M7 group work

Final Concept Map
Kadri-Maria Mitt, Marieh Sayadchi, Alise Semjonova

this is the concept map based on top ones from our collective 30 main concepts. Of course in this stage we could connect everything but we tried to keep only direct links. With this much of connectivity in our map, we can get from any concept to any other.

[M7] Conclusions

What I take away from these reading exercises, apart from quite large set of english vocabulary that I did not know they existed before!, is:

- Theory is important to reason about the problem, to develop a common vocabulary to communicate ideas, to have a framework to evaluate and predict effects, and to improve.(about the improvement: it is very difficult to change and improve something when we don't have a theory as a "frame of reference" behind what we are doing) and of course it is not everything, and it does not mean that we should force fit things into theories!

- There is not only one(or even limited number ) of "right" way to research and develop in HCI. one theory or approach might be more suited to a particular setting but other may fit another situation.
it is important to keep an open mind about new approaches particularly in ever changing technologic world.

- As a student or anyone who practices design in HCI, we should keep in mind that many theories and approaches need skill and practice to be understood and work properly.

The last chapter (this sounded so sad!)
Last chapter gives an overview of the evolution in HCI, starting from importing pure theories from other fields such as psychology and cognitive science to practical frameworks tailored for HCI type of practice and hybrid approaches which combines methods from different sources.
It then analyses the success of different approaches : a framework should be abstract enough to be applied in different problem setting and with different tool sets, but at the same time prescriptive enough to be able to map into real life situations.
HCI researchers should try to close the gap between theory and practice by developing practical frameworks for theories. the contribution of each theory to to the field should be valued. and discarding all the old theories in rise of a new one should be limited: at the end each of them are pieces of the same one bigger picture.


30 concepts: cognitive psychology, user capabilities, user limitations, goals, design, artefact, interaction , group work, society, human, cultural values, social values, design, community, ethnography, context, learning, technology, experience, emotions, reflection, rules, tools, activity, lifestyle, value sensitive, learning, usability

Critical Design Brief [M5]: how to save water

How To Save Water:
-Lets not!

The web service that we are designing for :
http://www.tallinnavesi.ee/en/For-Business/Service-Contract/Signing-and-terminating

The website of Tallinna Vesi gives hints and suggestions to keep the sea clean and save water in daily usages. We decided to explore the scenario when humans are short in drinkable water because of too wasteful usage. Although Estonia may currently seem far from this state, water scarcity already affects every continent and around 2.8 billion people around the world; these people don’t have access to clean water at least one month out of every year. More than 1.2 billion people lack access to clean drinking water right now.[wikipedia] If we continue using water thoughtlessly, these numbers will grow to the limits of global crisis. In order to bring attention to the problem we’re showing the children as victims and targeting their parents - we are showing what will happen if we don’t leave drinkable water to future generations.



Our critical design brief:
Targeted issue of our design is shortage in drinkable water.

Our project criticizes the careless use of drinkable water and the fact that people tend to think that the point where we face a critical situation in water scarcity is very far from them or their children. We try to engage people with bringing this issue closer to their personal lives, with involving their children. Targeted audiences of this design can be any adult with children or anyone who plans to have kids in the future. The project provokes people through showing how one’s kid should prepare for future shortage in drinking water, combining scientific background with dark humor.


The scenario:
Imagine the time that we have exhausted the drinkable water on the planet to the extent that there is no more water to drink. In such situation we have no choice but to stop water consumption and adapt our bodies to this new condition. Based on researches done on indian yogic (see link:http://phys.org/news191743491.html and http://www.unbelievable-facts.com/2013/06/a-man-who-survived-without-food-and.html) many training centers are opened to teach people how to survive without drinking water.

The yogic from the link claims that he started from the age of 8 and had not drunk water ever since.


The proposal:
“Desert Camel training center”

This training center is specialized for children and it promises to train kids to survive without water. They use the newest methods and best trainers and promise to teach the kids to stop drinking water in a three month long course.

