Designing In With Black Box Technologies and PD

Building on prior work we examine design research challenges posed by working with new technological applications of Blockchain within multidisciplinary research. Drawing from recent design research of others, we articulate the value – and associated challenges – of Participatory Design creative approaches involving codesign of similar ‘black box’ technologies. We go on to report on three workshops, including one in which we invited technologists and designers to work together to talk through and materially represent their tacit understandings of how two Blockchain applications – BITNATION and Trust Stamp – work. We demonstrate how creative methods are useful in enabling critical reflection and knowledge exchange providing a useful bridge between radically different disciplines; to counter emerging technologies’ ‘unconscious image’ as magic; and to valuably inform on future oriented design implications

TAPESTRY:A Blockchain based Service for Trusted Interaction Online

We present a novel blockchain based service for proving the provenance of online digital identity, exposed as an assistive tool to help non-expert users make better decisions about whom to trust online. Our service harnesses the digital personhood (DP); the longitudinal and multi-modal signals created through users' lifelong digital interactions, as a basis for evidencing the provenance of identity. We describe how users may exchange trust evidence derived from their DP, in a granular and privacy-preserving manner, with other users in order to demonstrate coherence and longevity in their behaviour online. This is enabled through a novel secure infrastructure combining hybrid on- and off-chain storage combined with deep learning for DP analytics and visualization. We show how our tools enable users to make more effective decisions on whether to trust unknown third parties online, and also to spot behavioural deviations in their own social media footprints indicative of account hijacking.Comment: Submitted to IEEE TSC Special Issue on Blockchain Services, May 201

Owls of Creative Evaluation

Capturing the value of engagement and consultation for the public sector, with the communities with which they work, is both critically important and rare. Constructive, practical and reliable evaluation of consultation is challenging. However, there is an increasing need to better demonstrate the return on investment of such approaches for purposes of transparency, suitability and effectiveness of chosen methods, as well as articulating impact better. Previously, evaluation approaches have followed traditional methods such as surveys, focus groups and interviews. While such approaches are structured and capture key evaluation data, their appeal and effectiveness can suffer from not providing an engaging experience for participants. Also, they risk turning good indicators into definitive targets, which then become unrepresentative under a ‘tyranny of measurements’. So we are exploring the use of evaluation through new frameworks of co-design and consultation. They are intended to capture the effects of impact in a format meaningful to research and communities making evaluation part of the collaborative process. Our evaluation framework is creative, innovative and engaging; and aims to be designed unobtrusively within our consultation tools. We have scoped several short and major projects in partnership with public sectors, gaining an understanding of what difference and impact our partners wish to gain, informing our design of evaluation processes. Owls are a good indicator of a healthy forest and ecosystem. However, the owls should only be measured as an indicator of a healthy forest, rather than a target to work towards. So, we hope to identify ‘Owls’, a set of indicators that is representative of the collective wellbeing. We offer these contributions to the field of evaluation as evidence of the value of non-traditional qualitative processes. We present the understanding and tools developed and conclude with the challenges encountered

Designing Games for Understanding and Enabling Distributed Trust

In this position paper, we discuss the early stages of design research conducted as part of a widely multidisciplinary inquiry involving social psychology, cyber security and deep learning (AI). TAPESTRY aims to: i. investigate online users’ approaches to establishing the trustworthiness of an interactor or organisation they are about to disclose personal information to, and ii. ways of supporting judgements through the use of a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) service such as blockchain which operates as a form of personal identity credit rating. Building on prior work, we are utilising game design within our Participatory Design approach that involves creatively engaging with three user groups (crowdfunding, eHealth, online dating). Drawing from recent design-led research projects we highlight some of the value and challenges in using creative and innovative techniques in participatory design in technically sophisticated work. We present very early concept ideas and contribute from novel recent literatures to provoke workshop discussion

TAPESTRY: Visualizing Interwoven Identities for Trust Provenance

In this paper we report our study involving an early prototype of TAPESTRY, a service to support people and businesses to connect safely online through the use of a Machine Learning generated visualization. Establishing the veracity of the person or business behind a pseudonomized identity, online, is a challenge for many people. In the burgeoning digital economy, finding ways to support good decision-making in potentially risky online exchanges is of vital importance. In this paper, we propose a Machine Learning method to extract temporal patterns from data on individuals’ behavioural norms in their online activity. This monitors and communicates the coherence of these activities to others, especially those who are about to disclose personal information to the individual, in a visualization. We report findings from a user trial that examined how people accessed and interpreted the TAPESTRY visualization to inform their decisions on who to back in a mock crowdfunding campaign to evaluate its efficacy. The study proved the protocol of the Machine Learning method and qualitative insights are informing iterations of the visualization design to enhance user experience and support understanding

Tagging is connecting:shared object memories as channels for sociocultural cohesion

In Small Pieces Loosely Joined, David Weinberger identifies some of the obvious changes which the Web has brought to human relations. Social connections, he argues, used to be exclusively defined and constrained by the physics and physicality of the “real” world, or by geographical and material facts: "it’s … true that we generally have to travel longer to get to places that are farther away; that to be heard at the back of the theater, you have to speak louder; that when a couple moves apart, their relationship changes; that if I give you something, I no longer have it. " (xi) The Web, however, is a place (or many places) where the boundaries of space, time, and presence are being reworked. Further, since we built this virtual world ourselves and are constantly involved in its evolution, the Web can tell us much about who we are and how we relate to others. In Weinberger’s view, it demonstrates that “we are creatures who care about ourselves and the world we share with others”, and that “we live within a context of meaning” beyond what we had previously cared to imagine (xi-xii). Before the establishment of computer-mediated communication (CMC), we already had multiple means of connecting people commonly separated by space (Gitelman and Pingree). Yet the Web has allowed us to see each other whilst separated by great distances, to share stories, images and other media online, to co-construct or “produse” (Bruns) content and, importantly, to do so within groups, rather than merely between individuals (Weinberger 108)