Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds

TaskCam: Designing and Testing an Open Tool for Cultural Probes Studies

TaskCams are simple digital cameras intended to serve as a tool for Cultural Probe studies and made available by the Interaction Research Studio via open-source distribution. In conjunction with an associated website, instructions and videos, they represent a novel strategy for disseminating and facilitating a research methodology. At the same time, they provide a myriad of options for customisation and modification, allowing researchers to adopt and adapt them to their needs. In the first part of this paper, the design team describes the rationale and design of the TaskCams and the tactics developed to make them publicly available. In the second part, the story is taken up by designers from the Everyday Design Studio, who assembled their own TaskCams and customised them extensively for a Cultural Probe study they ran for an ongoing project. Rather than discussing the results of their study, we focus on how their experiences reveal some of the issues both in producing and using open-source products such as these. These suggest the potential of TaskCams to support design-led user studies more generally

Making Up Instruments: Design Fiction for Value Discovery in Communities of Musical Practice

The design of a new technology entails the materialisation of values emerging from the specific community, culture and context in which that technology is created. Within the domain of musical interaction, HCI research often examines new digital tools and technologies which can carry unstated cultural assumptions. This paper takes a step back to present a value discovery exercise exploring the breadth of perspectives different communities might have in relation to the values inscribed in fictional technologies for musical interaction. We conducted a hands-on activity in which musicians active in different contexts were invited to envision not-yet-existent musical instruments. The activity revealed several sources of influence on participants’ artefacts, including cultural background, instrumental training, and prior experience with music technology. Our discussion highlights the importance of cultural awareness and value rationality for the design of interactive systems within and beyond the musical domain

Self-Obviating Systems and their Application to Sustainability

Most research in computing and information science reinforces the premise that information and communications technology (ICT) can be productively applied even more broadly than it is at present. A recent thread of research in sustainable HCI, however, has focused on the possibility that there are many situations where less ICT, not more, may be desirable. We envision an adaptation of this premise, where the goal is not just to consciously omit or remove ICT systems, but rather to create systems explicitly designed to make themselves superfluous through their use. Such a system—one in which the successful operation of the system in the short term renders it superfluous in the long term—could be called a “self-obviating system”. We present a case study in the sustainable food domain for a context in which self-obviating systems could be useful, and a typology of self-obviating systems that could be relevant to other domains. Self-obviating systems could be an important part of a sustainable future, and could be applied more broadly in ICT design.ye

My Naturewatch Camera: Disseminating Practice Research with a Cheap and Easy DIY Design

My Naturewatch Camera is an inexpensive wildlife camera that we designed for people to make themselves as a way of promoting engagement with nature and digital making. We aligned its development to the interests of the BBC’s Natural History Unit as part of an orchestrated engagement strategy also involving our project website and outreach to social media. Since June 2018, when the BBC featured the camera on one of their Springwatch 2018 broadcasts, over 1000 My Naturewatch Cameras have been constructed using instructions and software from our project website and commercially available components, without direct contact with our studio. In this paper, we describe the project and outcomes with a focus on its success in promoting engagement with nature, engagement with digital making, and the effectiveness of this strategy for sharing research products outside traditional commercial channels

Implications for Adoption

In this paper we explore the motivations for, and practicalities of, incorporating ‘implications for adoption’ into HCI research practice. Implications for adoption are speculations which may be used in research projects to scrutinize and explore the implications and requirements associated with a technology’s potential adoption in the future. There is a rich tradition within the HCI community of implementing, demonstrating, and testing new interactions or technologies by building prototypes. User-centered design methods help us to develop prototypes to and move toward designs that are validated, efficient, and rewarding to use. However, these studies rarely shift their temporal focus to consider, in any significant detail, what it would mean for a technology to exist beyond its prototypical implementation, in other words how these prototypes might ultimately be adopted. Given the CHI community’s increasing interest in technology-related human and social effects, the lack of attention paid to adoption represents a significant and relevant gap in current practices. It is this gap that the paper addresses and in doing so offers three contributions: (1) exploring and unpacking different notions of adoption from varying disciplinary perspectives; (2) discussing why considering adoption is relevant and useful, specifically in HCI research; (3) discussing methods for addressing this need, specifically design fiction, and understanding how utilizing these methods may provide researchers with means to better understand the myriad of nuanced, situated, and technologically-mediated relationships that innovative designs facilitate

