Saturated and situated: expanding the meaning of media in the routines of everyday life

Recently media scholars have made renewed calls for non-media-centric, non-representational and phenomenological approaches to media studies. This article responds to this context through an investigation of how media form part of the experiential, habitual and unspoken dimensions of everyday routines. Drawing on examples from ethnographic research into digital media and domestic energy consumption, we explore the role of media in the making and experiencing of environments, centring on their salience to daily routines of transition in the home. While media content forms part of how people make their homes, attention to these routines brings into focus a notion of the 'media-saturated' household that goes beyond attention to media content in significant ways. This, we argue, has both theoretical and practical implications for how we situate and interpret media as part of everyday life. © The Author(s) 2013

PORTS: an interdisciplinary and systemic approach to studying energy use in the home

In this paper, we present an alternative and novel approach to identifying energy demand reduction opportunities in the home. Through the creation of detailed narratives informed by our interdisciplinary research team of social scientists, designers and engineers, we employ a systemic view of how energy is consumed in the home. By interrogating clusters of people, objects and resources through time and space as they come together within our qualitative and quantitative research, we have identified opportunities for sustainable HCI design. This paper outlines our approach and presents an example product concept in relation to laundry

Understanding technology in the home: sensory ethnography and HCI

Digital technologies are increasingly considered an important piece in the puzzle of domestic energy demand reduction. However, for technological interventions to be successful, we need to understand more about how they might fit into the lives and homes of ordinary people. This paper reflects on bringing together methods from sensory ethnography and user-centered design to generate technologies for the home. Beyond practical considerations, it underlines the importance of creating an interdisciplinary dialogue that engages with both theory and method

An internet of old things as an augmented memory system

The interdisciplinary Tales of Things and electronic Memory (TOTeM) project investigates new contexts for augmenting things with stories in the emerging culture of the Internet of Things (IoT). Tales of Things is a tagging system which, based on two-dimensional barcodes (also called Quick Response or QR codes) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, enables the capturing and sharing of object stories and the physical linking to objects via read and writable tags. Within the context of our study, it has functioned as a technology probe which we employed with the aim to stimulate discussion and identify desire lines that point to novel design opportunities for the engagement with personal and social memories linked to everyday objects. In this paper, we discuss results from fieldwork with different community groups in the course of which seemingly any object could form the basis of a meaningful story and act as entry point into rich inherent 'networks of meaning'. Such networks of meaning are often solely accessible for the owner of an object and are at risk of getting lost as time goes by. We discuss the different discourses that are inherent in these object stories and provide avenues for making these memories and meaning networks accessible and shareable. This paper critically reflects on Tales of Things as an example of an augmented memory system and discusses possible wider implications for the design of related systems. © 2011 Springer-Verlag London Limited

Digital touch: towards a novel user-experience design pedagogy

HCI and Industrial Design are both disciplines that are currently experiencing radical transformation in terms of their identity and scope. HCI has moved beyond its origins in human factors and cognitive psychology towards the proactive and generative design of experience. Industrial Design has similarly evolved from a concern with physical form and function-giving solutions to the holistic design considerations of the user’s experience. Given the complexity and scale of this shifting design landscape, the response of design education must shift in methods and learning and teaching objectives. This paper provides the Design and Technology Education community with a research case study of innovation within HCI education, here situated within the broader context of Industrial Design education. We present a novel pedagogy for designing digital touch communications, developed through an interdisciplinary collaboration of HCI, Industrial Design, and Social Science academics, and advanced through a coursework assignment for 64 undergraduate Industrial Design and Technology students undertaking a User-Experience Design module at the [AUTHOR] (UK). We discuss the role of low-fidelity experience prototyping of digital touch interactions beyond screens, and the limitations of such an approach when engaged with by novice designers with entrenched material science understanding. We conclude the paper with a call for new educational ‘tools’ to support and scaffold both the learning and teaching of design for digital touch experiences within a User-Experience Design context, and we offer our development of a Designing Digital Touch Toolkit as one such tool

Supporting novice designers design of digital touch

Digitally mediated touch is an emerging and significant area for technology and therefore for design and design education. However, the design of digital touch is a challenge, especially for novice designers, compounded by low awareness and understanding of the sociality of touch and the complexity of communicating felt sensations. This paper presents a qualitative study of a two-part educational intervention on the design of digital touch using a design-based research methodology. Findings are presented and discussed on the design challenges faced by novice designers in relation to touch and digital touch (the focus of part one of the intervention) and the development and piloting of the Designing Digital Touch (DDT) toolkit (the outcome of part two). The paper discusses how the toolkit can be used to foster and support novice designers to respond to the future facing complexity of digital touch design.</p

LEEDR: what are the results? Participant feedback for H99

The LEEDR project was a four-year study that explored energy consumption in family homes. 20 households took part, being involved for about three years. Insights were fed back to the participants at the end of the project in the form of a unique, tailored book for each family. This book represents the style, formatting and information content of those books. This version has been called ‘H99’ and it is an amalgam of chapters from multiple homes, and therefore should not be used as a source of data or analysis: please refer to publications. The information contained here has been released generally in the hope that it might inspire and inform the development of feedback from other similar projects