This document discusses the challenges of human-centered research in human-computer interaction (HCI). It notes that while humans are complicated and unpredictable, they are also interesting. It explores how HCI studies people, including through fieldwork and co-design. Challenges include sustaining participation over time and balancing stakeholder interests. While new technologies make interaction seamless, humans still matter and HCI must consider social consequences. The document calls for acknowledging pitfalls and bias, and critiquing views of AI as human-less.
Discourse Centered Collective Intelligence Platforms for Social InnovationAnna De Liddo
PPT presentation of the "URBAN LIVING LABS AS SOCIO-DIGITAL SPHERES FOR EXPERIMENTING GOVERNANCE"
International Workshop
Cities are more and more witnessing the emergence of innovation initiatives,
indifferently originated by top-down or bottom-up intentionality, that are being
observed and analysed as Urban Living Labs, i.e. socio-digital innovation ecosystems
made up of creative communities of people producing innovation at urban
level with the support of a number of methods and tools helping to co-create value
out of the experience of interaction between the citizen/customer and
private/public actors.
These Urban living Labs are activators of experiments of governance innovation
which include people, institutions, private actors, relationships, values, processes,
tools and physical or financial infrastructures, that could trigger, generate, facilitate
and catalyse innovation in the city. These are spheres for knowledge creation
within the city and differ for dimensions, scale of action, nature (top-down or
bottom-up), organizational structure, and also for the way in which the participants
acts and are represented. They are also heterogeneous for the space of action in
which they emerge and can be interrelated and connected by topics, contexts,
interests, practices, and level of maturity in many different ways.
In Urban Living Labs new governance modes and models are experimented,
where participants acts in several and not pre-defined ways, creating complex
organizations able to integrate hierarchical and horizontal structures and creating
specific spheres of action stimulating collective testing and learning. In these
environments, governance is experimented between formal and informal publicprivate-
people partnerships able to shape innovative dialogues between citizens
and city institutions.
In this perspective the workshop aims at investigating some questions:
1.What kind of organizations is shaped in Urban Living Labs?
2.How is governance modelled in Urban living labs?
3.How is governance experimented?
4.What level of institutionalization is opportune for the emerging governance?
Presentatie ecare summerschool Ghent 2014 An Jacobs
In this presentation we start with explaining the necessity of a user centered approach of any e-care solution. In the past users where only consulted when a product was almost finished at the end of a development trajectory when making changes cost a lot of money. Today another approach is becoming the best practice of R&D: user centered design. In the care domain this brings some extra challenges towards the inclusion of vulnerable people as well as overburdened care professionals. Adapted UCD strategies are thus appropriate. Illustrated with examples from own research experiences in e care R&D projects, we reflect on the essential steps, pitfalls and solutions to integrate a user centered approach in your future eCare project.
Discourse Centered Collective Intelligence Platforms for Social InnovationAnna De Liddo
PPT presentation of the "URBAN LIVING LABS AS SOCIO-DIGITAL SPHERES FOR EXPERIMENTING GOVERNANCE"
International Workshop
Cities are more and more witnessing the emergence of innovation initiatives,
indifferently originated by top-down or bottom-up intentionality, that are being
observed and analysed as Urban Living Labs, i.e. socio-digital innovation ecosystems
made up of creative communities of people producing innovation at urban
level with the support of a number of methods and tools helping to co-create value
out of the experience of interaction between the citizen/customer and
private/public actors.
These Urban living Labs are activators of experiments of governance innovation
which include people, institutions, private actors, relationships, values, processes,
tools and physical or financial infrastructures, that could trigger, generate, facilitate
and catalyse innovation in the city. These are spheres for knowledge creation
within the city and differ for dimensions, scale of action, nature (top-down or
bottom-up), organizational structure, and also for the way in which the participants
acts and are represented. They are also heterogeneous for the space of action in
which they emerge and can be interrelated and connected by topics, contexts,
interests, practices, and level of maturity in many different ways.
In Urban Living Labs new governance modes and models are experimented,
where participants acts in several and not pre-defined ways, creating complex
organizations able to integrate hierarchical and horizontal structures and creating
specific spheres of action stimulating collective testing and learning. In these
environments, governance is experimented between formal and informal publicprivate-
people partnerships able to shape innovative dialogues between citizens
and city institutions.
In this perspective the workshop aims at investigating some questions:
1.What kind of organizations is shaped in Urban Living Labs?
2.How is governance modelled in Urban living labs?
3.How is governance experimented?
4.What level of institutionalization is opportune for the emerging governance?
Presentatie ecare summerschool Ghent 2014 An Jacobs
In this presentation we start with explaining the necessity of a user centered approach of any e-care solution. In the past users where only consulted when a product was almost finished at the end of a development trajectory when making changes cost a lot of money. Today another approach is becoming the best practice of R&D: user centered design. In the care domain this brings some extra challenges towards the inclusion of vulnerable people as well as overburdened care professionals. Adapted UCD strategies are thus appropriate. Illustrated with examples from own research experiences in e care R&D projects, we reflect on the essential steps, pitfalls and solutions to integrate a user centered approach in your future eCare project.