An investigation of nonverbal imitation and language in children with specific language delay

Children with specific deficits in language do not form a homogeneous group, but present with varied profiles of language skills and deficits. Research in children with language problems has focussed on deficits in the acquisition of lexical forms and syntactic structures of language, but our understanding of children's deficits with the meaning of language remains limited. Sociocognitive abilities are necessary for discovering the meaning of language, and it has been hypothesised that some children with specific deficits in language have sociocognitive difficulties. In this thesis, it is argued that nonverbal imitation, which does not involve the processing of structural aspects of language, may be indicative of sociocognitive difficulties. More specifically, it is argued that types of nonverbal imitation which serve a primarily social Junction are more informative about sociocognitive abilities than types of nonverbal imitation which serve a primarily instrumental function. In line with this reasoning, it has been found that different forms of nonverbal imitation can be separately impaired and associated with different language skills in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASO), who are known to have sociocognitive difficulties. However, there has been very little exploration of nonverbal imitation skills in children with specific deficits in language, and existing studies have predominantly involved school-age children. This study set out to investigate elicited immediate nonverbal imitation as a measure of sociocognitive skills in young typically developing (TO) children and children with specific language delay (SLO), and also to investigate relations between performance on nonverbal imitation and language in the SLD sample. A subsidiary aim was to compare the performance of the TD and SLD samples on verbal imitation. Participants were German-speaking TD (n=60) and SLD (n=45) children aged 2-3 1/2 years, who were divided into three age groups (2;0-2;5, 2;6-2;11, 3;0-3;5 years). A novel battery of tasks measured their attempt and ability to imitate a range of nonverbal (body movements, common instrumental acts on objects, pretend acts) and verbal (words, nonwords, sentences) target acts. It was found that groups with SLD performed significantly below TO groups on some, but importantly not all, nonverbal imitation tasks. Results demonstrated that children with SLD did not have a general difficulty with nonverbal imitation, but a specific difficulty with target acts hypothesised to serve a primarily social function. A comparison of types and rates of nonverbal imitation errors revealed that error patterns in the oldest SLD group resembled those in the youngest TD group, suggesting a delay rather than deviance in some types of nonverbal imitation within the SLD sample. Different relations between performance on nonverbal imitation and language emerged at different ages, pointing towards the possibility that the nature of associations between nonverbal imitation and language might be linked to age and change over time. As expected, results revealed verbal imitation deficits in the SLD sample at all ages. The theoretical and clinical implications of findings are discussed

Homes for Life & Other Stories The Use and Evaluation of Design Fiction as a Means to Understand Sensitive Settings: a Case Study of Exploring Technologies for Dementia Care

Design fictions are used in HCI to position emerging technologies in fictional future worlds, through which the complexities of our relationships with technologies can be represented, explored and experienced. They promise to stimulate discussions about sensitive topics, such as the future of technology-enabled care, a complex area with contrasting emotional, social and practical views and wishes. However, the term design fiction is currently associated with a wide range of uses, and artefacts. It is also linked to contrasting philosophies and frameworks, which are often not made explicit, as I show in an initial survey with practitioners. This makes it difficult to identify what makes a design fiction good or effective for different purposes. This thesis aims to answer the research question: How can design fiction be used and evaluated in understanding sensitive settings? I turn to the Constructive Design Research framework and adapt it to classify how design fiction is used in HCI. I outline how design fiction can be used in the showroom approach, where it is most commonly placed, but also how it can be used as a lab and field approach to gather insights into the responses to design fictions. I developed design fictions and explored how they can be used to further discussions around the use of monitoring technologies in dementia care: an area challenging to research because of ethical issues associated with deployment studies of prototype technologies. The contribution of this thesis is threefold: first, a methodological contribution into the use of design fiction in HCI and an evaluation of the Constructive Design Research framework as a means to classify research through design fiction. Second, insights into participants’ views and wishes about technology-led care in regards to dementia. Third, a design contribution of artefacts that can be used to stimulate further debate around the topic