Understanding the role of designers' personal experiences in interaction design practice

Using designers' personal experiences in interaction design practice is often questioned in a predominantly rationalist practice like HCI and professional interaction design. Perhaps for this reason, little work has been conducted to investigate how designers' personal experiences can contribute to technology design. Yet it's undeniable designers have applied their personal experiences to their design practice and also benefited from such experiences. This paper reports on a multiple case study that looks at how interaction designers worked with their personal experiences in three industrial interaction design projects, thus calling for the need to explicitly recognize the legitimacy of using and better support of the use of designers' personal experiences in interaction design practice. In this study, a designer's personal experiences refer to the collections of his/her individual experiences derived from his/her direct observation or past real-life events and activities, as well as his/her interaction with design artifacts and systems whether digital or not

Interaction design for supporting communication between Chinese sojourners

In our global village, distance is not a barrier anymore for traveling. People experience new cultures and face accompanying difficulties in order to live anywhere. Social support can help these sojourners to cope with difficulties, such as culture shock. In this paper, we investigate how computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools can facilitate social support when living physically separated from loved-ones in different cultures. The goal is to understand the design considerations necessary to design new CMC tools. We studied communication practices of Chinese sojourners living in the Netherlands and the use of a technology probe with a novel video communication system. These results led to recommendations which can help designers to design interactive communication tools that facilitate communication across cultures. We conclude the paper with an interactive communication device called Circadian, which was designed based on these recommendations. We experienced the design recommendations to be abstract enough to leave space for creativity while providing a set of clear requirements which we used to base design decisions upon

Design for Mobile Mental Health:An Exploratory Review

A large number of mobile mental health apps are available to the public but current knowledge about requirements of designing such solutions is scarce, especially from sociotechnical and user centred points of view. Due to the significant role of mobile apps in the mental health service models, identifying the design requirements of mobile mental health solutions is crucial. Some of those requirements have been addressed individually in the literature, but there are few research studies that show a comprehensive picture of this domain. This exploratory review aims to facilitate such holistic understanding. The main search keywords of the review were identified in a cross-disciplinary requirements workshop. The search was started by finding some core references in the healthcare databases. A wider range of references then has been explored using a snowball method. Findings showed that there is a good understanding of individual design requirements in current literature but there are few examples of implementing a combination of different design requirements in real world products. The design processes specifically developed for mobile mental health apps are also rare. Most studies on operational mobile mental health apps address major mental health issues while prevention and wellbeing areas are underdeveloped. In conclusion, the main recommendations for designing future mobile mental health solutions include: moving towards sociotechnical and open design strategies, understanding and creating shared value, recognizing all dimensions of efficacy, bridging design and medical research and development, and considering an ecosystem perspective

Probes and prototypes: a participatory action research approach to codesign

Participatory Action Research (PAR) has a long history of use with disadvantaged groups in order to assist them to improve their living conditions, however its use with Information and Communications Technology (ICT) projects is less well known. This paper examines a case study where PAR was tied with the use of a technology probe by an Aboriginal group, with the goal of determining if culturally appropriate design of ICTs could help support individual well-being. The results of this project show that although PAR and probes can be used together, this combination has the potential to alter how probes are traditionally used in the design space. To support this premise, we review the history of the probes method in the literature and discuss changes in how cultural and technology probes have been implemented in recent years. We argue that as modifications are made to these frameworks due to the needs of the research, two sorts of project results should be fully elucidated: (1) the changes made to the original methodology and (2) how these changes have had an effect on the real-life environment to which they were applied

Co-designing interactive applications with adults with intellectual disability: a case study

Current and emerging participatory design practices are providing opportunities for people with intellectual disability to have a say in how technology can best support them and their individual needs. In this paper, we present lessons learnt from a co-design exercise aimed at designing a mobile application to support people with intellectual disability when using public transports. We investigate more specifically four elements proposed in the literature in order to deepen the engagement of participants: a digital prototype, a non-finito feature, inclusion of a proxy, and a co-development opportunity. Our observations with 3 users with intellectual disability engaging in an hour-long co-design workshop with a carer confirm the benefits of digital prototypes and non-finito features in this context, contribute a better understanding of the role of proxies, and suggest a longer engagement to potentially take advantage of co-development