chi2018 course: resillience to brilliance

From Resilience to Brilliance is a CHI Short Course to get you up to speed on what you need to know about how the body works on the inside to deliver better designs & research for health Course code: C07-A

TO ENSURE SPOT: SIGN UP BEFORE CLOSE OF EARLY BIRD REG MARCH 1

Know More about THE BODY,

Design better for THE BODY, for Brilliance

QUICK self test:

What is the relationship between stress, attention and learning? Is all stress bad for learning/attention?

What is the relationship between proprioception, endocrine system and stress?

How use the vistubular-occular reflexes to improve cognitive performance? How design interactive tools to support this?

How use the endocrine system deliberately to effortlessly improve memory building

How to leverage the microbiome -  to improve tissue and cognitive processing

How use caffeine strategically? How use multiple bodyclocks deliberately?

What are training cycles and how use these to support cognitive effort deliberately?

How do you know when you are sufficiently hydrated? relationship to creativity?

The brain is part of the body - what does that mean?

HOW PLUG THESE IDEAS INTO DESIGNS?

Some Example Basics we’ll cover:

Essential amino acids

Essential fatty acids

Essential to what and for whatThe role of hormones for health and cognitive performance Including some really cool new ones like leptin and ghrelin regarding knowledge workers.

Approach and Outcomes

To come to grips with all the awesome complexity of the body from physiology to endocrinology with some microbiota in between takes years of study to gain expert knowledge. We have 160 mins.

Three Ideas:        

 Performance as a design strategy to complement Prevention ·    

 In- and Circum- bodied interaction as a complement to em-bodied interaction ·      

Design for Impact at Scale

Each concept will form the basis for group design work to be carried out in the course, using a Design Jam methodology to co-create and co-test designs.

Concept 1: Performance complements Prevention

In health science, the discourse around the body is often about “preventative health.” In other words, the language focuses on delaying a negative health outcome. It’s almost as if the body only becomes visible if it gets in the way – through illness – of what ever we wish to do. In sports science, the approach to the body is rather than push it into the background, to bring it forward:  that performance goals – whaterver these are – are mediated through the body. Thus the state of the body immediately affects the state of one’s performance. A simple insight here is that the brain is part of the body, thus whatever we do to enhance our physical wellbeing, translates to all other aspects of our performance, including emotional, social and cognitive.

Group Work: Design Jam

In this part of the course, we will dive deeper into the principles of Performance as a model to approach interactive health and wellbeing design. From this, our first exercise will be to build a set of Performance Design Heuristics. We will also consider the properties of a successful design and how to evaluate these. As a design exercise we will (1) review several current preventative health approaches/applications and (2)  use our heuristics to determine which if any would benefit from being reframed as Performance approaches (3) and re-design them from this perspective.

Concept 2: Interaction In and Around the Body

We tend to think of the body as a relatively closed, if hugely complex, system. Indeed, 11 complex systems, interact within this frame. Recent work on the microbiome, however, suggests that the boundaries between inside and outside the body are potentially both illusory and may be “considered harmful.” In this section, we’ll consider three models to help access these complex systems: (1) threat and the nervous system (2) the in5 model for tuning rather than behavior change and (3) circumbodied interaction with the micro to macro biome.

Group work: Design Pairs

For each of these 3 models we will consider a short Design Challenge to be considered in pairs, and to form the basis to explore in the group as a whole, how these approaches can help inform novel approaches to health and wellbeing design.

For example: with the in5 model we learn that sleep is critical for a multitude of functions, cognitive, not the least. Therefore, rather than a “smart alarm” to interrupt sleep, what kind of system needs to be designed to help get the sleep one needs to link back to optimizing performance, from Concept 1?

Concept 3: Design For Scale

A significant challenge in HCI around performance or scale. Even with the number of downloads of Pokemon Go, there is no sustained demographic effect. Normal, in other words, has not changed. Yet. It may be that to make normal better, there is not an app for that; we need to think about new kinds of systems, measures and interactions. We may need to consider new ways to engage at an infrastructure rather than individual level.

In this section, we will review several published case studies around work place health interventions (these will be made available before the course).

We will look at what was seen to work as interventions, for whom, and critically for how long. Few of these cases have any technological / computational support.

Group Work: Principled Design Speculation

Groups will take up an aspect of a case study’s intervention where we can draw on some specific aspect about the in-body we’ve learned, and can apply that understanding in order to see how the case study intervention

(a) may be strengthened by adding  interactive technology, or

(b) where the intervention could be replaced by interactive technology.

We will also consider briefly formal mechanisms of cost/benefit analysis for delivering interventions at scale.

The goal of this section will be to use the heuristics from Concept 1 and the models from Concept 2 to create a principled explanation for why such an approach may be worth attempting.

Take Aways/Benefits

Participants in this course will have three new mechanisms through which to deepen both their approach to health and wellbeing, and from which to drive new and innovative interactive technologies that may have benefit at scale.

Similarly, participants in this course will have a new network cadre with whom to build up a design community to #makeNormalBetter.

AND - bets! you’ll have ideas that you will be keen to take home and turn into research for your next CHI submission AND that will help others feel better too.