Valedictory Lecture
Making Thinking Visible in Complex Times
Prof Simon Buckingham Shum
This event took place on 15th July 2014 at 4:00pm (15:00 GMT)
Berrill Lecture Theatre, The Open University, Walton Hall Campus, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
In 1968 Doug Engelbart gave “The Mother of All Demos”: a disruptive technology lab had quietly invented the mouse, collaborative on-screen editing, hyperlinks, video conferencing, and much more. This was the start of the paradigm shift, still unfolding: computers were no longer to be low level number crunchers, but might mediate and mould the highest forms of human thinking, both individual and collective. In this talk I review nearly 19 years in KMi chasing this vision with many colleagues, inventing tools for making dialogue, argument and learning processes visible in different ways. How do we harness such tools to tackle, not aggravate, the fundamental challenge facing the educational system, and its graduates: to think broadly and deeply, and to thrive amidst profound uncertainty and complexity? These are the hallmarks of the OU — and indeed, all true education from primary school onwards.
Systemic Design Principles & Methods ISSS 2014Peter Jones
Research paper presentation at ISSS 2014: Design Research Methods for Systemic Design: Perspectives from Design Education and Practice
The recent development of systemic design as a research-based practice draws on long-held precedents in the system sciences toward representation of complex social and enterprise systems. A precedent article, published as Systemic Design Principles for Complex Social Systems (Jones, 2014) established an axiomatic and epistemological basis for complementary principles shared between design reasoning and systems theory. The current paper aims to establish a basis for identifying shared methods (techne) and action practice (phronesis). Systemic design is distinguished from user-oriented or industrial design practices in terms of its direct relationship to systems theory and explicit adoption of social system design tenets. Systemic design is concerned with higher-order socially-organized systems that encompass multiple subsystems in a complex policy, organizational or product-service context. By integrating systems thinking and its methods, systemic design brings human-centered design to complex, multi-stakeholder service systems as those found in industrial networks, transportation, medicine and healthcare. It adapts from known design competencies - form and process reasoning, social and generative research methods, and sketching and visualization practices - to describe, map, propose and reconfigure complex services and systems.
A key-note presented at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences in february 2014 about how philosophy of "embodiment of human being" can help design the Smart City. Instead of making the city digital, how can we use digital processing to make for a better experience in the actual, concrete world in which our bodies are situated?
branding / mess: some sketch ideas in the hope of a discussion a-small-lab
sketch text about mess, innovation, branding.
published as part of installation for stimulus terrain at MOTAT
http://a-small-lab.com/motat/
stimulus terrain for innovation processes is a space at the Idea Collective / Innovation Hub at the Museum of Transport and Technology (Auckland, New Zealand).
This is part of a "dynamic, evolving, collaborative project that celebrates New Zealand's vibrant innovation culture" by pairing five diverse New Zealand innovators with artists and designers to illuminate the activity of innovation, ideation, creation and collaboration.
An agenda for Systemic Design - An emerging research and educational track in systems sciences and design.
Peter Jones talk at ISSS 2014
Movements in Design & Systems Thinking
Education Movements
RSD3 Symposium
Systemic Design Research
Relationship to Systems Community
Free the Patterns! The Vital Challenge to the Pattern CommunityDouglas Schuler
Patterns and Pattern Languages have been used to design buildings as well as software and devices such as the iPhone. They can be used for "loose coordination" among people working on "wicked problems" such as climate change mitigation and more just and equitable societies.
Presentation given during Panel 1 ("Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?") at "Research Conditions and Digital Humanities: What are the Prospects for the Next Generation? #dhiha5" (10–11 June 2013, Paris), an international colloquium organised by Mareike König (IHA), Georgios Chatzoudis (Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung), in cooperation with Pierre Mounier (Cleo).
What do we mean by dialogue? Certainly it is more than conscious speaking and attentive listening in a group. Indeed, when participating in a real dialogue we recognize and understand the depth and value of the experience, but may find it impossible to call it up on demand. We know dialogue is much more than method, and does not lend itself to methodological practices. But perhaps it can play a more meaningful role in design practice, in particular for design situations where stakeholders must have a voice in and play an active role in the deployment of designed solutions.
A few slides from a class session in the Carnegie Mellon School of Design, "Foundations of Practice for Social Design." I'm putting them up for folks who arrived here from my "notes on participatory design' on medium.com.
This workshop asks how we can use methods drawn from design, art, and craft, informed by
interdisciplinary and systems thinking, to materialize not just envisioned ‘things’, but abstract or
invisible ideas and relationships. There is an emerging set of research practices using tangible or
material models, or constructive making and embodying to visualize how people think about concepts
ranging from invisible systems and infrastructures to mental models, personal data which would
otherwise be invisible, or even the phenomenological dimensions of experiences themselves. Examples
include explorations of the design of public services, healthcare processes, mental health experiences,
career paths, crafters’ movements, and experiences of social networks (Aguirre Ulloa and Paulsen,
2017; Rygh and Clatworthy, 2019; Luria et al, 2019; Ricketts and Lockton, 2019; Nissen and Bowers,
2015; Fass, 2016).
Valedictory Lecture
Making Thinking Visible in Complex Times
Prof Simon Buckingham Shum
This event took place on 15th July 2014 at 4:00pm (15:00 GMT)
Berrill Lecture Theatre, The Open University, Walton Hall Campus, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
In 1968 Doug Engelbart gave “The Mother of All Demos”: a disruptive technology lab had quietly invented the mouse, collaborative on-screen editing, hyperlinks, video conferencing, and much more. This was the start of the paradigm shift, still unfolding: computers were no longer to be low level number crunchers, but might mediate and mould the highest forms of human thinking, both individual and collective. In this talk I review nearly 19 years in KMi chasing this vision with many colleagues, inventing tools for making dialogue, argument and learning processes visible in different ways. How do we harness such tools to tackle, not aggravate, the fundamental challenge facing the educational system, and its graduates: to think broadly and deeply, and to thrive amidst profound uncertainty and complexity? These are the hallmarks of the OU — and indeed, all true education from primary school onwards.
