Aesthetic Multimedia CHI 2006 Blog

http://web.mac.com/bliusophia/iWeb

Tuesday MetaData

Implications for Design
Paul Dourish, University of California, Irvine, USA

Provides an alternative account of the value of ethnographic work based on historical and conceptual exploration of ethnographic practice. Helps practitioners, researchers, and reviewers assess ethnographic studies and their contributions.

• What has ethnography done for us?
• What does ethnographic practice involve?
• Ethnography in Context
o Engagement with a field setting from member's action to member's experience
o Long-term, immersive, participant-observation, a text, interpretive, analytic, increasingly a partnership with informants
o Understanding the underlying social organization
• Four issues
o The Marginalization of Theory
• Ethnography as a set of field techniques: "Toolbox" view
• Analytic Practices / Positions
• "An ethnographer is not a tape recorder"
• Analytic Stance / Interpretive Practice
o Ethnographic Analysis
• Objectivity and Subjectivity
• Ethnographic data is not "collected" but generated arises from the encounter between an ethnographer and the field setting
• Proceeds from a consciousness of subjectivities
• Be conscious of subjectivity
o Power Relations
• Asymmetric disciplinary relationships
• Design as the natural end-point?
• User interface design/human-computer interaction
• Design as a privileged activity
• The site of design?
o Technology and Practice
• Beyond the "two domains" approach
• Two separate worlds linked by problems that ethnography can uncover
• A broader view of practice
• How technology is put to use: adopted, adapted, repurposed, appropriated
• How people create the circumstances, contexts, and consequences of technology use
• How technologies take on social meaning
• A site where people perform social action
o Representation
• Ethnography in service of what?
• "Objective, instrumental, actionable" accounts
• Faming encounters
• Bridging epistemic communities
• What I'm Not Saying...
o Implications for design are bad
o Ethnography is irrelevant to practice
o poor metric for evaluating ethnographic contributions
o Narrow focus on design may underplay ethnography contribution
o Interdisciplinary engagements require conscious attention to power relations
o All stakeholders must have a place at the table and have a distinct role in an interdisciplinary work
• Site of social and cultural production

Monday MetaData

International Usability Evaluation: Issues and Strategies
Emilie W. Gould, Acadia University, Canada
Aaron Marcus, Aaron Marcus and Associates, USA
Apala Lahiri Chavan, Human Factors International, India
Huatong (Hannah) Sun, Grand Valley State University, USA

In this SIG, practitioners will discuss challenges they faced in selecting and customizing methods for international usability design. Facilitators and then participants will contribute experiences, case studies, and helpful multicultural contacts.
• Storytelling: Sharing Narratives
• Bizarre-Bazaar Method: informative performance method for Asian users
• Having very young facilitators when doing contextual inquiry and/or interviews
• Use methods that use inherent cultural practices from the community you are researching

Making Action Visible in Time-Critical Work
Jonas Landgren, Viktoria Institute & Göteborg University Sweden

Ethnographic accounts of time-critical physical work. Design implications for making verbal communication persistent to provide accountability. Inspiration for designers and practitioners of systems and applications for time-critical settings.
• Window report: crucial information, snapshot view
• Situation assessment, rushed deployment: location, surroundings, context to inform intervention, can’t wait must rush deployment but need full information
• Situational adjustment: momentary meetings, taking control of situation to bring to a safe state, a lot more time for momentary meetings with incident commander, improvisation
• All these work rhythms, share all the information, all communication is verbal and ephemeral
• Actions visible in conversations
- The actions are embedded in temporal structures which form the conversations and are thereby also represented in the communication.
- The work rhythm forms the conversations and makes aspects of the context of those actions visible in the conversation.
• Design implications
- Make verbal communication persistent
• Record the conversations with meta data
- Make verbal communication visible
• Visualize the evolving structure of conversations
• Create technology that is running on communication devices, each conversation should be uploaded to some central communication, structure of communication and visualize it
• CallerNo: ReceiveNo: Start: End: Audio: Note
- Collect basic information about communication, the content, create a structure through a timeline perspective
• Dual Use
- Supporting ongoing response work
• Evolving structure and cues to support sensemaking
- Post-emergency analysis
• Material for detailed analysis and response work evaluation
• Occasions for use
- Mobilization * – transportation, awakening
- Intervention – status report
- Situational adjustment *
- Incident completion
• Summing up
- Key rhythms and temporal structures in time-critical work
- Make ephemeral verbal communication persistent and visible
- Dual use: ongoing work, post-analysis

Participatory Design in Emergency Medical Service: Designing for Future Practice
Margit Kristensen, Morten Kyng, University of Aarhus, Denmark
Leysia Palen, University of Aarhus & University of Colorado, Boulder, Denmark & USA

