Interfaces with the Ineffable

In recent years, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) designers and researchers have shifted focus from a primary concern with procedural, generic, and task based applications to applications that address messy, personal, and aesthetic experiences. These difficult to formalize experiences, such as feelings of intimacy, spirituality, or a sense of place, are conceptualized as experiences of the ineffable. In this work, I use a reflective design practice to look at two primary approaches to designing interfaces with the ineffable, one emphasizes reduction and the other openness to interpretation. I discuss issues of control and reification that result from the reduction approach and develop the interpretation approach as a viable alternative requiring a re-thinking design and evaluation strategies and criteria. These issues and approaches are explored in detail through the development of two case studies. Case study one addresses the ineffable experience of art and presents a series of applications for interfacing with the ineffable in the art museum. Case study two details the ineffable experience of affect and presents a system designed for augmenting affective presence in an office environment. To further this work, I examine new thinking in both HCI and Communication for understanding every day interpretive acts and the implications for design. In addition, I advance reflective design as a new process based practice for the field of Communication

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

How HCI interprets the probes

We trace how cultural probes have been adopted and adapted by the HCI community. The flexibility of probes has been central to their uptake, resulting in a proliferation of divergent uses and derivatives. The varying patterns of adaptation of the probes reveal important underlying issues in HCI, suggesting underacknowledged disagreements about valid interpretation and the relationship between methods and their underlying methodology. With this analysis, we aim to clarify discussions around probes, and, more importantly, around how we define and evaluate methods in HCI, especially those grounded in unfamiliar conceptions of how research should be done. Author Keywords Cultural probes, probes, reflective HC

Echoes of Social Presence: A Case Study of A Cross- Disciplinary Pedagogical Experiment

This case study reviews the use of an ambient display system, dubbed Echo, for encouraging cross-disciplinary exchange about the design and role of technology systems. The study begins with a review of Echo: from the initial participatory interviews to the reflections and discussions generated by the installation. The second half of the case study analyzes why the experiment succeeded and where it fell short. To answer open questions about the experience, we look to the practice of dialogic aesthetics advanced by Grant Kester. We ask what it would mean to use the concept of the ‘character of exchange’ as a guide for the evaluation and design of cross-disciplinary exchanges