Systemic Design Principles & Methods ISSS 2014Peter Jones
Research paper presentation at ISSS 2014: Design Research Methods for Systemic Design: Perspectives from Design Education and Practice
The recent development of systemic design as a research-based practice draws on long-held precedents in the system sciences toward representation of complex social and enterprise systems. A precedent article, published as Systemic Design Principles for Complex Social Systems (Jones, 2014) established an axiomatic and epistemological basis for complementary principles shared between design reasoning and systems theory. The current paper aims to establish a basis for identifying shared methods (techne) and action practice (phronesis). Systemic design is distinguished from user-oriented or industrial design practices in terms of its direct relationship to systems theory and explicit adoption of social system design tenets. Systemic design is concerned with higher-order socially-organized systems that encompass multiple subsystems in a complex policy, organizational or product-service context. By integrating systems thinking and its methods, systemic design brings human-centered design to complex, multi-stakeholder service systems as those found in industrial networks, transportation, medicine and healthcare. It adapts from known design competencies - form and process reasoning, social and generative research methods, and sketching and visualization practices - to describe, map, propose and reconfigure complex services and systems.
A key-note presented at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences in february 2014 about how philosophy of "embodiment of human being" can help design the Smart City. Instead of making the city digital, how can we use digital processing to make for a better experience in the actual, concrete world in which our bodies are situated?
branding / mess: some sketch ideas in the hope of a discussion a-small-lab
sketch text about mess, innovation, branding.
published as part of installation for stimulus terrain at MOTAT
http://a-small-lab.com/motat/
stimulus terrain for innovation processes is a space at the Idea Collective / Innovation Hub at the Museum of Transport and Technology (Auckland, New Zealand).
This is part of a "dynamic, evolving, collaborative project that celebrates New Zealand's vibrant innovation culture" by pairing five diverse New Zealand innovators with artists and designers to illuminate the activity of innovation, ideation, creation and collaboration.
An agenda for Systemic Design - An emerging research and educational track in systems sciences and design.
Peter Jones talk at ISSS 2014
Movements in Design & Systems Thinking
Education Movements
RSD3 Symposium
Systemic Design Research
Relationship to Systems Community
Free the Patterns! The Vital Challenge to the Pattern CommunityDouglas Schuler
Patterns and Pattern Languages have been used to design buildings as well as software and devices such as the iPhone. They can be used for "loose coordination" among people working on "wicked problems" such as climate change mitigation and more just and equitable societies.
Presentation given during Panel 1 ("Which Changes are Currently Taking Place in our Research and Academic Culture?") at "Research Conditions and Digital Humanities: What are the Prospects for the Next Generation? #dhiha5" (10–11 June 2013, Paris), an international colloquium organised by Mareike König (IHA), Georgios Chatzoudis (Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung), in cooperation with Pierre Mounier (Cleo).
What do we mean by dialogue? Certainly it is more than conscious speaking and attentive listening in a group. Indeed, when participating in a real dialogue we recognize and understand the depth and value of the experience, but may find it impossible to call it up on demand. We know dialogue is much more than method, and does not lend itself to methodological practices. But perhaps it can play a more meaningful role in design practice, in particular for design situations where stakeholders must have a voice in and play an active role in the deployment of designed solutions.
A few slides from a class session in the Carnegie Mellon School of Design, "Foundations of Practice for Social Design." I'm putting them up for folks who arrived here from my "notes on participatory design' on medium.com.
This workshop asks how we can use methods drawn from design, art, and craft, informed by
interdisciplinary and systems thinking, to materialize not just envisioned ‘things’, but abstract or
invisible ideas and relationships. There is an emerging set of research practices using tangible or
material models, or constructive making and embodying to visualize how people think about concepts
ranging from invisible systems and infrastructures to mental models, personal data which would
otherwise be invisible, or even the phenomenological dimensions of experiences themselves. Examples
include explorations of the design of public services, healthcare processes, mental health experiences,
career paths, crafters’ movements, and experiences of social networks (Aguirre Ulloa and Paulsen,
2017; Rygh and Clatworthy, 2019; Luria et al, 2019; Ricketts and Lockton, 2019; Nissen and Bowers,
2015; Fass, 2016).
To many, informatics means big data. But as the 2014 Obermann Working Symposium, “Designing the Digital Future: A Human-Centered Approach to Informatics,” November 7-8, 2014, demonstrated, informatics technology intersects with narrative, the arts, collaborative learning, dance, diversity, narrative, social justice movements, values sensitive design, visual thinking, and more. During an “agenda lunch” on the second day of the symposium, participants considered the future of human-computer interaction and informatics at the University of Iowa. These slides are the product of that discussion.