Results of a participatory design process for emergency medical service address future practice and challenges of designing for major incidents.
• Palpable Computing: Palcom and ISIS Katrineberg
• Emergency Medical Service (EMS) in Major Incidents
• PalCom
- Focus on palpability of IT: how new functionality can be created through deconstruction and reconstruction
- Begin with real users in context
• Major Incidents
- All incidents are unpredictable
- Characterized by
• Too few available resources, meaning priorities have to be made
• Require immediate response
• Rapid changes in situation
• Many different professionals at the incident site as well as in remote locations
- Today: Minimal IT-support
• Participatory Design approach
- Field Studies, Design and Prototype Development, Workshops
• Familiarity Principle
- Professionals have to be very familiar with the IT to be used in major incidents
- Thus the IT should not only be useful (and used) in major incidents, it should be used and be very useful in everyday work
• Integrated alarm system
• Interdisciplinary hierarchy – can cause conflict
• Personal ID and data information for each victim
• Categorization of victims
- Triage cards, not immediately visible
• Medical assessment
- Only available equipment
• Communication and coordination around the victims
- Information handed over from person-to-person
- Finding each other or staying together during emergency response systems
• Victims as boundary objects in major incident EMS
- Presence of victims an indication of the work-to-be-done
• Design ideas
- Wireless biomonitors and remote access displays
- Capturing and displaying…
• Wireless biomonitors – The BlueBio System
- Exchange of data with hospital…
• Data from several monitors to different displays and change between these
• Technical solutions to support high degree of dynamics
• One/more to more connections situation without having physical indicators of what/who is connected (= no wires)
- How to indicate connections? Light, color, etc.
• Changes between connections
- How to indicate, how to carry out
• Respiration sound – can this be used at all?
- Distinguish between noise and not-noise
- Listen over distance without watching the patient
• Must be used with real users to get a more realistic understanding
• Designing/developing to the major incident area is difficult
- Not only matter of size, but kind
- The familiarity principle
- Reliability in use is crucial
• Cannot be done with out serious involvement of professions
• Participatory Design approach is essential

The MetaData from the Workshop

• Trying to open up that consciousness
• An experience in collaborative play
• Creating an opportunity for a visceral response that confronts your perceived inalienable rights
• Expanding the human knowledge-base
• How can we design systems where the goals are to augment cognitive, social, or creative processes?
• Performance as evaluation of technology
• Performance as complex highly skilled interaction
• Use of body motion
• Intuitive analysis
• Expressions are emergent from practice
• Virtuosity: A human’s ability to transcend all technical, social, cultural, etc. problems to such a degree that he or she contributes a unique, innovative, and inspirited performance
• Patterns of interaction in the communication
• Form of interaction where the process is about enjoying it together while creating it
• Attunement – How people pick up other people’s ideas, taking other people’s ideas and manipulating them
• People creating own emergent spaces
• Seeking new design spaces
• Computers as media for expressions, richer and more meaningful
• What are everyday expressive activities?
• How can we turn computers into media to support expressive activities?
• Jamming a lot of computers into space, taking over the space and becoming part of the environment
• Technologies are changes in consciousness, changing the way we think
• What does it mean that the mind is embodied?
• Perceptual systems: Thinking through our bodies, how you act in space
• Focus on touch, hard to communicate and study in language, many different senses that are incorporated in touch, forces to think of body in different way, using different parts of brain
• Reflective of own behaviors
• We think through our bodies, if we change our body we change our thought
• Put on costume that changes your personal perception
• The social is an entry point to thinking about body space
• Sensation, imagination, emotion
• Make it a collaborative tool
• Work with intended users as design partners
• Think of piece at a low level of the piece in terms of input and output
• Resolve the tension between human performance engineering and art regarding the role of new computer technology in human existence
• Dynamic feedback about consumption
• Information presented during the product-user interaction prompts user to adopt energy saving strategies
• In social data exploration, a visual display becomes the catalyst for conversation and collective data mining, analysis, and conversation
• Site-specific eco-visualization
• “Information consists of differences that make a difference.” – Edward Tufte: Envisioning Information
• Open and playful space
• How can creative empowerment and engagement be encouraged in a collaborative setting?
• What types of spaces allow for the overlap of art production and interaction design?
• How can structures and constraint aid in the development of interactive projects?
• Create a computational or interactive object out of found or discarded materials in a few hours
• Themes, music controllers, wearable devices, public installations, urban interventions
• Each workshop concludes with a public display of the projects created: from fashion show to musical performance to city walk – different input and output
• Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Culture
• Provide a safe environment for experimentation and risk tasking
• Emphasis on process, rather than outcome allows for non-judgmental atmosphere.
• How can limited structure and imposed constraints aid in the development of interactive projects?
• Explore the properties of material affordances but focus on personal expression and creative enjoyment
• Allow for “interaction relabeling” or remapping of an existing functionality onto a incongruous object
• Open-ended explorations where available materials dictate creative actions
• Participants are “performing” as designer and user negotiating materials and necessary invention
• Tension between role, action, and implementation captures the difficulties inherent in integrating artistic approaches and HCI practice
• Trying to find common practices
• Building frameworks for analysis/critique
• Certain communication styles and tasks lead to certain production methods
• Audiences as users
• Location based mobile content and technology creation
• Enhance experience and build ecological and historical awareness
• Artistic improvisation
• Body storming: building in-situ
• Using a lot of metaphors to help build interaction
• Annotated park walk, multiplayer adventure game, democratic audio – distributed improvisation play

