Combining thematic and narrative analysis of qualitative interviews to understand children’s spatialities in Andhra Pradesh, India

One of the foremost questions for any researcher setting out on a qualitative study is which form of analysis to use. There are a diverse range of qualitative analytical methods, each offering different forms of insight. In this paper, we discuss our experience of combining two distinct but complementary analytic methods – thematic and narrative analysis. We provide a worked example that combines the two approaches to analyse secondary data from the Young Lives study (see www.younglives.org.uk), in a project carried out as part of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods Node, NOVELLA (Narratives of Varied Everyday Lives and Linked Approaches, see www.novella.ac.uk). We reflect on the challenges and benefits that result from our combined approach, aiming to illuminate the ways in which the integration of narrative and thematic analysis can support and enrich understanding of a complex dataset

Mundane Fashion: Women, Clothes and Emotional Durability

This research investigates emotional durability of clothing through the lens of a designer-maker practice. The current discourse on fashion futures urgently recognizes that a deeper understanding of the behavioural drivers behind long-term use of clothing is critical in order to move beyond symptom-based solutions to fashion and sustainability such as closed loop recycling and technological innovation. A considerable body of work exists on design strategies for emotional durability. However, empirical evidence that examines their relationship to users’ everyday experiences with clothing is missing. I set to remedy this gap through my own designer-maker practice that investigated women’s routine relationships with the clothes in their wardrobes. Focusing specifically on what matters in everyday use, I examine the possible applications of emotionally durable design in fashion design and making. This approach challenges the imperative of disposability in fashion and foregrounds instead a long-term value-creation enabled through the continuous use of familiar clothes. The thesis structure has three interrelated elements that outline the linear narrative of the research as well as the conceptual and methodological developments. The first part of the thesis outlines the global challenges in fashion production and consumption. The second part introduces and applies ethnographic methods to understanding the sensory wardrobe, and the third concluding stage includes the findings and practical application in the One Thing Collection. Conceptually, the thesis moves from comprehending the macro towards a practical application in the micro. The methodology employs a combination of practical explorations through designer-maker practice with in-depth wardrobe conversations. Adopting methods from narrative enquiry and sensory ethnography, ten women aged between 29-69 were interviewed in their homes. Rich imagery of clothes in use and extended excerpts of wardrobe conversations are essential components of the thesis ethos, these became framed as individual portraits of each of the women. It is stressed that these portraits are significant to the research findings presented in the thesis; the portraits are presented in the Appendices as the nature of sensory ethnography results in details of visual and textual data beyond the confines of the thesis. The findings show that designable characteristics of garments such as shape, style, fit, colour, material, details, or easy care are all significant in contributing to a garment’s emotional durability. However, a truly long-lasting relationship with a piece of clothing results from a complex dynamic between its design, the mode of its acquisition, expectations, fluctuation of personal circumstances, and each woman’s perspective on the relationship between continuity and change. The key insights are articulated through the four themes identified in thematic cross-case analysis of the wardrobe conversations: (1) Enablers, (2) Sensory experiences, (3) Longing and Belonging, and lastly (4) Layering. Each theme is also interpreted through the process of making a corresponding everyday garment that captures the essence of the women’s narratives. This research contributes to the current discourse on emotional durability in fashion design and making and provides new contextual data on user experience of clothing; [See Chapter 7.3 Contribution to knowledge summarized, p. 300]. The research demonstrates that fashion design for emotional durability requires an empathic approach that readily embraces the complexity of everyday life as an opportunity, rather than a hindrance to creative expression. These conclusions are also now embodied in my studio practice with future development of the One Thing Collection that resulted from this thesis

"Hey, Can You Add Captions?": The Critical Infrastructuring Practices of Neurodiverse People on TikTok