During two days and with participants from across the University of Iowa and surrounding community, keynote speakers, local panelists, and the symposium organizers explored how -
-to encourage more departments to participate in the informatics initiative
-to assess campus resources for joint programming, courses, and research groups that engage not only science and technology, but also the arts, humanities, and social sciences
-to clarify the opportunities, challenges, and obstacles faced by researchers in HCI and informatics, including funding; tenure and promotion; research and publication; curriculum, disciplinary differences, and institutional barriers
Digital sustainability: how to move beyond the oxymoron
Can digital art be made to last in a sustainable way? It is no surprise that artists are keen to use and respond to new material in their practices. With every new invention, throughout the years, museum conservators tried to follow and adapted their working methods to the new challenges. Similarly, with the rise of digital artworks conservators try to think of solutions to preserve the collected artworks. While this works well in some cases, in many cases changes to the artwork happen as most hardware and software follow the design of planned-obsolescence. As a consequence endless migration and/or emulation projects are set up to prolong the working of digital art. It makes sense to use upgraded technology to keep an artwork going. Yet this enduring rat race becomes questionable when thinking about the environmental impact of digitals. In this presentation I want to discuss the oxymoron ‘digital sustainability’. By acknowledging this inherent contradiction, in my research I aim to critically inquire what it means for digital technology to support sustainability and how humans and technology can work together optimally for a more sustainable future. As a first step, I'll explore the potential of ‘networks of care’ to create, build and maintain digital cultural heritage in a sustainable way.
Similar to Luigina Ciolfi inaugural lecture 2019 (20)
Le nuove frontiere dell'AI nell'RPA con UiPath Autopilot™UiPathCommunity
In questo evento online gratuito, organizzato dalla Community Italiana di UiPath, potrai esplorare le nuove funzionalità di Autopilot, il tool che integra l'Intelligenza Artificiale nei processi di sviluppo e utilizzo delle Automazioni.
📕 Vedremo insieme alcuni esempi dell'utilizzo di Autopilot in diversi tool della Suite UiPath:
Autopilot per Studio Web
Autopilot per Studio
Autopilot per Apps
Clipboard AI
GenAI applicata alla Document Understanding
👨🏫👨💻 Speakers:
Stefano Negro, UiPath MVPx3, RPA Tech Lead @ BSP Consultant
Flavio Martinelli, UiPath MVP 2023, Technical Account Manager @UiPath
Andrei Tasca, RPA Solutions Team Lead @NTT Data
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
State of ICS and IoT Cyber Threat Landscape Report 2024 previewPrayukth K V
The IoT and OT threat landscape report has been prepared by the Threat Research Team at Sectrio using data from Sectrio, cyber threat intelligence farming facilities spread across over 85 cities around the world. In addition, Sectrio also runs AI-based advanced threat and payload engagement facilities that serve as sinks to attract and engage sophisticated threat actors, and newer malware including new variants and latent threats that are at an earlier stage of development.
The latest edition of the OT/ICS and IoT security Threat Landscape Report 2024 also covers:
State of global ICS asset and network exposure
Sectoral targets and attacks as well as the cost of ransom
Global APT activity, AI usage, actor and tactic profiles, and implications
Rise in volumes of AI-powered cyberattacks
Major cyber events in 2024
Malware and malicious payload trends
Cyberattack types and targets
Vulnerability exploit attempts on CVEs
Attacks on counties – USA
Expansion of bot farms – how, where, and why
In-depth analysis of the cyber threat landscape across North America, South America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East
Why are attacks on smart factories rising?
Cyber risk predictions
Axis of attacks – Europe
Systemic attacks in the Middle East
Download the full report from here:
https://sectrio.com/resources/ot-threat-landscape-reports/sectrio-releases-ot-ics-and-iot-security-threat-landscape-report-2024/
Builder.ai Founder Sachin Dev Duggal's Strategic Approach to Create an Innova...Ramesh Iyer
In today's fast-changing business world, Companies that adapt and embrace new ideas often need help to keep up with the competition. However, fostering a culture of innovation takes much work. It takes vision, leadership and willingness to take risks in the right proportion. Sachin Dev Duggal, co-founder of Builder.ai, has perfected the art of this balance, creating a company culture where creativity and growth are nurtured at each stage.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
Generative AI Deep Dive: Advancing from Proof of Concept to ProductionAggregage
Join Maher Hanafi, VP of Engineering at Betterworks, in this new session where he'll share a practical framework to transform Gen AI prototypes into impactful products! He'll delve into the complexities of data collection and management, model selection and optimization, and ensuring security, scalability, and responsible use.
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
Empowering NextGen Mobility via Large Action Model Infrastructure (LAMI): pav...
Luigina Ciolfi inaugural lecture 2019
1. Users, participants, co-designers…Or just pesky
humans?
On the challenges of human-centred research in
Human-Computer Interaction
Professor Luigina Ciolfi
C3RI - The Cultural, Communication and Computing Research Institute
Sheffield Hallam University (UK)
l.ciolfi@shu.ac.uk @luiciolfi luiginaciolfi.net
https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/c3riimpact/
2. “The two hardest problems in computer science are: (i)
people, and (ii) convincing computer scientists that the
hardest problem in computer science is people.”
Prof Jeff Bigham, Carnegie Mellon University
3. They change their mind
They are complicated
They are part of complicated organisations and groups
They are busy and might not want to talk to you
They often say one thing but mean, or think, another
They often want what experts know will not work
Humans Are Hard Work
4. They change their mind
They are complicated
They are part of complicated organisations and groups
They are busy and might not want to talk to you
They often say one thing but mean, or think, another
They often want what experts know will not work
They are smart and adaptable
They can empathise
They make very complicated systems work, using very complex tools
They like to be and work with other humans
They can figure things out
They find ingenious workarounds, solutions, or alternatives
Humans Are Hard Work…But They Are Interesting!
