Communicating for Policy Change

Synthesizes information from a November 2006 GIH Issue Dialogue meeting that explored communications theories and techniques and their application to policy work

Käyttäjäymmärryksen kasvattaminen suunnittelukäytännöillä ketterissä sovelluskehitysprojekteissa

Modern software development aims to produce valuable digital solutions by benefiting from customer- and user-centred agility. These can be supported by design practices, with which user understanding can be deepened. The goal of this thesis was to study how design practices can help small companies to increase their user understanding in agile software development projects. The empirical study was conducted as an insider action research. In this study, four design practices were tested: semi-structured interviews, user stories, scenarios, and prototyping. The four design practices helped to increase user understanding, by explaining who the users are, why they use the product, and how they use it. Semi-structured interviews helped to discover users’ values and motivations to use the current and future versions of the product. User stories allowed for creative thinking and writing of perceived user needs in a clear sentence. Scenarios described realistic stories of users. The stories gave details of the user, their interactions, circumstances, goals, and environment. Prototyping was used alongside the other three design practices to help the users feel and test the product. Testing the product in real context allowed for spontaneous idea creation for system improvement. The results of this thesis indicate that a small company could use semi-structured interviews, user stories, scenarios, and prototyping to increase user understanding in agile software development projects. Increasing user understanding requires careful selection of design practices. The design practices should provide detailed information about who the users are, what their needs and motivations are, and how they would use a product.Nykyaikainen ohjelmistokehitys pyrkii tuottamaan arvokkaita digitaalisia ratkaisuja hyödyntäen asiakas- ja käyttäjäkeskeistä ketteryyttä. Näitä tukevat suunnittelukäytännöt, joilla syvennetään käyttäjäymmärrystä. Tämän työn tavoitteena oli tutkia, kuinka suunnittelukäytännöt voivat auttaa pieniä yrityksiä kasvattamaan käyttäjäymmärrystä ketterissä ohjelmistokehityksen projekteissa. Empiirinen tutkimus toteutettiin toimintatutkimuksena, jonka toteuttaja oli diplomityön tekijä. Tutkimuksessa testattiin neljää suunnittelukäytäntöä: puolistrukturoituja haastatteluja, käyttäjätarinoita, skenaarioita ja prototypointia. Nämä suunnittelukäytännöt auttoivat käyttäjäymmärryksen kasvattamisessa. Käyttäjäymmärryksellä selitetään tuotteen käyttäjäryhmät, syyt tuotteen käytölle ja kuinka tuotetta käytetään. Puolistrukturoidut haastattelut auttoivat löytämään käyttäjien arvoja ja motivaatioita tuotteen nyky- ja tulevien versioiden käytölle. Käyttäjätarinat sallivat luovaa ajattelua ja havaittujen käyttäjätarpeiden kirjoittamista selkeinä lauseina. Skenaarioilla kuvattiin realistisia tarinoita käyttäjistä. Tarinoissa kuvattiin yksityiskohtaisesti käyttäjät, heidän vuorovaikutukset, olosuhteet, tavoitteet ja ympäristö. Prototypointia käytettiin kolmen muun suunnittelukäytäntöjen ohessa testauksen ja kokeilun tukena. Tuotteen testaus oikeassa kontekstissa mahdollisti spontaanin tuotekehitysideoinnin. Tämän työn tulokset viittaavat siihen, että pienet yritykset voisivat käyttää puolistrukturoituja haastatteluja, käyttäjätarinoita, skenaarioita ja prototypointia käyttäjäymmärryksen kasvattamiseen ketterissä ohjelmistokehitysprojekteissa. Käyttäjäymmärryksen kasvattaminen vaatii käytettävien suunnittelukäytäntöjen huolellista valintaa. Niiden tulee vastata yksityiskohtaisesti siihen, keitä käyttäjät ovat, mitkä ovat heidän tarpeensa ja motivaationsa sekä kuinka he käyttävät tuotetta

Tools and Methods to Analyze Multimodal Data in Collaborative Design Ideation

Collaborative design ideation is typically characterized by informal acts of sketching, annotation, and discussion. Designers have always used the pencil-and-paper medium for this activity, partly because of the flexibility of the medium, and partly because the ambiguous and ill-defined nature of conceptual design cannot easily be supported by computers. However, recent computational tools for conceptual design have leveraged the availability of hand-held computing devices for creating and sharing ideas. In order to provide computer support for collaborative ideation in a way that augments traditional media rather than imitates it, it is necessary to study the affordances made available by digital media for this process, and to study designers\u27 cognitive and collaborative processes when using such media. In this thesis, we present tools and methods to help make sense of unstructured verbal and sketch data generated during collaborative design, with a view to better understand these collaborative and cognitive processes. This thesis has three main contributions