• Artists want the transformative aspect of the interaction
• How you design systems that enables exploration robustly and solve the gap between engineering problems and experiential design problems
• Locative applications
• Just-in-time capability extension
• Handle multiple platforms
• Real-time representation
• Aesthetics as emotional content
• Tension between informational density and emotional (aesthetic) density
• Let go of territory and homeland
• Show what you mean
• Prioritize constantly
• Provide alternatives
• Converse
• Clear role of definitions and task distribution
• Know when to let go of design details that drive your partner insane
• Foster a collaborative culture of trust and respect
• At decision/tension points, see the situation from your partner’s point of view
• How is work disseminated and represented after production?
• How are interaction strategies shared among new media artists?
• Why fast prototyping ? Are we just bad time managers afraid of commitment?
• Social machine
• Exploratory machine
• Perceptual machine
• Synergetic machine
• “Space” machine
• Negotiation machine
• Functional pleasure
• Cultural probes




• http://ntrg.cs.tcd.ie/~ledoyle
• http://www.carminka.net/shi
• http://gouda.dcs.qmul.ac.uk
• http://orchid.cs.uiuc.edu

About Face Interface: Creative Engagement in New Media Arts and HCI

As a blue-haired lady on rollerblades wearing a long dress with an imprint of a Chinese painting on it, I take great joy in expressing myself. One of my ideas is to take my thousands of digital pictures and print them onto my clothes and other material objects to share the stories of my life. I have always articulated my life not only through my words but also through my style and artistic creations, such as in my appearance, my dance, and my many other forms of expression. Growing up with a father who natively speaks Taiwanese and with a mother who natively speaks Cantonese from Vietnam, while I speak primarily English, I am accustomed to expressing myself in other, non-verbal modes to help me cross language barriers that I face in my daily life.

It is through my multicultural and artistic background that I have recognized my potential to creatively articulate the means by which people from different cultural backgrounds relate to each other. And with the rise of our digital culture, I find it imperative that we become even more open and aware of the opportunities for new forms of social connection and expression with the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and with the various digital media available to the public. I also find it imperative that a more interdisciplinary approach to research and academic studies be used to more holistically understand the various issues of interest. My early undergraduate training in Social Science Research Methods, Computer Science, and Digital Arts has provided me with a multidisciplinary foundation, which has become valuable in transitioning into a new interdisciplinary graduate program at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU). I am one of the two new PhD students in the Technology, Media, and Society program at the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) Institute. I plan to creatively integrate human-computer interaction, sociology, communication, digital arts, and disaster research for my doctoral degree.

Creativity needs to be increasingly emphasized and integrated into research and practice, as it inspires different people to come together and share their culture and experiences. Creativity is my passion; not only has my digital arts education broadened my artistic perspective, but I also continue to be surrounded by amazing artists that have been inspirational to my creative research endeavors. Throughout most of my life, I have captured my experiences by creating, collecting, and sharing a variety of ephemera – artwork, fliers, music, and other memorabilia of different times in my life including my digital photos, videos, and audio recordings. In these ways, I have always been an “armchair anthropologist” interested in capturing and exploring creative forms of human expression; yet, through my research training, I am turning this personal, amateur interest into a more rigorous, professional practice. My aim is to take a more holistic approach through my interdisciplinary endeavors and create innovative technologies that encourage people to be creators of their experiences fostering self-expression.

Therefore, this workshop is particularly relevant and engaging in terms of my current research endeavors because I am interested in exploring and developing new models for communication and interaction, particularly in the disaster research domain, by integrating media art and peer-to-peer communication technologies. My goal in attending this workshop is to develop creative visions for this research project in order to reach a broader audience. I want to explore how I can create a synergy between my academic research studies and the collaborative and participatory fieldwork I plan to conduct in my future research plans. I want to use creativity and media art as the medium in which to explore and engage my research participants as well as to communicate with the research community more creatively. I also want to discuss different theoretical frameworks for concepts of creative engagement to better understand and justify a more creative approach to research, especially in the HCI research community.

CHI 2006 Bliu Blogger

If you happen to see a blue-haired lady on rollerblades floating by you, it is BLIU...please feel free to say hello as we interact in the physical world but I want to welcome you to my bliu virtual world.