7. How Do We Study Humans in HCI?
The Human Processor
8. The twists and turns of 30+ years in the field of HCI according to Susanne
Bødker (2015):
● First wave: cognitive science and human factors (model-driven)
(Critique by Liam Bannon, From Human Factors to Human Actors, 1991)
● Second wave: focus on groups of people working with a collection of
applications; situated action; social research methods
● Third wave: participation, sharing, holistic experiences; integration of
methods from creative practices (particularly design)
How Do We Study Humans People in HCI?
10. "To study a user 'in the field' does not mean find a user,
bring them to a field and watch them get chased by
cows for an afternoon (unfortunately)”
(Anonymous HCI student, 2012)
…From mapping behaviours to understanding practices in
context
Studying People (and Technology) in the Field
11. Working in the Hunt Museum (Limerick), for the SHAPE project (2001-2004)
“Re-Tracing The Past” (2003)
Studying People (and Technology) in the Field
15. “Customers ring me all the time. They never ask me ‘Are you up on the
scaffolding, are you measuring?’. They never say ‘Can I talk with you, can
you check something for me’ But they ask me everything. So at least
when I’m in the car, even when I’m driving, I’m looking through this
information trying to give an answer. So I just carry everything.”
(Jane, sales representative)
Studying People (and Technology) in the Field
19. Established and well-tested approach to systems design (UCD iterative
cycle: understand users-design-prototype-evaluate)
Design decisions about a system are made by those who will not use it - We
go away and then return with a system/prototype for evaluation
Constraints and limits to number of iterations we can go through
Changing the way people work/do things is complicated, adoption of new
systems might be difficult and often disruptive. Extracting requirements
from the user-centred design process to feed into the system’s
development can over-simplify the real-world aspects of practices that
might mean a system’s success or failure
The Challenges of User-Centred Design
20. Involving people to design together with us (the “experts”)
Recognizing both the expertise and context/organizational knowledge that
people have to contribute to the design of systems, and the right to be
part of decisions that can change the way they work
Also, a general intent to democratise the process of (digital technology)
design and to make change open and visible to those that it affects
(originated in the 1970s in Scandinavia, participation in workplace
decisions)
Powerful yet challenging way to work with participants: balancing
constraints, agendas, interests and expertise
Involving People as Co-Designers
22. “At the time of the co-design workshop we had in [City] in the summer of 2013, due
to what happened in my own group, I had the feeling that we had betrayed the
museums. Tech took over the show. As a designer, I felt we lost control. (...) But
looking back, nothing was lost, we learnt from experience and this episode proved
useful” (anonymous co-designer A)
“From speaking with some of the museum professionals (...) I get the impression
that they are delighted to have all of these co-design activities, but the same time I
have the feeling that they are somehow frustrated at how the actual prototypes are
finally being implemented, somehow they are cut out off [from] the equation.”
(anonymous co-designer B)
“It is also important for those [designers and curators] to trust the process, and to
believe what comes out will have value and be useful” (anonymous co-designer C)
Involving People as Co-Designers
23. A lot of work needed, a lot of negotiations, but hard to sustain before the
final results are evident to everyone
Often the decisions are not the ones that the “experts” (or one kind of
experts) would take: this can cause tensions
Also, we demand a lot of our co-designers, but when funding runs out at
the end of a project, we leave (often we have little choice on the matter)
“Historical” Participatory Design is morphing into something else, often
putting its legacy behind:
“Do design teams ‘compromise’ PD by loosening its egalitarian politics? Or
do they impose their own values onto these participants, as methodological
and ideological colonialists?” (Bannon, Bardzell and Bødker 2019)
The Challenges of Co-Design
24. There is no universal, one-size-fits-all, way of going about
human-centred research in HCI
Importance of partnership, of dialogue, with stakeholders
Never assume that because you have approached a similar
group/person before that their priorities and goals are the same
Because something is fashionable in research circles it does not
mean is the right fit, or will work anytime
Leave a legacy (even small) of the work you do with people. It
might just be a relationship legacy, but it matters
(Some) Things I Learned
26. The rise of platform computing
…leveraging established interaction models (.e. the like and
share model) that make new systems easier to learn…
…leading to usage and user-generated data on a massive scale…
…but is this making individuals, bodies, and their micro, local
and localised practices disappear?
Resurgent “promise” of AI and algorithmic knowledge (machine
learning)
…but where is the focus on people, communities, and groups,
which still very much exist? Where is the human?
What’s Next?
29. A concern for human beings is more important than ever - Not only from
the point of view of how people use and customise systems, but also of
how they enable them to work
“Visible” and “Invisible” Work (Star and Strauss 1998)
“We are dealing with work that can not be seen, because it is purposely
made invisible by the creators of the platforms (…) It is work that is not
recognized as such, because workers are considered consumers. In addition,
there are workers who do tasks so small that they are not considered work,
but microwork.
These false consumers and microtaskers perform a very important task,
which is to train artificial intelligences.”
