Interact 09 Conference website
Dates:
August 24-25, 2009 – Preconference: Tutorials, Workshops
August 26-28, 2009 – INTERACT 2009 Conference
Designing for Engaged Experience
This workshop explores the process of translating understandings and insights, arising from products created by collecting data about people’s experience of places, into prototypes; and, in particular, ways to enable getting close to ‘what it feels like’ to shape a design space that conveys a sense of ‘being there’. Our design starting point is ethnographically inspired methods for collecting data about people’s experiences.
Experience-centred design and designing for affective computing often includes video or photographic records of interactions, data that can ‘extend’ or ‘deepen’ our field time. From a designer’s perspective, there are two difficulties with this approach. Using recorded images and sound has always been problematic [1], as the viewer is not situated in the full visual and sensorial panorama in which the interaction origi-nally occurred. Secondly, video analysis is a time and resource consuming specialist task [2]. So, rather than using such material as ‘hard data” [3] our intention has been to use it as a ’soft and flexible medium of representation’ open to participatory interpreta-tion [4]. To shape the design space we need to present the raw material in ways that afford design interpretation of the participants’ perspectives and experiences.
For example, watching a video of a participant’s visit to a city garden or a wilder-ness area might cue reflection on the interaction as a ‘view from somewhere’ [5], but it also has potential as a ‘view from somewhere else’. We become enmeshed in our own interpretations of the participant’s perspective and experience. Our interactions with the data form a bricolage that illuminates the underlying logic of the social practice under review through the lens of our own experience. What we see, as designers, is reflexive, grounded in our own and our audience’s cultural perspective. So our media recordings are not just products of a toolbox of convenient methods. Rather, the re-corded data itself is a site of continued interaction. Importantly, this interaction is participatory in a profound sense. The re-mediation [6], inherent in re-presenting and re-interpreting the data, adds to the original material and inspires design.
EgoPOV video
The locale of technology design and production tends to be urban-based and, con-sequently, little attention is paid to ‘natural’ and rural places in design [7]. We there-fore propose to use ‘natural place’ example data that offers designers a ‘de-familiarisation‘ and thus a means to reflect upon their own interpretative processes.
Consider drawing upon recordings of a visitor’s familiar experience of a natural beauty spot to inspire designing a technology to mediate others’ experiences of that or another special places. Whilst digital technology might never transfer the sense of embodiment in a place to those who have no in situ experience of the place, could it be used to augment the otherwise often flat and somewhat sterile depictions of place, for example, that one might come across in a tourist guide? How can we draw upon a visitor’s familiar experience of a natural place so as to inspire the design of a digital technology that might mediate others’ experiences of that place?
We found that Egocentric POV video is useful in depicting memories and mean-ings visitors associate with natural places and the ways in which people recreate and augment these meanings in subsequent visits [8]. In particular, it provides a record of the participants’ reflexive tailoring of deictic communications with physical contin-gencies to construct meaning. For example, depicting visual resources egocentrically supports interpreting the situated experience, as similarity between the speaker and listener’s eye-movements in viewing scenes promotes comprehension [9]. So egocen-tric Point of View (egoPOV) video can depict how both fleeting and temporally ongo-ing experiences contribute to creating meaning during situated interaction.
We will present EgoPOV video extracts as an exemplar during the workshop that capture some of the meaning associated with a natural, unbuilt place (Alligator Creek, a National Park in the north Australian tropics) as visitors familiar with the location talk about why the place is special to them. We focused on a number of different participants’ accumulated experience of places they had visited regularly. Natural places hold memories and enabled us to uncover ways that people recreate and aug-ment place in subsequent visits [10]. We extended this by framing the activity in participants’ accounts of the place in their personal history. We co-located the re-searcher and participant to provoke articulating references to physical resources and interviewed participants later using the egoPOV video to assist recall. We use analysis of the egoPOV video and later interviews to provoke ideas and inspiration for design.
Determining the design methods
Can the interaction artefacts produced during in the course of such research, for example as described above, inspire to new interaction designs? We are all familiar with iterative design methods that incorporate a desire for the participation of poten-tial interactants. Often this approach is implemented in a demarchic, action research cycle process. However, to turn a design into an actual object, the practicalities of production often require some form of traditional project management. There are a number of ways of coping with this conundrum. One is to present the basic tools for production in the mode of so-called Web 2.0 projects. An empty framework is pre-sented, with the site open and dependent on participant contribution (see [11]). An-other relatively common form is the open source process. However, neither approach necessarily fits in with responsibilities towards stakeholders and funding bodies.
A recently suggested alternative would be to apply a core element of the values model [12]. The values model of designing essentially posits the overall design meta-phor and subsequent parameters or outcome values as a design goal so that participant input can be participatory but the product goal retains a top down form necessary for projects that have to maintain milestones and outcomes.
This workshop invites participants to explore the potential of this third approach, (and any other models suggested by workshop participants in their position papers), in the context of designing for engaged experience, and focused on the experience of being in a natural place. There will be opportunity for participants to present their own material and potential design metaphors in order to then work collaboratively in small groups. We intend that participants not only find this experience of designing useful but that it gives them some design ideas to take away and explore further.
Fashioning the design space for ‘place’
As Harrison [13] puts it, “Placeness is created and sustained by patterns of use; it’s not something we can design in. On the other hand, placeness is what we want to support; we can design for it.” So, if we no longer take for granted that the process of mediation should be driven by a desire for, e.g. fidelity (as might be a goal in the design of a virtual environment to represent a place), how could we begin to design systems that mediate places and experiences in novel ways?
As part of the design emphasis of the workshop, we will discuss ways in which people appropriate technology in tactical support of their experiences. This will help to open a new design space that focuses strongly on the ability of users (or receivers) to use their own capabilities for making sense of experiences of natural places. Draw-ing on reflective design ([14], [15]), we will explore how the design of affective and experiential technologies should not necessarily be concerned with determining mean-ing in the system, but rather with opening up interpretation and meaning for the user, allowing them to find their own meaningful footing when interacting with technology. Design games and prototyping play a central role in this effort.
This perspective on design is driven by a wish to allow for a repositioning of tradi-tional forms of technological mediation. Such a shift towards opening up technologies to interpretation also entails a thorough, ongoing questioning of our own values and predispositions as professionals and researchers within HCI, design and related fields.
Conclusion
In the work of re-presenting and re-interpreting data gathered using ethnographi-cally inspired methods, we are able to collaboratively think about and give shape to conceptual designs for mediation. In that discussion we expect to discover new and engaging vocabularies for interaction design and technologies that mediate the ex-perience of natural places. Exploring the shaping of an appropriate design space will permit us to interrogate our own foundations for doing design.
References
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