Sketching & drawing as future inquiry in HCI

Creating visual imagery helps us to situate ourselves within unknown worlds, processes, make connections, and find solutions. By exploring drawn ideas for novel technologies, we can examine the implications of their place in the world. Drawing, or sketching, for future inquiry in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) can be a stand-alone investigative approach, part of a wider ‘world-building’ in design fiction, or simply ideation around a concept. By examining instances of existing practice in HCI, in this paper we establish recommendations and rationales for those wishing to utilise sketching and drawing within their research. We examine approaches ranging from ideation, diagramming, scenario building, comics creation and artistic representation to create a model for sketching and drawing as future inquiry for HCI. This work also reflects on the ways in which these arts can inform and elucidate research and practice in HCI, and makes recommendations for the field, within its teaching, processes and outcomes

Prototyping and the New Spirit of Policy-Making

This conceptual paper discusses the use of co-design approaches in the public realm by examining the emergence of a design practice, prototyping, in public policy-making. We argue that changes in approaches to management and organisation over recent decades have led towards greater flexibility, provisionality and anticipation in responding to public issues. These developments have co-emerged with growing interest in prototyping. Synthesising literatures in design, management and computing, and informed by our participant observation of teams inside government, we propose the defining characteristics of prototyping in policymaking and review the implications of using this approach. We suggest that such activities engender a ‘new spirit’ of policymaking. However this development is accompanied by the further encroachment of market logics into government, with the danger of absorbing critiques of capitalism and resulting in reinforced power structures

Drawing on Experiences of Self

In this paper, we present a method of Dialogical Sketching. We introduce the development of this method as a discursive aid to understanding design probe responses within participatory co-design engagements but also articulate its potential more broadly within participatory research. Situated within a research study into the potential of digital jewellery to support self, we focus on how sketching can elucidate reflection on layers of meaning conveyed both explicitly and implicitly in participants' probe responses. The method enabled an iterative dialogue not bound by certainty, but more by inference, interpretation and suggested meanings. Systems of sketching scaffolded conversations about personal issues and feelings that were difficult to articulate in a way that was imaginative, rather than descriptive. We argue that the method firstly enriches the potential of probes, secondly encourages discourse in open and often uncertain ways and thirdly can enable sustained participatory engagement even through challenging circumstances

Meaningful gestures for human computer interaction: beyond hand postures

In the development of gestural interfaces for product design, the perceptual-motor skills of the designer and the expressive, creative process of design need to be supported. To accomplish this goal, we propose a different approach than currently used in research on gestures. We propose that meaning is central to the definition of gesture and discuss a new categorisation for gestures in which gestures refer (simultaneously) to four aspects, namely space, pathic information, symbols and emotion. This definition and categorisation also ask for a different type of experimentation. We show with two experiments how gestural human-computer interaction for product design can be studied. By having a trained artist mimic a gestural interface for design, we found that an accurate interpretation of the created product can be made, even when designers are allowed full freedom in their gestures. We find that task-specific intuitive human-computer interaction using gestures is feasible, although extensive research is necessary and ongoing