Designing for Engaged Experience

DfEE Ozchi Overview 2008

OZCHI 2008 Full Day Workshop, Cairns, Australia, December 8 – 12 2008

This workshop encourages participants whose research includes the experience of interaction in natural places and how understandings of people’s experiences in natural places might be used in design. In a nutshell, we are concerned with getting closer to ‘what it feels like’ to be there. Experience centred design and designing for affective computing often leads to the use of what might loosely be called ‘ethnographic methods’. Numerous constraints might prohibit full-blown ethnography, so we often end up with video, photographic or audible records of interactions, in an effort to “extend” our time in the field.

We gain insights from analysing this data, but we do so in a world of sounds and images that are representations of the original interactions. Recorded images and sound are (and always have been) problematic and suspect [1] as the viewer is not situated in the full visual and sensorial panorama in which the interaction originally occurred. In employing such methods, as designers, we’re seeking the material that affords interpretation of a participant’s perspective and experience. What we do is reflexive, grounded in the cultural perspective from which we describe our interpretation of those practices, and the cultural perspective of our audience. So, a record of a participant’s interaction might be, viewed, listened to, or transcribed and read, but it then carries only some of its original richness.

However, whilst watching a video of a participant’s visit to a natural place might cue reflection on the interaction as a ‘view from somewhere’ [2], it also has the potential to become a ‘view from somewhere else’. Our media recordings are not just the product of a toolbox of convenient methods. For us, as designers, the recorded data itself becomes a site of interaction. Our interactions during recollection and interpretation become a form of reportage that seeks to reveal the ‘underlying logics of (the) social practice’ [3] under review. Importantly, this is an interaction that adds to the original material; it is an interaction that inspires.

=============================

Australasian Computer-Human Interaction Conference (2008)

OZCHI is Australia and New Zealand’s leading forum for work in all areas of human-computer interaction. As the annual conference for the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG) of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia (HFESA), OZCHI attracts an international community of researchers and practitioners with a wide range of interests, including usability, information architecture, interaction design, human factors and ergonomics, human-computer interaction, information systems, software engineering, artificial intelligence, design, social sciences and management. The long and short papers accepted in the conference will be included in the proceedings of the ACM Digital Library.

This year’s conference is to be held at James Cook University’s Tropical campus just north of Cairns in Far North Queensland, Australia, the only place on the planet where two World Heritage listed areas, the Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropical Rainforest, are side-by-side.

Theme

Our conference theme is Designing for Habitat & Habitus. This theme encompasses the role of technology in supporting and enhancing our relationships with, and within, the settings we inhabit and designing interactions that can sustain affective and diverse cultural and environmental dimensions of life-experiences.

more: OZCHI 2008 website