(Antonio Casilli)
Humans Still Matter
30. Interaction might be more seamless, less demanding on the surface, but it can
still be a bad fit for those who engage in it, or lead to ways of working and
doing that ignore other important things that human beings value
Humans Still Matter
32. Joy Buolamwini and The Algorithmic Justice League (MIT Media Lab)
Humans Still Matter
33. ● Thinking about the social consequences of pervasive digital systems
● Questioning the rhetoric of ever-growing progress and of innovation as sole
driver (acknowledge pitfalls, failures, and (political) crises – Hakken, Teli and
Andrews 2016)
● Not letting the human in current technological discourse become a bodiless,
genderless construct (Bardzell (2010) arguing for a feminist HCI… “The
interaction design process takes place independent of gender
considerations, and even today the central concept of the whole field—the
user—remains genderless”)
● Develop HCI knowledge and expertise with awareness of the importance of
social action, and of our own bias and ideologies (also in HCI reporting and
publication, see Light 2018)
● Critiquing and proposing alternatives to a resurgent view of AI as human-
less (algorithms are made by people and are about people)
● Bridging research and practice, and industry and academia
The Challenges Ahead
Thanks to all of you for being here this evening. I am really honoured to see so many of you, and particularly to see so many family and friends. Thanks for making an effort and coming on such a cold day, even from foreign, faraway places: Italy, Ireland, and even Liverpool (Brighton).My talk tonight is about what I believe makes my work as a human-computer interaction academic exciting, and at the same time constantly challenging – human beings. I started in this field because I was enthusiastic about computers, and the potential of digital technologies, but the more I work and think about it, the more I realise that what I am passionate about the most is understanding what role technologies play in people’s lives. Pre-emptively, I want to mention that all the past projects I will discuss in the rest of the talk are the result of the work of many people. In the past 22 years of work in HCI, I have been very lucky to work with some wonderful people, many of them are here tonight. I am just borrowing our joint work to make points about my own thinking.
Human-computer interaction is a discipline that focuses on the complex relationship between people and digital interactive systems. We study this relationship, we study the domains that digital technologies affect, and how, and we design and implement novel systems. A human-centred approach is key.
Human beings are the main focus, and as HCI researcher we are often becoming advocates for end-user needs and requirements as part of development teams.
Working with people is as interesting as it is challenging.
There is a common perception of people as something that can be factored into the design of a system, the messy variable to consider, the unpredictable one…or simply the one that can be left for last, once all the really difficult technical problems have been solved. The reality is more complicated.
From the point of view of systems developers, you can see why. Humans are hard work!
READ OUT SLIDE
But each of these aspects has another side, one of opportunity. When the idea of “interactivity” emerged, together with personal computing, all these problems/opportunities also emerged: how do we deal with them and build on them to make interactions with digital systems usable and effective?
Early work in HCI was about bridging human users and complex machines that required specialised knowledge,
The assumption was that most people would need a lot of help as personal computers were new devices, and interaction with them an unknown quantity. In time, digital devices and interfaces have evolved, and so have people as users, becoming more and more savvy and also relying on standards that have become commonplace, think for example about the organisation of software graphical user interfaces. These days we are used to having a few magical devices in our pockets that we can control with simple gestures and that intuitively perform many functions for us
Like this one. Oh and smartphones of course!
If systems and their users have changed, so has the way we study people and involve them in the HCI process
At the beginning, it was all about models of how human cognition operated, and the idea that it operates as a “human processing system”: memory, perception, motor processor, etc. This in relation to an overall system of interaction understood as one person operating one device.
I am sure if all of you think of a simple interaction with an interactive system that you have in your daily life, you can point out many more things that matter in terms of how that interaction takes place.
Think about taking money out at the ATM machine: yes, it’s about putting the card inside the correct slot, pressing the buttons in the right sequence and reading clearly what is on the screen. But other things matter too: for example, when it’s very sunny and the screen cannot be read, or whether you are aware or not that perhaps you are in a sketchy part of town, or whether there is someone standing too close behind you, or a friend instead keeping an eye out just beside you. All these things shape your interactive experience, even if it lasts less than one minute, as taking cash out does.
You are acutely aware of all those things while the interaction is progressing, only to forget pretty much everything as soon as it is completed. It’s a fairly simple interaction, that only takes up a tiny bit of time in our day and it’s not even that important (unless it fails of course), and yet so much surrounds it. When it goes smoothly, it becomes pretty much invisible, So, now think of much more complex systems that we use as part of much bigger parts of our lives: our job, for example, our medical record, our education. How complex it is to make them work in such a way to disappear in the background of our practices.
It’s quite clear that we need to study human beings in ways that are much broader than this model, even if some of these things do not necessarily lead to a component in the system, or a behaviour, we do need to consider them all to know how the system will be used in practice
Professor Susanne Bodker identified three “waves” in the history of the discipline, with important expansions of what was considered the scope and approach of HCI research. READ OUT
When I started my career in HCI as a student researcher in 1997, we were working very much with cognitive models and doing studies in the lab. Opportunity to work on a European project changed that for me. The project was about designing an electronic adaptive guide for museums.
I was sent to the Museo Civico in Siena to do Observations of people visiting the space, creating “maps” of where they were stopping, for how long, etc.
As you can see from the photograph, In the middle ages, they weren’t that concerned with making it easier for researchers of the future to build an adaptive museum guide! This is a very beautiful hall, covered in dozens of frescoes, with people spending a lot of time there to see them all.
I was filling up my observation grid, but noticing many other things, for example how things changed when people came to visit with other people, and even depending on what the weather was like outside, for example when the rain made people who were not interested in it come to the museum.
Then some visitors would notice that I was not a visitor myself, I had a staff pass and they thought I worked for the museum and started asking me questions. We would talk and I would ask them questions: what made them come visit on that day, what did they like the most. Of course, this would have broken any ethical research protocol, and there was never a way for me to take what people said as data, but I was interested in it. As naïve as I was as a beginner researcher, I thought it was important.
