An Ethnographic Study of Everyday Interactions in Innovative Learning Spaces

For the last 10 years universities and colleges in the UK have generated significant investment in designing innovative learning spaces. These spaces have been created to accommodate a student-centered pedagogical approach that is intended to promote formal and informal learning activities, collaboration and socializing by means of flexible technological infrastructure and architectural design. Various assessments have already been realized to investigate the outcomes of this investment and the impact of those spaces on learning. Yet, there is a persevering need to better understand the role of the technological infrastructure and the architectural design in innovative learning spaces as a lived experience by those who use and inhabit them; and to establish whether they are used as anticipated. This work takes up on this challenge and investigates three innovative learning spaces through an ethnographic approach that, following the analytic orientation of Suchman’s situated action, considers and juxtaposes anticipated versus actual use. More specifically, this work addresses the following research questions: • How do people interact with the architectural and technological infrastructure and with each other in innovative learning spaces on an everyday basis? • How do everyday interactions compare with those envisioned by the designers and managers of these spaces? • How do we account for the differences between actual and anticipated use of the spaces? • How can spaces be designed or recover from breakdowns so that actual and anticipated use (re) align? By addressing those questions, the present work contributes to an empirically-grounded understanding of how innovative learning spaces are being used and appropriated compared to the envisioned usage. The analysis reveals tensions between actual and anticipated use, the situated nature of flexible design, as well as the complex and contested processes through which interactions in innovative learning spaces are accomplished, adapted or superseded. The findings suggest a set of critical factors that account for the tensions between desired and actual use of such spaces. Issues of legibility, legitimacy and sense of ownership and appropriation supersede the existing views and guidelines of adaptable design as presented in the current literature and can be used to inform the design and evaluation of innovative learning spaces

Can technology-rich spaces support multiple uses?

A number of technology-rich spaces have been designed and created over the last few years with the purpose of supporting and enhancing learning, collaboration, community participation and a variety of everyday activities. Our research is concerned with how such spaces are used and whether they can support multiple uses. We report on an observational fieldwork study of a technology-rich multipurpose space based in a library. We examine its everyday use and discuss the tensions that were revealed in our analysis between anticipated and actual use. These are: (i) public versus private, (ii) play space versus meeting room and (iii) technology use versus non-use

HCI expertise needed! Personalisation and feedback optimisation in online education

Two key challenges in education relate to how traditional educational providers can personalise online provisions to the students’ skill level, optimise the use of tools and increase both the generation and utilisation of feedback (in terms of timing, content, and subsequent use by students). The application of traditional programmes in the online setting is often complicated by the legacy of traditional universities infrastructures, knowledge bases (or lack thereof in the human-computer-interaction/HCI realm), and pedagogical priorities. It is here that HCI experts (designers and researchers) can have real-world impact in line with macro-HCI, while also being able to test new innovations in collaboration with educators (e.g., the practitioners in such education settings). In this note, we make a case that the HCI community is in a situation where it can make a significant contribution to traditional providers in two prospective areas: personalisation, feedback generation and increased feedback utilisation

The value of experience-centred design approaches in dementia research contexts

Experience-Centred Design (ECD) has been applied in numerous HCI projects to call attention to the particular and dialogical nature of people's experiences with technology. In this paper, we report on ECD within the context of publicly-funded, long-stay residential dementia care, where the approach helped to highlight aspects of participants' felt experience, and informed sensitive and meaningful design responses. This study contributes an extended understanding of the quality of experience and the means of making sense in dementia, as well as unpicking the potential of ECD to support enriched experience and contextual meaning-making for people with dementia. Finally, we delineate what it is about Experience-Centred Design that differentiates the approach from other often-used approaches in designing in dementia contexts: 1) explorative thinking, 2) working within 'cuttings-out of time and space', 3) careful yet expressive methodology and documentation, and 4) working together to imagine futures. We end with considerations of how the contributions of this research may extend to other experience-centred projects in challenging settings

