Crafting Critical Heritage Discourses into Interactive Exhibition Design

This paper argues how a more reflective design practice that embraces critical discourses can transform interactive exhibition design and therefore the museum visiting experience. Four framing arguments underpin our exhibition design making: the value of materiality, visiting as an aesthetic experience, challenging the authorized voice, and heritage as a process. These arguments were embodied through design, art and craft practice into one interactive exhibition at a house museum. We draw from our design process discussing the implications that adopting an approach informed by critical heritage debates has on exhibition design and suggest three sensitizing concepts (polyvocal narratives, dialogical interaction, interweaving time and space) bridging the practice of interactive exhibition design and critical heritage theory

Making Sense of Multidimensional Health Data to Manage Chronic Conditions: Designing to Support Episode-Driven Data Interaction

People with chronic health conditions, such as diabetes, are now able to capture large amounts of health data every day owing to improved medical and consumer sensing technology. These data, known as patient-generated data, have immense potential to inform the care of chronic conditions, both individually by patients and collaboratively by patients and clinicians. Despite the increasing ability to capture personal health data, informatics tools provide limited support to enable routine use of data for disease management. Lack of support for making sense of different types of health data challenges informed decision-making and results in missed opportunities for improving care, leading to suboptimal control and poor health consequences. Motivated by these problems, my dissertation examines the data practices and decisional needs of patients and clinicians to design novel tools for the presentation of multidimensional health data and evaluates these tools in the context of Type 1 diabetes. It employs several qualitative methods that include interviews, observations, focus groups, diary study, think aloud sessions, and user-centered design. By examining how patients and clinicians interpret multiple streams of data from continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps, I synthesized the episode-driven sensemaking framework, a novel framework that describes the different analytical stages through which multidimensional health data is made actionable. My work describes the four analytical stages of the episode-driven sensemaking framework that include episode detection, episode elaboration, episode classification, and episode-specific recommendation generation. I show that the episode-driven framework provides a promising basis to guide the design of tools for data-based sensemaking and decision-making as the different stages of the framework lend themselves to opportunities for combining computational and user agency in different ways. By examining existing data review platforms, I show that the exploratory nature of these tools makes them underutilized by lay users like patients, in addition to resulting in negative experiences, such as cognitive burden, misinterpretation, and misrepresentation of reality. Given the limitations of exploratory tools, the potential of the episode-driven framework in providing a basis for tool design, and the promise of data-driven narratives in communicating data to the lay users, I designed episode-driven data narratives to help patients review data from continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps. An exploratory comparison of the episode-driven narratives with the commercially available data review platforms shows that the former improved data comprehension and patients’ ability to make decisions from data; and lowered the cognitive load of engaging with data. Additionally, in nuanced ways, episode-driven narratives enabled user agency in making decisions for self-care. Based on multiple studies to examine practices, and design and evaluate tools, I suggest that to support people in effectively leveraging multidimensional data for managing chronic conditions, tools must do the following - support effective problem-solving with data by creating a shared understanding of data between stakeholders, enable different types of assessments from data and help connect those assessments, and guide analytic focus using a scaffold (e.g., an episode-driven workflow) to organize and present evidence. One promising approach to implement these suggestions in the design of a tool is an episode-driven data narrative, an embodiment of the episode-driven sensemaking framework using narrative visualization techniques. By supporting the generation and presentation of episode-driven narratives from multidimensional data, tools can augment patients’ abilities to effectively inform self-care of chronic conditions with their data.PHDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/174432/1/shritir_1.pd

Information Delivery from Healthcare Providers to Patients in Emergency Department: Opportunities for Patient-Centric Technology Design

I present an observational study conducted to understand the phenomenon of information delivery to patients from healthcare providers in an Emergency Department (ED). My observations reveal different phases of a patient's ED care process, which I term as “milestones”. I report the composition of these care milestones in terms of information given to patients and the care team members who deliver information. Analysis of contextualized information delivery events across these milestones revealed three factors affecting information delivery and patients’ perception of information delivery. These factors are: temporalities in a patient's care process, invisibility of ED work to patients and a patient’s expectation and health literacy. My study shows how these factors affect information availability, and the time and content of information delivered to patients. The findings reflect on when and what information is appropriate to be delivered to patients, and how to design patient-centric technologies for information delivery to be appropriate with regards to the time, content and format of information delivery

"Energy is a Finite Resource": Designing Technology to Support Individuals across Fluctuating Symptoms of Depression

While the HCI field increasingly examines how digital tools can support individuals in managing mental health conditions, it remains unclear how these tools can accommodate these conditions' temporal aspects. Based on weekly interviews with five individuals with depression, conducted over six weeks, this study identifies design opportunities and challenges related to extending technology-based support across fluctuating symptoms. Our findings suggest that participants perceive events and contexts in daily life to have marked impact on their symptoms. Results also illustrate that ebbs and flows in symptoms profoundly affect how individuals practice depression self-management. While digital tools often aim to reach individuals while they feel depressed, we suggest they should also engage individuals when they are less symptomatic, leveraging their energy and motivation to build habits, establish plans and goals, and generate and organize content to prepare for symptom onset