When a couple of years later I began working as a researcher at the University of Limerick in Professor Liam Bannon’s group, I became interested in CSCW - Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and in approaching the study of people in the field, with all that it brings, and realising that many other researchers in HCI worked with people in that way, and that working in that way was not breaking any rules of HCI. This was what I was interested in doing, understanding people using technology in the context of their activities, in the field
In the immortal words of a former HCI student who shall remain anonymous, this is not what studying people in the field means.
It’s not about putting people in situations we have orchestrated and documenting how they deal with them, which is also a valid approach that can be very useful for systems design.
It’s about being where they are, and understanding what they do, why and how – in relation to the physical and social context of their practices. Fieldwork in HCI draws heavily from the ethnographic tradition, which in the words of Dave Randall, Richard Harper and Mark Rouncefield, “seeks to present a portrait of life as seen and understood by those who live and work within the domain concerned”
I will talk about some examples of studying and working with people from my professional history that pushed me and challenged me as a researcher. It wasn’t easy to just pick a few, but thinking back across many projects these stood out as important milestones for my own learning. After presenting these examples, I will move on to discuss some current and future research themes
A first example is the work I did on the European project SHAPE at the Hunt Museum in Limerick.
SHAPE was about building interactive exhibitions embedded into the spaces of museums and galleries.
At the Hunt we built an interactive exhibition where visitors could explore mysterious objects from the museum collection that were never fully interpreted, and then share their own theories about them. In the Study Room (on the right of the panorama), they could find out known facts, in the Room of Opinion (on the left) they could record their theory. The recording then appeared on the Study Room interactive radio, on the channel for each object, where other visitors could listen to it.
The design of “Re-Tracing the Past” was based on over a year of field work in the museum.
I studied how people explored the galleries, and which objects caught their attention and why, but also the role of staff and volunteers in guiding them and facilitating many activities, such as handling sessions, where people could manipulate authentic objects.
We learned things that we did not expect. For example that to design something that would work and fit into the museum it was not enough to design it for visitors. We had an unexpected additional category of people involved: the museum docents, volunteers who gave their time to the museum and who were driven by their own interests and passions.
The docents make the museum unique, and we could not design anything that did what they did, nor exclude them from any way in which we wanted to augment the museum through technology. Understanding them was the key to understanding the character of the museum, and to developing design ideas that would fit: if the docents are the ones who tell people their knowledge and stories, we needed for the interactive experience to do something else. So we decided that we would support people (both visitors and volunteers) to tell US their views and ideas, and this is how the Re-Tracing the Past exhibition came to be.
People weren’t just using what we designed, they contributed and made it different every day.
Also the installation was something that the Docents appreciated as it was not doing their job but actually enabling them to be represented and heard.
This data vignette shows an example: Paddy is a docent who has done some research on one of the mysterious objects, a Bronze age artefact known as a Y-shaped object. He used to come to the exhibition to listen to what theories people came up with about these objects. In this instance, he came with paper and pencil to take notes, and you see him hear talking to one of the researchers, Mark (who is here tonight, incidentally). Paddy was one of the first Docents to come to the exhibition to record his own views about the objects. It meant something important to him that he’d play a part.
A second example is from a project called “NomadS”. My team and I studied a company’s transition from a paper-based system for collecting, detailing and processing orders of joinery products to a digitally-supported one. The company developing the digital system was also involved in the project.
A group of 8 sales representatives volunteered to be the early adopters of the system, and to be studied by us in order to document their practices and inform the design of the new system.
The reps had a home office, worked at customers’ sites to take measurements of parts and to file orders, and at the company headquarters to talk to managers and to production. Soon, it transpired that it was not enough to meet them every now and then for interviews and observations, and that it was important to also “move” with them and see how they managed. The “in between” places in their working lives mattered a lot
My project researchers started going to work with them for several days a week. They became also company, help and support to them.
They collected data that was interesting and important well beyond extracting some design requirements. Work in the car was extremely important, in fact as important as the time they spent at the office and with customers. It was their workplace for “relationship management”, making phone calls, answering queries, planning the rest of the day/week.
When the software company that we were working with released the new PDA-based software, we continued studying how the reps’ practices were affected by it. It turned out that they kept using paper although that meant walking onto a building site with a cumbersome paper form, filling it in, then copying everything into the PDA back in the car for processing the order. The system worked perfectly and everybody liked it. However, when we asked why they were not taking it with them on site to fill in the orders directly on it, they told us that it was “too expensive”, “too fine”, “too fragile”. Interestingly, they would bring to the building sites a digital measuring device (called a DigiRod) that was about 5 times more expensive than the PDA. They would use it as a walking stick to better climb onto scaffolding and to scrape off bits of plaster off the frames of doors and windows to take better measurements, but they had no concerns about doing these things with it.
It turned out to be an issue of physical design and choice of materials. They didn’t think the PDA was a device fit for a building site, but only for the car and office. So we built a second prototype that was installed onto the DigiRod, stored electronic measurements and communicated them with the PDA once the DigiRod was back in the car. No lab evaluation, or even a standalone evaluation, of the mobile system could have told us that. Things might have been very different now, with people being used to carry smart phones or tablets to all places, but it was certainly an issue all those years ago.
The next examples takes me to a completely different context, Bunratty Folk Park, an open air museum displaying entire authentic buildings (32 of them), their contents, the activities in them and the landscape surrounding them. We conducted field studies to understand how people visited the park so to design a mobile interactive installation to complement the visit. It was clear that there wasn’t very much information on the buildings and their objects available to people, so a reasonable approach would have been that of providing them what was missing. However, following people around for many weeks and listening to their conversations during the visit told us that what people enjoyed the most were the sounds, smells and even tastes of the place (for example the cakes freshly baked by the animators in some of the cottages), and imagining the lives of the people of the past inside those buildings.
