First person HCI research:Tapping into designers’ tacit experiences

The emphasis on user experience, and bodily-driven approaches in HCI has paved the way towards a richer understanding of felt-life experience. Unlike users however, designers need specific methods to access such experiences and to work with them in their design. This paper presents three cases studies where we employed first person research method to design or evaluate interactive systems, or where we directly explored professional designers’ first person accounts of felt-life experiences in their practice. We conclude with a reflection on opportunities and challenges of this methodological approach in HCI, and three suggestions for first person HCI research

Representing older people: towards meaningful images of the user in design scenarios

Designing for older people requires the consideration of a range of difficult and sometimes highly personal design problems. Issues such as fear, loneliness, dependency, and physical decline may be difficult to observe or discuss in interviews. Pastiche scenarios and pastiche personae are techniques that employ characters to create a space for the discussion of new technological developments and as a means to explore user experience. This paper argues that the use of such characters can help to overcome restrictive notions of older people by disrupting designers' prior assumptions. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences using pastiche techniques in two separate technology design projects that sought to address the needs of older people. In the first case pastiche scenarios were developed by the designers of the system and used as discussion documents with users. In the second case, pastiche personae were used by groups of users themselves to generate scenarios which were scribed for later use by the design team. We explore how the use of fictional characters and settings can generate new ideas and undermine rhetorical devices within scenarios that attempt to fit characters to the technology, rather than vice versa. To assist in future development of pastiche techniques in designing for older people, we provide an array of fictional older characters drawn from literary and popular culture.</p

(Dis)abling Effects of Technology Use and Socio-material Practices

This paper reports on observations and discussions conducted through a weekly technology support service at a residential care facility for senior citizens. The intention with the fieldwork was to get a better understanding of the knowledge and relations seniors, living in smart homes, have with modern digital technologies. The findings are presented in the form of two vignettes and analysed through the lens of actor-network theory. The analysis shows how the use of technology is immersed in a web of socio-technical relations. It also shows that these relations contribute to dynamically enable or disable actors in a variety of ways. The contribution of this work is to give some reflections on how socio-technical structures affect the character of ability and disability, and the implications this has for the design of welfare technology

Do we ruin the moment? Exploring the design of novel capturing technologies

Copyright © 2015 ACM. By capturing our experiences we often strive to better remember them in the future. However, the act of media capturing also influences these same experiences in the present, an area which is underexplored. This paper describes a study with the aim to inform the design of novel media capturing strategies. Adopting an approach of defamiliarization based on intervention and reflection, we strive to gain insights in the influences of future capturing technologies on the experience of a day out. We conducted an exploratory study in which 28 students went on a day out and used a variety of capturing strategies. Individual and group reflections on the experience during this day identified several important aspects that media capturing influences: engagement, perception & attention and social activity. The paper concludes with implications for design and proposes three potential future directions for media capturing, that instead of disturbing the moment enhance the experience

Designing Futures From the Inside

By looking at the design process of a narrative-based design fiction, this paper introduces new areas of exploration for futures practices concerned with human-scale futures — the internal worlds of daily lives. Called Trina, the design fiction imagines new practices through the simultaneous creation of storyworld, prototypes, characters, and plot, with an emphasis on relations as opposed to things. By theorizing the design fiction creators as participant-observers in a world that emerges from a field of forces (Ingold, 2013), the paper concludes with questions that arise from a method that may help explore the interconnectedness of futures “from the inside.

An Anxious Alliance

This essay presents a multi-year autoethnographic perspective on the use of personal fitness and self-tracking technologies to lose weight. In doing so, it examines the rich and contradictory relationships with ourselves and our world that are generated around these systems, and argues that the efforts to gain control and understanding of one's self through them need not be read as a capitulation to rationalizing forces, or the embrace of utopian ideals, but as an ongoing negotiation of the boundaries and meanings of self within an anxious alliance of knowledge, bodies, devices, and data. I discuss how my widening inquiry into these tools and practices took me from a solitary practice and into a community of fellow travellers, and from the pursuit of a single body goal into a continually renewing project of personal possibility

Exploring and Designing for Memory Impairments in Depression

Depression is an affective disorder with distinctive autobiographical memory impairments, including negative bias, overgeneralization and reduced positivity. Several clinical therapies address these impairments, and there is an opportunity to develop new supports for treatment by considering depression-associated memory impairments within design. We report on interviews with ten experts in treating depression, with expertise in both neuropsychology and cognitive behavioral therapies. The interview explores approaches for addressing each of these memory impairments. We found consistent use of positive memories for treating all memory impairments, the challenge of direct retrieval, and the need to support the experience of positive memories. Our findings open up new design opportunities for memory technologies for depression, including positive memory banks for active encoding and selective retrieval, novel cues for supporting generative retrieval, and novel interfaces to strengthen the reliving of positive memories

Towards Affective Chronometry:Exploring Smart Materials and Actuators for Real-time Representations of Changes in Arousal

Increasing HCI work on affective interfaces aimed to capture and communicate users’ emotions in order to support self-understanding. While most such interfaces employ traditional screen-based displays, more novel approaches have started to investigate smart materials and actuators based prototypes. In this paper, we describe our exploration of smart materials and actuators leveraging their temporal qualities as well as common metaphors for real-time representation of changes in arousal through visual and haptic modalities. This exploration provided rationale for the design and implementation of six novel wrist-worn prototypes evaluated with 12 users who wore them over 2 days. Our findings describe how people use them in daily life, and how their material-driven qualities such as responsiveness, duration, rhythm, inertia, aliveness and range shape people’s emotion identification, attribution, and regulation. Our findings led to four design implications including support for affective chronometry for both raise and decay time of emotional response, design for slowness, and for expressiveness

Interaction Aesthetics In and Beyond the Flow

Although almost two decades have passed since the term aesthetics of interaction made its appearance in design-oriented Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), the actual understanding of the concept remains fuzzy and focused on the description of qualities of what constitutes an aesthetic experience. However, by trying to describe specific aesthetic qualities emerging from technology encounters, we risk offering endless definitions of potential aesthetic traits, mostly fixated on pleasurable interactions. This approach may discard other interactive expressions that could potentially lead us to meaningful insights. Drawing on the similarities between John Dewey's aesthetic experiences, Eugene Gendlin's process model, and Martin Heidegger’s analysis of tool use, this article offers a theoretical framework towards a broader, systematized view of aesthetics of interaction. To do so, the discussion exemplifies a series of phenomenological experiences ranging from transparency to breakdown: two opposites in the understanding of how technologies reveal themselves