Accessibility efforts, how we can make the world usable and useful to as many people as possible, have explicitly focused on how we can support and allow for the autonomy and independence of people with disabilities, neurotypes, chronic conditions, and older adults. Despite these efforts, not all technology is designed or implemented to support everyone's needs. Recently, a community-organized push by creators and general users of TikTok urged the platform to add accessibility features, such as closed captioning to user-generated content, allowing more people to use the platform with greater ease. Our work focuses on an understudied population -- people with ADHD and those who experience similar challenges -- exploring the creative practices people from this community engage in, focusing on the kinds of accessibility they create through their creative work. Through an interview study exploring the experiences of creatives on TikTok, we find that creatives engage in critical infrastructuring -- a process of bottom-up (re)design -- to make the platform more accessible despite the challenges the platform presents to them as creators. We present these critical infrastructuring practices through the themes of: creating and augmenting video editing infrastructures and creating and augmenting video captioning infrastructures. We reflect on the introduction of a top-down infrastructure - the implementation of an auto-captioning feature - shifts the critical infrastructure practices of content creators. Through their infrastructuring, creatives revised sociotechnical capabilities of TikTok to support their own needs as well as the broader needs of the TikTok community. We discuss how the routine of infrastructuring accessibility is actually best conceptualized as incidental care work. We further highlight how accessibility is an evolving sociotechnical construct, and forward the concept of contextual accessibility.Comment: To be published in: Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. CSCW '2

Personal Curation in a Museum

An established body of work in CSCW and related communities studies social and cooperative interaction in museums and cultural heritage sites. A separate and growing body of research in these same communities is developing ways to understand the design and use of social media from a curating perspective. A curating perspective focuses on how social media is designed and used by people to develop and manage their own digital archives. This paper uses a cultural heritage museum as the empirical basis and setting along with new information visualization methods we have developed to better integrate these bodies of work and introduce the concept of personal curation; a socio-technical practice in which people collect, edit, and share information using personal information devices and social media as they move through physical environments rich with meaning potential. In doing so this paper makes three contributions. First, it illustrates how to combine a spatial focus on people’s movement and interaction through the physical environment with an analysis of social media use in order to gain a deeper understanding of practices such as personal curation. Second, it shows in greater detail how visitors to museums and cultural heritage sites use and link digital information with physical information to shape others’ understandings of cultural heritage. Third, it suggests how museums and cultural heritage sites may leverage personal curation to support more expansive learning opportunities for visitors

ActuEating: Designing, Studying and Exploring Actuating Decorative Artefacts

Actuating, dynamic materials offer substantial potential to enhance interior designs but there are currently few examples of how they might be utilised or impact user experiences. As part of a design-led exploration, we have prototyped (Wizard-of-Oz) an actuating, dining table runner (ActuEater1), and then developed a fully-interactive fabric version that both changes shape and colour (ActuEater2). Four in-situ deployments of ‘ActuEaters’ in different dinner settings and subsequent ‘design crits’ showed insights into how people perceive, interpret and interact with such slow-technology in interesting (and often unexpected) ways. The results of our ‘ActuEating’ studies provide evidence for how an actuating artefact can be simultaneously a resource for social engagement and an interactive decorative. In response, we explore design opportunities for situating novel interactive materials in everyday settings, taking the leap into a new generation of interactive spaces, and critically considering new aesthetic possibilities

Interactive Audience and the Internet

This dissertation takes up a question posed by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford in 2009: “In a world of participatory media—of Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Del.icio.us—what relevance does the term audience hold?” Using a case study methodology (e.g., Dyson and Genishi; Stake; Yin), I examine how three popular internet writers—all writers who engage with political issues in different venues—conceptualize their audiences and respond to audience feedback. Using established scholarship about audience, including Ede and Lunsford’s work, as well as newer digital scholarship (e.g., Arola, Carnegie, Edbauer Rice), I extend the existing conversation on audience to the context of digital textual production. Rather than understanding participatory audiences as monolithic, my dissertation breaks up the concept of participation in order to represent its dynamic effects on the broader notion of audience. Drawing upon my case studies of current web writers, I introduce three important concepts: audience emerging, audience managed, and audience oriented. The first, audience emerging, shows us the unexplored relationship between Ede and Lunsford’s canonical terms, addressed and invoked. Understanding the nature of this oscillating relationship situates writer awareness of audience as an emerging, recursive process, much like other elements in the contemporary understanding of the writing process. Audience managed illuminates ways that a web-writer can marshal members into a community and initiate discursive norms. Her writing in this community, funneled through the template, then creates the community’s expectations and conventions. Audience oriented shows the ways in which a writer can guide their audience toward the formation of a public. Overall, this research highlights the way writers imagine and experience their audience in ongoing, continuous ways