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

Reflecting on the usability of research on culture in designing interaction

The concept of culture has been attractive to producers of interactive\ud systems who are willing to design useful and relevant solutions to users\ud increasingly located in culturally diverse contexts. Despite a substantial body of\ud research on culture and technology, interaction designers have not always been\ud able to apply these research outputs to effectively define requirements for\ud culturally diverse users. This paper frames this issue as one of understanding of\ud the different paradigms underpinning the cultural models being applied to\ud interface development and research. Drawing on different social science theories,\ud the authors discuss top-down and bottom-up perspectives in the study of users‟\ud cultural differences and discuss the extent to which each provides usable design\ud knowledge. The case is made for combining bottom-up and top-down perspectives\ud into a sociotechnical approach that can produce knowledge useful and usable by\ud interaction designers. This is illustrated with a case study about the design of\ud interactive systems for farmers in rural Kenya

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

Embodied Musical Interaction

Music is a natural partner to human-computer interaction, offering tasks and use cases for novel forms of interaction. The richness of the relationship between a performer and their instrument in expressive musical performance can provide valuable insight to human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers interested in applying these forms of deep interaction to other fields. Despite the longstanding connection between music and HCI, it is not an automatic one, and its history arguably points to as many differences as it does overlaps. Music research and HCI research both encompass broad issues, and utilize a wide range of methods. In this chapter I discuss how the concept of embodied interaction can be one way to think about music interaction. I propose how the three “paradigms” of HCI and three design accounts from the interaction design literature can serve as a lens through which to consider types of music HCI. I use this conceptual framework to discuss three different musical projects—Haptic Wave, Form Follows Sound, and BioMuse

Hierarchy-in-flux: Co-evolving a distributed user interface for orbiting robots

The role of context has been an important focus for Human-Computer Interaction research since the beginning of the Second Wave of HCI. While different theoretical frameworks within the HCI community have different approaches to analysing context, they do so always with the object of understanding its effects on human-machine interaction, often with the larger goal of generating insights into future designs. The forces that shape context itself are typically ignored in these analyses because they are not considered relevant to the interaction itself, which is the focus of HCI. Yet if these forces were to create different contexts for interaction those changes would be relevant to HCI research. This suggests that HCI might benefit from techniques that analyse and design for the creation of the institutional structures that constrain human-machine interactions. We present the notions of multi-scale analysis and multi-scale design as terms which describe approaches that seek to engage the different disciplinary proficiencies that create the context for interaction. In doing so we make the case for a new kind of design education that strives to create multidisciplinary designers capable of harnessing the dynamics of systems at different levels of abstraction to achieve outcomes that exceed what we might expect from HCI alone

A hauntology of participatory speculation

In this paper I conduct a hauntological analysis of participatory speculation, within the context of a study into understanding the potential for increasing recognition of LGBT+ young people’s experiences of hate crime and hate incidents. Hauntology provides a means to further situate accounts of speculation in Participatory Design by sensitising us to the interplay of the virtual and the actual that enables us to expand our sense of the possible. Through understanding how participatory speculation is shaped by absent presences, this paper contributes to the discussion of post-solutionist practices in PD that foster care and responsibility across multiple sites and forms of participation in the face of issues that resist resolution. I conclude by considering by translating speculation into shared spaces of wonder, Participatory Design can foster ethical commitments that stay with the trouble

Collaborative Learning and Knowledge Transfer in Consciousness Society

Starting from the expression "workplace learning†which states that the use of personal computers at work or at school reflects learning activities and work activities which are interchangeable at individual level, this paper presents collaborative models dedicated to processes of teaching, learning, assessment and research in education. One of the most important activities is represented by computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) which, from its occurrence, presented a special interest for researchers in informatics. CSCL is based on human-computer interaction (HCI) and on computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). CSCL promotes in turn the development of computer supported collaborative research (CSCR). Information and communications technologies represent not only a media support but, most of all, a mean for accessing resources worldwide. The development of the information technology and of the information society brought benefits both to the traditional form of education, and to the distance education represented by the assisted instruction. The evolution of the information society led to the emergence of the society based on knowledge which represents an intermediary step between information society and consciousness society, who wants to be a moral society. This article highlights the transfer of data, information and knowledge (explicit and implicit) during assisted instruction processes along with the possibility to create collaborative content in consciousness society.CSCW, CSCL, CSCR Assisted Instruction, Consciousness Society

PosterVote:expanding the action repertoire for local political activism

Online and digital technologies support and extend the action repertoires of localized social movements. In this paper we examine the ways by which digital technologies can support ‘on-the-ground ’ activist communities in the development of social movements. After identifying some of the challenges of deploying conventional voting and consultation technologies for activism, we examine situated political action in local communities through the design and deployment of a low-cost community voting prototype, PosterVote. We deploy PosterVote in two case studies with two local community organizations identifying the features that supported or hindered grassroots democratic practices. Through interviews with these communities, we explore the design of situated voting systems to support grassroots democratic practices and participation within an ecology of social action. Author Keywords Democracy; activism; participation; e-votin