From the Ground Up: Designerly Knowledge in Human-Drone Interaction

There are flying robots out there — you may have seen and heard them, droning over your head. Drones have expanded our human capacities, lifting our sight to the skies, but not without generating intricate experiences. How are these machines being designed and researched? What design methods, approaches, and philosophies are relevant to the study of the development (or decline) of drones in society? In this thesis, I argue that we must re-frame how drones are studied, from the ground up, through a design stance. I invite you to take a journey with me, with changing lenses from the work of others to my own intimate relationship with this technology. My work relies on exploring the fringes of design research: understudied groups such as children, alternative design approaches such as soma design, and peripheral methods such as autoethnography.This thesis includes four articles discussing perspectives on designerly knowledge, composing a frame surrounding the notion that we may be missing out on some of the aspects of the wicked nature of human-drone interaction (HDI) design. The methods are poised on phenomenology and narratives, and supported by the assumption that any subject of study is a sociotechnical assemblage. Starting through a first-person perspective, I offer a contribution to the gap in research through a longitudinal autoethnographic study conducted with my children. The second paper comes in the form of a pictorial expressing a first-person experience during a design research workshop, and what that meant for my relationship with drones as a research material. The third paper leaps into a Research through Design project, challenging the solutionist drone and offering instead the first steps in a concept-driven design of the unlikely pairing of drones and breathing. The fourth paper returns to the pictorial form, suggesting a method for visual conversations between researchers through the tangible qualities of sketches and illustrations. Central to this thesis, is the argument for designerly approaches in HDI and championing the need for alternative forms of publication and research. To that end, I include two publications in the form of pictorials: a publication format relying on visual knowledge and with growing interest in the HCI community

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis dissertation establishes a new visualization design process model devised to guide visualization designers in building more effective and useful visualization systems and tools. The novelty of this framework includes its flexibility for iteration, actionability for guiding visualization designers with concrete steps, concise yet methodical definitions, and connections to other visualization design models commonly used in the field of data visualization. In summary, the design activity framework breaks down the visualization design process into a series of four design activities: understand, ideate, make, and deploy. For each activity, the framework prescribes a descriptive motivation, list of design methods, and expected visualization artifacts. To elucidate the framework, two case studies for visualization design illustrate these concepts, methods, and artifacts in real-world projects in the field of cybersecurity. For example, these projects employ user-centered design methods, such as personas and data sketches, which emphasize our teams' motivations and visualization artifacts with respect to the design activity framework. These case studies also serve as examples for novice visualization designers, and we hypothesized that the framework could serve as a pedagogical tool for teaching and guiding novices through their own design process to create a visualization tool. To externally evaluate the efficacy of this framework, we created worksheets for each design activity, outlining a series of concrete, tangible steps for novices. In order to validate the design worksheets, we conducted 13 student observations over the course of two months, received 32 online survey responses, and performed a qualitative analysis of 11 in-depth interviews. Students found the worksheets both useful and effective for framing the visualization design process. Next, by applying the design activity framework to technique-driven and evaluation-based research projects, we brainstormed possible extensions to the design model. Lastly, we examined implications of the design activity framework and present future work in this space. The visualization community is challenged to consider how to more effectively describe, capture, and communicate the complex, iterative nature of data visualization design throughout research, design, development, and deployment of visualization systems and tools

Threat Modeling of Cyber-Physical Systems in Practice

Traditional Cyber-physical Systems(CPSs) were not built with cybersecurity in mind. They operated on separate Operational Technology (OT) networks. As these systems now become more integrated with Information Technology (IT) networks based on IP, they expose vulnerabilities that can be exploited by the attackers through these IT networks. The attackers can control such systems and cause behavior that jeopardizes the performance and safety measures that were originally designed into the system. In this paper, we explore the approaches to identify threats to CPSs and ensure the quality of the created threat models. The study involves interviews with eleven security experts working in security consultation companies, software engineering companies, an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM),and ground and areal vehicles integrators. We found through these interviews that the practitioners use a combination of various threat modeling methods, approaches, and standards together when they perform threat modeling of given CPSs. key challenges practitioners face are: they cannot transfer the threat modeling knowledge that they acquire in a cyber-physical domain to other domains, threat models of modified systems are often not updated, and the reliance on mostly peer-evaluation and quality checklists to ensure the quality of threat models. The study warns about the difficulty to develop secure CPSs and calls for research on developing practical threat modeling methods for CPSs, techniques for continuous threat modeling, and techniques to ensure the quality of threat models

