Transitions in Human Computer Interaction: From Data Embodiment to Experience Capitalism

This article develops a critical theory of human–computer interaction (critical HCI) intended to test some of the assumptions and omissions made in the field as it transitions from a cognitive theoretical frame to a phenomenological understanding of user experience described by Harrison et al. (the three paradigms of HCI. Paper presented at the Conference on human factors in computing systems. https://people.cs.vt.edu/~srh/Downloads/TheThreeParadigmsofHCI.pdf, 2007) as a third research paradigm and similarly Bødker (when second wave HCI meets third-wave challenges. In: NordiCHI ‘06 Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on human–computer interaction: changing roles, 1–8. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1182476; 2006, Interactions 22(5):24–31; Bødker, Interactions 22(5)):24–31, 2015) as third-wave HCI. Although this particular focus on experience has provided some novel avenues of academic enquiry, this article draws attention to a distinct bridge between the conventional HCI disciplinary concerns with predominantly task-based digital work and use context and a growing business interest in consumer experiences in digital environments. Critical HCI addresses the problem of experience in two interrelated ways. On one hand, it explores the role market logic plays in putting user experiences to work. On the other hand, it engages with ontological understandings of experience hitherto realized in HCI by way of a phenomenological matrix (Harrison et al. The three paradigms of HCI. Paper presented at the Conference on human factors in computing systems. https://people.cs.vt.edu/~srh/Downloads/TheThreeParadigmsofHCI.pdf, 2007). The article concludes by bringing in an old thinker (A. N. Whitehead) to consider experience in novel ways that relate ontological concerns to a broader political concept of experience capitalism

A Load of Cobbler’s Children: Beyond the Model Designing Processor

HCI has developed rich understandings of people at work and at play with technology: most people that is, except designers, who remain locked in the information processing paradigm of first wave HCI. Design methods are validated as if they were computer programs, expected to produce the same results on a range of architectures and hardware. Unfortunately, designers are people, and thus interfere substantially (generally to good effects) with the ‘code’ of design methods. We need to rethink the evaluation and design of design and evaluation methods in HCI. A logocentric proposal based on resource function vocabularies is presented

Science vs. science: the complexities of interdisciplinary research

Human-Computer Interaction and Web Science are radically interdisciplinary fields, but what does this mean in practical terms? Undertaking research (and writing papers) that encompass multiple disciplinary perspectives and methods is a serious challenge and it is difficult to maintain conferences that fairly review and host contributions from multiple disciplines. The colocation of the ACM WebSci conference with CHI in Paris, offers an unusual opportunity to bring these two communities together. Previous discussions have considered how to conduct interdisciplinary work that bridges HCI/WebSci with specific areas. Our objective is to provide a space for interested researchers from both communities to share their views and approaches to tackling the tensions and complexities associated with interdisciplinary work, whatever fields are being bridged

Demarcating mobile phone interface design guidelines to expedite selection

Guidelines are recommended as a tool for informing user interface design. Despite a proliferation of guidelines in the research literature, there is little evidence of their use in industry, nor their influence in academic literature. In this paper, we explore the research literature related to mobile phone design guidelines to find out why this should be so. We commenced by carrying out a scoping literature review of the mobile phone design guideline literature to gain insight into the maturity of the field. The question we wanted to explore was: “Are researchers building on each others’ guidelines, or is the research field still in the foundational stage?” We discovered a poorly structured field, with many researchers proposing new guidelines, but little incremental refinement of extant guidelines. It also became clear that the current reporting of guidelines did not explicitly communicate their multi-dimensionality or deployment context. This leaves designers without a clear way of discriminating between guidelines, and could contribute to the lack of deployment we observed. We conducted a thematic analysis of papers identified by means of a systematic literature review to identify a set of dimensions of mobile phone interface design guidelines. The final dimensions provide a mechanism for differentiating guidelines and expediting choice

Mobility is the Message: Experiments with Mobile Media Sharing

This thesis explores new mobile media sharing applications by building, deploying, and studying their use. While we share media in many different ways both on the web and on mobile phones, there are few ways of sharing media with people physically near us. Studied were three designed and built systems: Push!Music, Columbus, and Portrait Catalog, as well as a fourth commercially available system – Foursquare. This thesis offers four contributions: First, it explores the design space of co-present media sharing of four test systems. Second, through user studies of these systems it reports on how these come to be used. Third, it explores new ways of conducting trials as the technical mobile landscape has changed. Last, we look at how the technical solutions demonstrate different lines of thinking from how similar solutions might look today. Through a Human-Computer Interaction methodology of design, build, and study, we look at systems through the eyes of embodied interaction and examine how the systems come to be in use. Using Goffman’s understanding of social order, we see how these mobile media sharing systems allow people to actively present themselves through these media. In turn, using McLuhan’s way of understanding media, we reflect on how these new systems enable a new type of medium distinct from the web centric media, and how this relates directly to mobility. While media sharing is something that takes place everywhere in western society, it is still tied to the way media is shared through computers. Although often mobile, they do not consider the mobile settings. The systems in this thesis treat mobility as an opportunity for design. It is still left to see how this mobile media sharing will come to present itself in people’s everyday life, and when it does, how we will come to understand it and how it will transform society as a medium distinct from those before. This thesis gives a glimpse at what this future will look like

Service Design in HCI Research: The Extended Value Co-creation Model

In this paper, we discuss what it means to practice service design in an academic research setting. For a long time, the primary focal point of design research has been the users—of their experiences, needs, desires, and values. By contrast, designers have been relatively anonymous and unlocatable. In shift to the service-centric design paradigm, we argue that it is important to recognize design researchers as distinct stakeholders, who actively interact with systems and services with a goal to fulfill their own values and achieve desired outcomes. In practice, typically the role of designer is that of a design consultant working for (or rather on behalf of) the client. By contrast, in academic research settings, the role of designer is that of a design researcher working with their own research agenda.We provide a case study of a service design research project aimed at developing new digital services for public libraries. We encountered a series of issues with a complex set of values at play, in which design researchers emerged as distinct stakeholders with specific sets of research questions, goals, and visions. The main contribution of this paper is a model that (a) clarifies the position of design researchers within the sociocultural context in which they practice design, and (b) visualize how their positions impact the value co-creation, and in turn, the design outcome

Exploring Research through Design in Animal-Computer Interaction

This paper explores Research through Design (RtD) as a potential methodology for developing new interactive experiences for animals. We present an example study from an on-going project and examine whether RtD offers an appropriate framework for developing knowledge in the context of Animal-Computer Interaction, as well as considering how best to document such work. We discuss the design journey we undertook to develop interactive systems for captive elephants and the extent to which RtD has enabled us to explore concept development and documentation of research. As a result of our explorations, we propose that particular aspects of RtD can help ACI researchers gain fresh perspectives on the design of technology-enabled devices for non-human animals. We argue that these methods of working can support the investigation of particular and complex situations where no idiomatic interactions yet exist, where collaborative practice is desirable and where the designed objects themselves offer a conceptual window for future research and development

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

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