Enhancing skills of academic researchers: The development of a participatory threefold peer learning model

In this article, we introduce a threefold peer learning model developed during the design and implementation of an innovative researcher-led digital skills training programme for early career researchers. The programme brought together researchers from three UK universities and facilitated the personal and professional development of: (1) the researchers who organised the programme; (2) the researchers who designed and delivered content; (3) the researchers who attended and participated in the digital skills workshops. This article outlines and reflects on its participatory approach to collaborative learning, which responded to the changing needs of UK higher education researchers who increasingly find themselves in interdisciplinary and digitally mediated research contexts. Finally, we propose the transferability of the approach to other fields of knowledge, student/staff learning and professional development

Saturated and situated: expanding the meaning of media in the routines of everyday life

Recently media scholars have made renewed calls for non-media-centric, non-representational and phenomenological approaches to media studies. This article responds to this context through an investigation of how media form part of the experiential, habitual and unspoken dimensions of everyday routines. Drawing on examples from ethnographic research into digital media and domestic energy consumption, we explore the role of media in the making and experiencing of environments, centring on their salience to daily routines of transition in the home. While media content forms part of how people make their homes, attention to these routines brings into focus a notion of the 'media-saturated' household that goes beyond attention to media content in significant ways. This, we argue, has both theoretical and practical implications for how we situate and interpret media as part of everyday life. © The Author(s) 2013

Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication

Communication is increasingly moving beyond ‘ways of seeing’ to ‘ways of feeling’. This Open Access book provides social design insights and implications for HCI research and design exploring digitally mediated touch communication. It offers a socially orientated map to help navigate the complex social landscape of digitally mediated touch for communication: from everyday touch-screens, tangibles, wearables, haptics for virtual reality, to the tactile internet of skin. Drawing on literature reviews, new case-study vignettes, and exemplars of digital touch, the book examines the major social debates provoked by digital touch, and investigates social themes central to the communicative potential and societal consequences of digital touch: · Communication environments, capacities and practices · Norms associations and expectations · Presence, absence and connection · Social imaginaries of digital touch · Digital touch ethics and values The book concludes with a discussion of the significance of social understanding and methods in the context of Interdisciplinary collaborations to explore touch, towards the design of digital touch communication, ‘ways of feeling’, that are useable, appropriate, ethical and socially aware

Rapid Prototyping for Social Science Research

Given social science researchers’ increasing interest in materiality and embodied practices, there is considerable potential for productive methodological engagement with design-based research practices. In this chapter, we explore the potential of conducting social science research ‘through design’ (Lupton, 2018:2, emphasis added). We reflect on a series of workshops investigating the societal implications and impact of digital technologies on the mediation of touch communication. The workshops used the design-based research method of rapid prototyping as a quick and approximate way to engage with ideas of remote digital touch communication that draw the body, touch and materiality into focus. Our emphasis in this chapter is on illustrating the kinds of insights that can be gained through this method, rather than an exhaustive analysis of touch. The chapter first introduces our rationale for using prototyping and our methodology. The second section illustrates the potentials of rapid prototyping as a socially orientated methodological strategy that enabled us, as qualitative researchers, to attend to the body as a meaning making resource, and to materialize ideas, sensory knowing, and wider discourses of personal remote digital touch communication. Drawing on selected episodes from the workshops, we show how this method helped participants to describe, explore or discover aspects of touch communication or stimulate dialogue. This enabled us to ask methodology and content focused questions including: What could we learn about touch through touch during the process of making? How did participants use touch as a form of telling and imagining? What were the social meanings and tensions that emerged around touch and the digital? How were experiential categories employed and made meaningful by participants in the process of making? In the final section of the chapter we reflect on the strengths and limitations of rapid prototyping for social science research, and suggest future developments for its use within social sciences

Supporting novice designers design of digital touch

Digitally mediated touch is an emerging and significant area for technology and therefore for design and design education. However, the design of digital touch is a challenge, especially for novice designers, compounded by low awareness and understanding of the sociality of touch and the complexity of communicating felt sensations. This paper presents a qualitative study of a two-part educational intervention on the design of digital touch using a design-based research methodology. Findings are presented and discussed on the design challenges faced by novice designers in relation to touch and digital touch (the focus of part one of the intervention) and the development and piloting of the Designing Digital Touch (DDT) toolkit (the outcome of part two). The paper discusses how the toolkit can be used to foster and support novice designers to respond to the future facing complexity of digital touch design

PORTS: an interdisciplinary and systemic approach to studying energy use in the home

In this paper, we present an alternative and novel approach to identifying energy demand reduction opportunities in the home. Through the creation of detailed narratives informed by our interdisciplinary research team of social scientists, designers and engineers, we employ a systemic view of how energy is consumed in the home. By interrogating clusters of people, objects and resources through time and space as they come together within our qualitative and quantitative research, we have identified opportunities for sustainable HCI design. This paper outlines our approach and presents an example product concept in relation to laundry

Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication

Communication is increasingly moving beyond ‘ways of seeing’ to ‘ways of feeling’. This Open Access book provides social design insights and implications for HCI research and design exploring digitally mediated touch communication. It offers a socially orientated map to help navigate the complex social landscape of digitally mediated touch for communication: from everyday touch-screens, tangibles, wearables, haptics for virtual reality, to the tactile internet of skin. Drawing on literature reviews, new case-study vignettes, and exemplars of digital touch, the book examines the major social debates provoked by digital touch, and investigates social themes central to the communicative potential and societal consequences of digital touch: · Communication environments, capacities and practices · Norms associations and expectations · Presence, absence and connection · Social imaginaries of digital touch · Digital touch ethics and values The book concludes with a discussion of the significance of social understanding and methods in the context of Interdisciplinary collaborations to explore touch, towards the design of digital touch communication, ‘ways of feeling’, that are useable, appropriate, ethical and socially aware

Understanding technology in the home: sensory ethnography and HCI

Digital technologies are increasingly considered an important piece in the puzzle of domestic energy demand reduction. However, for technological interventions to be successful, we need to understand more about how they might fit into the lives and homes of ordinary people. This paper reflects on bringing together methods from sensory ethnography and user-centered design to generate technologies for the home. Beyond practical considerations, it underlines the importance of creating an interdisciplinary dialogue that engages with both theory and method

An internet of old things as an augmented memory system

The interdisciplinary Tales of Things and electronic Memory (TOTeM) project investigates new contexts for augmenting things with stories in the emerging culture of the Internet of Things (IoT). Tales of Things is a tagging system which, based on two-dimensional barcodes (also called Quick Response or QR codes) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, enables the capturing and sharing of object stories and the physical linking to objects via read and writable tags. Within the context of our study, it has functioned as a technology probe which we employed with the aim to stimulate discussion and identify desire lines that point to novel design opportunities for the engagement with personal and social memories linked to everyday objects. In this paper, we discuss results from fieldwork with different community groups in the course of which seemingly any object could form the basis of a meaningful story and act as entry point into rich inherent 'networks of meaning'. Such networks of meaning are often solely accessible for the owner of an object and are at risk of getting lost as time goes by. We discuss the different discourses that are inherent in these object stories and provide avenues for making these memories and meaning networks accessible and shareable. This paper critically reflects on Tales of Things as an example of an augmented memory system and discusses possible wider implications for the design of related systems. © 2011 Springer-Verlag London Limited