The poster for this trainings:

Our Group: Marieh Sayadchi, Maria Medina, Helen Habakuk, Alise Semjonova

[M6] Contemporary theories (part II)

Turn to the wild 

and

Turn to embodiment

In my understanding they are not in conflict with two first approaches: turn to culture and turn to design. in fact they can be a way of looking at and problem solving, (as an example) for a case of "turn to culture problem". where the two first talk about the topic and concern of the design, these two try to shape a kind of lens or philosophy to look at the situation and approach it.

One good thing that I learned during this concept mapping was that I dont need to draw a clear border between different theories and methods. Actually many of them are overlapping. and it is possible in many cases to apply several of these theories to a particular setting and even get a very similar outcome, however sometimes some will be much more descriptive of the problem space and will result in a better solution.

ps: the grey area is kind of general overview, elements repeat in the right side again to make the map more readable

Paper Review

1. Turn to Design: 

Developing the Drift Table

In this paper authors are challenged to a domestic technology for households to promote non-utilitarian, “ludic” values in the home.

The final design that results from their work is a "drift table", where images of England's landscapes are displayed through a window on the table. image drifts to the left and right based on the weight balance on the objects located on the table.

Paper describes the design process, prototyping and testing. to start they have done ethnographic studies of information flow in the home and made many concept studies and sketch proposals.

After agreeing on a table like design, they has some choices of different tables, but in order to get away from task oriented tables such as dining or work table, they decided on a coffee table which implies a more relaxed settings.

this is defiantly goes under "turn to design" approaches.

why it is a "turn to design" work:

It tries to address issue related to human values and it is not addressing a practical or technical problem. "The idea that interaction design be informed by some ideology". it is a "design for lifestyle" because it promotes “ludic” values in the home. it is a "technology-mediated" experience design.

the video demo of the table:

2. Turn to Culture

Hatching Scarf: A Critical Design about Anxiety and Persuasive Computing 

This paper was a short introduction to the "hatching scarf". it did not include design process or a very deep analysis of the philosophy behind it.
Hatching scarf is an interactive scarf that reacts to the action of the user while she/he approaches to the bag of snacks. it is not a positive or negative reaction, but a reaction that is open to personal interpretation.
Designer says that it is an objection against the anxiety and pressure in the society about weight and body shape. it has feminist ideas behind and wants to encourage self expression without judgment.

why it is a "turn to culture" work:

it is a "design activism" to challenge current views on body image and eating habits. 

this design has elements of critical analysis and a re-contextualizing by doing that for "eating" and "reaction" concepts and it addresses questions concerning human nature and the human condition.

I did some research around it and I found this video about it:

http://vimeo.com/64228939

contemporary theories in HCI

Contemporary theories in HCI was a reply to similar wave in society where new human values start to emerge. HCI was young(still is!) and was not really fixed on any specific framework, that helped the field to move along the social and cultural revolutions without falling back. It seems that there is no agreed upon borders or use cases for contemporary theories yet. even parts such as critical theories may be ill understood by many of HCI researchers.
this was yet another hard to grasp reading from this book, the good thing is that after several similar experiences, now I am sure that it will become clear in next few days!

[M4] Modern theories (part II)

These theories were much closer to each other than previous ones, like a family they had a big common conceptual backbone. they all focus on human and technology in the social context of them.
while reading the book, it was really difficult to make a clear border of definition for each one, rather I found them merging together in many cases. grounded theory was a different approach between them because it had kind of engineering point of view to collect data and drive theories out of it based on researchers background. this and activity theory seemed to me more clear and easier to apply.

Distributed Cognition

Modern Theories in HCI:

Distributed Cognition(DC)

Development of distributed cognition method is continuation of involving cognitive science into HCI, and a result of popularisation of internet and computers in workplaces and social processes. 

This method tries to step out of individual user approach and move towards the networks of people and artefacts that they use.
Since it does not try to model process happening inside of human brain and focuses on external events, DC is expected to give a better detailed view on properties of the system itself.
Although distributed cognition promises a more accurate results, it has its drawbacks as well. one big difficulty on applying this method is that it needs conduction of ethnographic field study. ethnographic studies are time and resource consuming and there is no easy and predefined way of extracting design tips out of collected data.

