselves in relation to personal digital artifacts. Twelve participants, aged 19-29, took part in semi-structured interviews. Participants answered questions about the acquisition and disposition of personal artifacts, digital and non-digital, including mobile phones, music players, and wallets. The analysis of the interview transcripts reveals that young people often part with their digital artifacts in order to meet immediate needs, including the need to create and reciprocate goodwill. This contingent holding of personal artifacts illuminates both the ordinary and extraordinary circumstances of homelessness. The paper concludes with a discussion of constraints and implications for the design of information systems for improving the welfare of homeless young people. Author Keywords Homeless young people, attachment, personal digita

How does the use of mobile phones by 16-24 year old socially excluded women affect their capabilities?

This research looks at the impact of mobile phone use on the lives and opportunities of 16-24 year-old socially excluded women, using a novel, cross-disciplinary framework of the capability approach and affordances. Fieldwork took the form of semi-structured interviews in 2013-14 with 30 women between the ages of 16-24, and four youth workers. The instrumental affordances of mobile phones are examined to understand whether they provide a means to address issues relating to work, health, education and housing. The impact of the maintenance and communicative affordances of mobile phones on women’s lives and relationships is also critically examined. The fieldwork showed that respondents were making limited use of instrumental affordances to address issues of social exclusion. Poverty impacted on women’s mobile phone use: they lacked funds to repair their phones and experienced intermittent connectivity. Respondents were often paying a high proportion of their income for their mobile phones, going over call limits and breaking contracts. Mobile phones were contributing to a ‘digitally gendered’ identity, including technology-facilitated sexual harassment and gendered communicative practices. Economic and social circumstances meant that half of respondents were reliant on these devices for their Internet connection, and thus for a wide range of instrumental purposes. This demonstrates the value of research on women’s use of mobile phones that is alive not just to gendered technology use, but also to structural issues of class and poverty. This study shows the strength of cross-disciplinary approaches to studies on the social effects of inequalities of access to digital tools, particularly in the use of theories from the field of human computer interaction to ‘materialise’ understanding of the relationship between social and digital exclusion. It also makes a significant contribution to knowledge on the use of mobile phones by socially excluded young women in the UK