What we designed for them was a mobile experience that mixed digital audio of historical characters narrating their lives, and physical interactive objects, each connected to a building, to control it and to respond to it. Visitors could record their own impressions and memories.
The objects were chosen on the basis of what people remembered and appreciated about the park to do with its sensory qualities. We could not have captured that without spending time to visit the park with people, making note of their physical appreciation of objects, smells and sounds.
I never thought that in my career one morning I would be chopping up fresh turf in the prototyping lab, but there you go.
Visitors’ feedback was very positive, and it was considered a memorable experience.
However, this was not what the management of the park had expected back then: they wanted a classic “smart guide” like other tourist attractions had, digitizing the written information on their physical map and enabling people to book a table for lunch in the museum restaurant. They were also surprised that we ha not just taken their brief, but spent time studying visitors and talking to the staff animating the buildings. They never expected that we would go collect primary data and use it to come up with a completely different idea. While it was a successful project research-wise, it did not lead to future collaborations with the Park, and it was an important lesson in relationship management, in terms of expectations, goals and priorities. End users were happy, the partner institution’s management not so much.
All these are examples of what we call “user-centred design”: we study the end users of a future system, gather data about their practices, use them to design the system, then take it back to them (ideally multiple times) for evaluation and feedback. It’s a very established approach that can be very effective. However, it can pose some challenges. READ OUT
An alternative approach that I have used, and that has the goal to bring beneficiaries and stakeholders into the decision-making process is known as Participatory Design or Co-Design. READ OUT
This leads me to the last example from my own work I want to talk about, done here at SHU. On the meSch European project (2013-2017), cultural professionals were co-designing with us a platform and toolkit to enable them to create tangible interactive installations for museums and heritage sites. The team had designers, developers, social scientists, heritage and museum professionals.
While co-design is a well-established approach, our work on meSch was quite rare in terms of both scope and duration. 4 years is a long time to sustain working in this way as it is a demanding process requiring time and effort. The process was very successful, it produced numerous prototypes, three full-scale public exhibitions in three different museums in the Netherlands and Italy, a software and hardware toolkit, and a co-design resource booklet.
As it was such a substantial co-design effort, we documented the process throughout, so we were studying how all participants worked together on the project (and this included ourselves).
While the process was really successful and everyone felt that they had gained a lot from it and would do it again, some of the feedback we gathered showed how difficult working in this way can be, and that people had to deal with very significant obstacles and worries. MENTION QUOTES
The perception of common goals can almost disappear in the busyness of the work, and not being able to perceive mid-way results is challenging and frustrating.
A lot of food for thought was found in studying the process, in documenting the voice of those involved and not just of final, external beneficiaries of our work, and indeed we are still reflecting on it
Co-Design is not exempt from challenges! READ OUT
READ OUT
Up to this point I have talked about the past. But in the final part of this talk I want to talk about the future, or rather about a fluid present
So, what is next for doing human-centred research in HCI?
Museum conference anecdote: Conference on digital technologies for museums, one presentation really stood out, a wonderful project where an entire gallery was redesigned to allow people to leave digital traces in the form of comments, thoughts, drawings. I really liked it and I was ready to make a comment about how nice it was to see a project that was not about trying out the latest gadget, as it often happens, but it was all about people, and about dialogue. Someone else got to say something first, and it was: “It’s wonderful to see a data-driven museum”. (and the person was a museum professional not a computer scientist!)
My reaction was: How about the people??? After they have finally started to be asked to contribute and share, they have become just data?
And there are other challenges in relation to this
READ OUT
Platform computing (and platform capitalism) is on its way to making individuals, bodies, and their micro, local and localised practices disappear, the “like and share” model
Interactions are becoming more and more standardized,
Is a focus on the human disappearing? Do we still need it?
Is what we need just for humans to identify themselves from bots and the rest is taken care of?
The reality is more complicated than this.
How many of you have encountered something like these? What are they for?
These two things are also something else: they are crowdsourcing mechanisms to train machine learning algorithms, which we help every time we fill these in. We are not just different from bots and algorithms, but we are training them to work more accurately.
As machine learning and applications of AI are on the rise, we need more and more human interaction, and human work…some it’s very hard to know it’s even there
READ OUT EXAMPLES
To the point that is raising some serious ethical concerns, as well as interactional ones
For every simpler, more transparent, more “magical” interaction there is other work by humans that is invisible and unrecognised, and that has a cost:
READ OUT
The work of “priming” systems to make them “understand us”
The work of other humans to maintain, train, refine the system
A second issue is about “intelligent” systems, which can track things efficiently and certainly seamlessly…but they need to be designed with human needs and human diversity on mind. READ OUT
There are some recent and very well-publicised cases, such as Apple Health only being updated to include period tracking in 2014.
Another example is the increasing evidence of how biased Machine Learning algorithms be. The work being done by JOY BULAMINI and the Algorithmic Justice League, among others, is tackling this
We are dealing with emergent aspects of how technology impacts on humans and humans can shape technology,
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Pesky humans we might be, but we are still unfailingly interesting and still the best at empathy. And that will have made all the difference.
These are hefty challenges and we might need to tackle them in new ways, with regard to things that we have not considered before. Of course I know that I cannot face them all by myself, but I very much looking forward to playing a part.