My concept map of distributed cognition part of the book:

Classical Approaches in HCI

                 Classical Approaches in HCI

For making the map I first went through the text very quickly and had a grasp on the content and structure of the text. then I started reading it in detail and after I finished each sub-section, I drew the part of map related to that. while reading the next sub-section, I would sometimes revise my map accordingly editing previous part as well as adding new branches.
My map aims to summarise the classical approaches in HCI , their application and limitations.
I had a small problem during this Cmap, in many cases I found the examples interesting and wanted to include them in my map, but it was not clear how to show them in a meaningful and readable way.

100 Paper Challenge! 

or

Quick and Dirty Reviewing

the questions we supposed to answer after doing the task:

• How did you get to the 20 most important concepts? Briefly describe the process and the underlying rationale.

- I marked the papers that were interesting to me while I was reviewing , those ones were less than 20 so I went back to the ones with best ratings(my own rating) and selected some from them. the criteria to choose them were: 1)the idea was very new and exiting to me. 2)the work seemed very useful and addressed some big problems that could improve individual's life. 3)it contained some knowledge that I lack and would like to learn more about. 4)the subject is something that I may consider as a topic of my future work or research.

• What was the overall experience of the QnD Review?

- It was kind of challenging, but the reference paper about QnD review helped me to gain some insight.

and the best outcome of it for me was that, after this I have much more idea on what kinds of work is going on in the HCI field and which ones can be related to my background and which ones may be my future interest.

• Which are the two most interesting papers you would like to read more deeply? (Provide the full citation with DOI number, so that we can find the paper later)

- maybe:

Sitwat Langrial, Harri Oinas-Kukkonen, Päivi Lappalainen, and Raimo Lappalainen. 2013. Rehearsing to control depressive symptoms through a behavior change support system. In CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 385-390. DOI=10.1145/2468356.2468425  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2468356.2468425

 Elisa D. Mekler, Florian Brühlmann, Klaus Opwis, and Alexandre N. Tuch. 2013. Disassembling gamification: the effects of points and meaning on user motivation and performance. In CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1137-1142. DOI=10.1145/2468356.2468559 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2468356.2468559 

• How much time did you spend on this homework? 

I guess I am not the fastest one! as I read on the QnD review paper that it should take ~6 hours. for me it took at least 10 hours.

• What was the most difficult part of this homework?

after 60-70 papers I was totally bored(although I didn't do all the reviews at the same day) and was not interested to actually look at the papers and their content in a creative way. so before that, by reviewing each paper I would think how could I improve or use this work .. but in the second half I just wanted to finish it!

• How to make the quick and dirty review better?

I guess 50 papers also could do the same job and would be less tiring and boring.

maybe this suggestion is more to the paper authors rather than reviewers but the structure of the paper, clear titles, and descriptive abstracts can make it faster and less frustrating.

Some Thoughts on M0 Reading Exercise for Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction

Some Thoughts on M0 Reading Exercise

for

Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction

link to the article: http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/human_computer_interaction_hci.html

my conclusion on this introductory text was that HCI started from filing gaps in technology to make it more usable; but it grew and evolved in time to the point much deeper and broader that its original roots predicted.

I can summarize its journey in the past ~35 years in three conceptual/practical phases:

-phase one; the first sparks: I would put anything happened before and in the first years of "software crisis" in this group. in this time HCI had a small role in the whole picture and it was used as a complementary tool to add something to the existing technology(software or hardware). HCI is not a part of the design and development cycle yet. I would call it an additive role.

very first example is simple user manuals and documentation and later example is adding some graphics to the previously total textual contents.

-phase two emergence of the field: in this phase HCI enters the production cycle of the technology and fulfills some editing role. It means that perhaps HCI is somehow considered in design and development but not in a very deep manner. it is used in revision and verification. the subject technology may change and edited based on it.

-phase three , present and future: I will put the task-artifact cycle in this phase: co-evolution of needs and responses, importance of looking ahead and limitation of our prediction. HCI is a part of design and development and not only fulfills the existing needs, but also shapes the needs and looks into the future and predicts it. this can be very risky since we are not only observing the flow of event but also changing it simultaneously, and prediction is such circumstances may not be as simple as it seems.

HCI now is moving towards finding and filling gaps in human needs as an individual and as a society. Predicting and shaping the future of technology and its role in human/society's life is also a big part of current HCI.