Quantifying diversity in user experience

Evaluation should be integral to any design activity. Evaluation in innovative product development practices however is highly complicated. It often needs to be applied to immature prototypes, while at the same time users’ responses may greatly vary across different individuals and situations. This thesis has focused on methods and tools for inquiring into users’ experiences with interactive products. More specifically, it had three objectives: a) to conceptualize the notion of diversity in subjective judgments of users’ experiences with interactive products, b) to establish empirical evidence for the prevalence of diversity, and c) to provide a number of methodological tools for the study of diversity in the context of product development. Two critical sources of diversity in the context of users’ experiences with interactive products were identified and respective methodological solutions were proposed: a) understanding interpersonal diversity through personal attribute judgments, and b) understanding the dynamics of experience through experience narratives. Personal Attribute Judgments, and in particular, the Repertory Grid Technique, is proposed as an alternative to standardized psychometric scales, in measuring users’ responses to artifacts in the context of parallel design. It is argued that traditional approaches that rely on the a-priori definition of the measures by the researchers have at least two limitations. First, such approaches are inherently limited as researchers might fail to consider a given dimension as relevant for the given product and context, or they might simply lack validated measurement scales for a relevant dimension. Secondly, such approaches assume that participants are able to interpret and position a given statement that is defined by the researcher to their own context. Recent literature has challenged this assumption, suggesting that in certain cases participants are unable to interpret the personal relevance of the statement in their own context, and might instead employ shallow processing, that is respond to surface features of the language rather than attaching personal relevance to the question. In contrast, personal attributes are elicited from each individual respondent, instead of being a-priori imposed by the experimenter, and thus are supposed to be highly relevant to the individual. However, personal attributes require substantially more complex quantitative analysis procedures. It is illustrated that traditional analysis procedures fail to bring out the richness of the personal attribute judgments and two new Multi-Dimensional Scaling procedures that extract multiple complementary views from such datasets are proposed. An alternative approach for the measurement of the dynamics of experience over time is proposed that relies on a) the retrospective elicitation of idiosyncratic selfreports of one’s experiences with a product, the so-called experience narratives, and b) the extraction of generalized knowledge from these narratives through computational content analysis techniques. iScale, a tool that aims at increasing users’ accuracy and effectiveness in recalling their experiences with a product is proposed. iScale uses sketching in imposing a structured process in the reconstruction of one’s experiences from memory. Two different versions of iScale, each grounded in a distinct theory of how people reconstruct emotional experiences from memory, were developed and empirically tested. A computational approach for the extraction of generalized knowledge from experience narratives, that combines traditional coding procedures with computational approaches for assessing the semantic similarity between documents, is proposed and compared with traditional content analysis. Through these two methodological contributions, this thesis argues against averaging in the subjective evaluation of interactive products. It proposes the development of interactive tools that can assist designers in moving across multiple levels of abstractions of empirical data, as design-relevant knowledge might be found on all these levels

Portrayal: Leveraging NLP and Visualization for Analyzing Fictional Characters

Many creative writing tasks (e.g., fiction writing) require authors to write complex narrative components (e.g., characterization, events, dialogue) over the course of a long story. Similarly, literary scholars need to manually annotate and interpret texts to understand such abstract components. In this paper, we explore how Natural Language Processing (NLP) and interactive visualization can help writers and scholars in such scenarios. To this end, we present Portrayal, an interactive visualization system for analyzing characters in a story. Portrayal extracts natural language indicators from a text to capture the characterization process and then visualizes the indicators in an interactive interface. We evaluated the system with 12 creative writers and scholars in a one-week-long qualitative study. Our findings suggest Portrayal helped writers revise their drafts and create dynamic characters and scenes. It helped scholars analyze characters without the need for any manual annotation, and design literary arguments with concrete evidence