Place-centred interaction design: situated participation and co-creation in places of heritage

This paper argues that the design of interactive installations for museums and other heritage sites should be concerned with understanding, supporting and augmenting visitors 19 lived experiences in context, thus their ability to actively participate in an exhibition. We use the concept of 18place 19 to refer to the physical environment as it is invested by the qualities of human experience, and to placemaking as the active process of connecting and relating to locations that become meaningful in our lives. We will discuss some of the limitations of existing heritage technologies in considering aspects of active place experience, and will argue how a place-sensitive approach can lead to successful interaction design whereby people establish meaningful and active connections at personal, cultural, social and physical levels to the places of heritage they experience

Can Digital Interactions Support New Dialogue Around Heritage?

My abracadabra wish for interaction design is for the field to take a renewed look at heritage as a practiced domain, to go beyond the visitor-interpretation-focused functional approach of conveying content, often in only one “institutional” voice

Proceedings of the International Workshop “Re-Thinking Technology in Museums: towards a new understanding of people’s experience in museums"

Proceedings of the International Workshop “Re-Thinking Technology in Museums: towards a new understanding of people’s experience in museums

Social aspects of place experience in nomadic work/life practices

This chapter examines the importance of “where” mobile work/life practices occur. By discussing excerpts of data collected through in-depth interviews with mobile professionals, we focus on the importance of place for mobility, and highlight the social character of place and the intrinsically social motivations of workers when making decisions regarding where to move. In order to show how the experience of mobility is grounded within place as a socially significant con- struct, we concentrate on three analytical themes: place as an essential component of social/collaborative work, place as expressive of organizational needs and characteristics, and place as facilitating a blending of work/life strategies and relationships

From Work to Life and back again: Examining the digitally-mediated work/life practices of a group of knowledge workers

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study exploring the technologically-mediated practices of work/life balancing, blurring and boundary-setting of a cohort of professionals in knowledge-intensive roles in Sheffield, a regional city in Northern England. It contributes to a growing body of CSCW research on the complex interweaving of work and non-work tasks, demands and on the boundaries that can be supported or hindered by digital technologies. In the paper, we detail how a cohort of 26 professionals in knowledge-intensive roles devise diverse strategies for handling work and non-work in light of a set of interconnected forces, and we argue that boundary dissolving and work-life blurring, and not just boundary setting and “balancing”, are essential resources within such strategies. We also show how boundary sculpting pertains not only to work pervading personal spheres of life, but also the opposite, and that establishing, softening and dissolving boundaries are practiced to handle situations when the personal seeps into professional life

Exploring flash fiction for the collaborative interpretation of qualitative data

This paper presents some exploratory reflections on flash fiction as a possible method to spark discussion and collaborative interpretation of qualitative research data. A growing body of work in HCI and CSCW examines the potential of techniques used in creative writing and creative fiction to generate design concepts, and narrative data analysis is adopted by social science using creative writing techniques for qualitative data work. Here we discuss our experience of an exercise where flash fiction was used not as a technique in support of design (which has been done before in human-centred computing), but as a means of probing data and facilitating collaborative data work among researchers. We reflect on the experience and outcomes of the exercise and also discuss exploratory ideas regarding how creative writing techniques could be further explored in human-centred computing as a way to probe findings from empirical data, particularly for collaborative teams

Flash Fiction Exploring the Blurring of Work and Life

In this short paper, we present some reflections after a workshop exercise where flash fiction was used as a method to both encourage creative thinking around technology use, and to probe and reflect upon empirical data. The workshop was part of a project exploring the unique ways in which people develop strategies for balancing and/or blurring work and life demands. We describe how we used flash fiction to run a creative exercise with participants and, based on our experience, discuss the potential of this technique for developing interaction scenarios and design concepts, and for reflection about empirical data