Running up Blueberry Hill: Prototyping whole body interaction in harmony space

Musical harmony is considered to be one of the most abstract and technically difficult parts of music. It is generally taught formally via abstract, domain-specific concepts, principles, rules and heuristics. By contrast, when harmony is represented using an existing interactive desktop tool, Harmony Space, a new, parsimonious, but equivalently expressive, unified level of description emerges. This focuses not on abstract concepts, but on concrete locations, objects, areas and trajectories. This paper presents a design study of a prototype version of Harmony Space driven by whole body navigation, and characterizes the new opportunities presented for the principled manipulation of chord sequences and bass lines. These include: deeper engagement and directness; rich physical cues for memory and reflection, embodied engagement with rhythmic time constraints; hands which are free for other simultaneous activities (such as playing a traditional instrument); and qualitatively new possibilities for collaborative use

Bread stories: understanding the drivers of bread consumption for digital food customisation

Consumer demand for food that satisfies specific needs rather than generic mass produced food is growing. In response, the food industry is actively investigating techniques for efficient and comprehensive food customisation. Digital approaches to food customisation are starting to emerge, however, the majority is currently limited to the ingredient level thus excluding consumption drivers such as people’s practices and values around food. Using the approach of cultural probes, we identified four distinct narratives around bread consumption: the healthy bread, the fresh bread, the ethical bread, and the exceptional bread. These themes encapsulate drivers of bread consumption, which we argue can inform the design of digital food innovation platforms

Care and design: an ethnography of mutual recognition in the context of advanced dementia

While there have been considerable developments in designing for dementia within HCI, there is still a lack of empirical understanding of the experience of people with advanced dementia and the ways in which design can support and enrich their lives. In this paper, we present our findings from a long-term ethnographic study, which aimed to gain an understanding of their lived experience and inform design practices for and with people with advanced dementia in residential care. We present our findings using the social theory of recognition as an analytic lens to account for recognition in practice and its challenges in care and research. We discuss how we, as the HCI community, can pragmatically engage with people with advanced dementia and propose a set of considerations for those who wish to design for and with the values of recognition theory to promote collaboration, agency and social identity in advanced dementia care

A Consumer-Centred Sensory Vocabulary for Open-Food Innovation

Through crowdsourcing and open innovation, product manufacturers are exploiting digital technologies to communicate with their consumers, drawing on the crowd to propose new products and designs. The food industry has struggled with adopting this model due to the lack of an effective language around the taste and texture of food. Existing sensory vocabularies are complex and target food professionals instead of consumers. To address this, we created a new consumer-centred sensory vocabulary aimed at underpinning future crowdsourcing platforms for open innovation in food manufacturing, with a focus on cake

House rules: the collaborative nature of policy in domestic networks

We draw on ethnographic studies to understand the collaborative nature of network policies or rules in domestic settings. We outline the technical nature of network policy in enterprise domains and how this contrasts with the social or collaborative nature of rules in everyday life. We then consider the deployment of network control and policy system interfaces in domestic settings, highlighting the ways in which household members collaboratively exploited these to support network governance. Our results suggest that an important feature of network policy in domestic contexts is that rules about network activity are shaped by and answerable to the moral reasoning that governs domestic life. This reframes our understanding of how rules are oriented to and used in the home and has significant implications for the design of home network policy systems

Listening to the forest and its curators: lessons learnt from a bioacoustic smartphone application deployment

Our natural environment is complex and sensitive, and is home to a number of species on the verge of extinction. Surveying is one approach to their preservation, and can be supported by technology. This paper presents the deployment of a smartphone-based citizen science biodiversity application. Our findings from interviews with members of the biodiversity community revealed a tension between the technology and their established working practices. From our experience, we present a series of general guidelines for those designing citizen science apps Full Citation Moran, Stuart, Pantidi, Nadia, Rodden, Tom, Chamberlain, Alan, Griffiths, Chloe, Zilli, Davide, Merrett, Geoff V. and Rogers, Alex (2014) Listening to the forest and its curators: lessons learnt from a bioacoustic smartphone application deployment. In, ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Toronto, CA, 26 Apr - 01 May 2014. (doi:10.1145/2556288.255702)