Course Organization

The The approach of the course will be a mix of instruction and practicum across each of the two 80 minute sessions.

Session One will cover InBodied Interaction and an introduction to the in5 model.

Session Two Will go into more detail of in5 in terms of connecting these processes to internal systems.

We will also cover the Binary Body evaluation model and practice this assessment.

After instruction in each component, we will have small group practice sessions to develop a new interaction approach demonstrating an application of the concepts just learned. By the end of the two sessions participants will have practical experience with these three approaches and perspectives.

Course Instructor

The course is developed and delivered by m.c. schraefel.

m.c. is this year’s CHI Health Chair - follow  Get Fit for CHI 2018 (#gf4c18)

m.c. is also a professor of computer science and human performance at the University of Southampton where she runs the WellthLab (mission: #makeNormalBetter).

m.c. is also a certified, practicing (and insured!)  strength and conditioning coach, nutritionist and functional neurology practitioner and coach. Her research and publications in HCI are related to information systems design and health interaction; on the physiological side her research is around active mechanisms to alleviate workplace pain. More information can be found on m.c.’s websites www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~mc, begin2dig.com and youtube.com/begin2dig.

photos by m.c. -and PLEASE join m.c. on instagram

LISTING of this course on CHI 2018 CONFERENCE WEB SITE

A word from Our Sponsors!

3 basics every HCI researcher needs to know about how bodies work to improve ANY design. CHI2017

OVERVIEW From Ergonomics to Embodied interaction, the body is a fundamental locus of interaction in HCI research and design. 

image showing the 11 systems of the body - to say nothing of the microbiome

In HCI the body and all its awesome complexity, however, is largely treated as a black box where we focus on designing around the constraints of its input and output.

Image shows typical approach to body in Embodied interaction to be considered as a closed system.

If we crack the lid of the box, however, to understand, for instance,

how sleep affects ability to see errors, or

how stress suppresses creativity or affects recall, or

how social interaction with movement enhances insight,

we can immediately begin to explore new kinds of design challenges to help us perform better from general to specific contexts: imagine the typical scenario of finishing the write up of a CHI paper. If we know something of goings on IN the body,

how would we design a tool that identifies sleep and stress patterns to prompt counterintuitive but beneficial increase of social engagement prior to a critical deadline, for instance?

That’s a new kind of question, isn’t it? for potentially new kinds of interactive designs/systems.

The body is highly complex. No kidding. But in this course we explore how, by cracking the lid of the body black box via three accessible heuristics, we can begin to address these new kinds of questions to enable us to innovate better designs for human performance and enhanced quality of life for all.

About the Course

The premise of this course is that by learning more about how our bodies work – or more particularly how the 11 complex systems (shown in sidebars) that make up our bodies from bones to hormones work - we will have the knowledge we need to take the leap forward necessary in the efficacy of our designs to make real and measurable differences in the world for human wellbeing and quality of life.

MOTIVATION: New Opportunities The body has always been part of HCI from ergonomics to eye tracking to embodied interaction. That engagement has been predicated by the types of hardware and software limiting our interactions with computational systems: ergonomics is critical when we must align our bodies to an immobile system; as systems become more mobile/tactile, it makes sense to think of how our bodies mediate our interactions with devices as part of a larger ecosystem, but where the body is still largely a black box, of interest in terms of supporting its I/O.

That interest is changing. As computational systems become smaller and more pervasive and autonomous, and increasingly data driven, and as opportunities to monitor every orifice increase, we can see HCI having more interest in what those systems tend to be used to monitor: us. Frequently this monitoring falls within what is framed as “health” but may also be work place efficiency or other measures of performance. With this focus only growing (considering how the numer of papers submitted to the Health track this year has nearly doubled) it seems an opportune time for us to chart a path to look inside the black box of the body.

Our goal is to explore how understanding more about our inbodied complexity can help inform design of systems to support our embodied complexity. This focus for HCI researchers to become more selfreliant about the body, to enable us to begin to look inside the body ourselves to see how that informs what we do in terms of designing for interactions with the body is a New Thing.

Some people may say that we do not need to gain this expertise: we can continue to collaborate with doctors or physiologists or whomever who have this expertise. Yes we can of course, but HCI is an interdisciplinary field, where computer scientists learn about visual perception and cognition where psychologists learn to code and sociologists how to design. At the very least, with the approach this course offers, participants will be able to ask better questions and have more informed conversations with those domain experts.

Approach and Outcomes

To come to grips with all the awesome complexity from physiology to endocrinology with some microbiota in between takes years of study to gain expert knowledge. We have 160 mins. The focus of this course is to give participants a sufficient introduction to the complexity of the body’s interconnected systems that it is both accessible and of immediate and practical use. To this end, the course will present and practice a set of three concepts through which to start to develop better knowledge of the relationship of our inner processes on our outer practices.

These concepts are:

Inbodied interaction •

The in5 map of inbodied interactions

The binary body: the fundamental inbodied interaction

Model 1: Inbodied interaction will be framed in two related ways in the course: first as body-based process and second as an approach to interaction research and design. Thus process and practice.

In terms of processes, inbodied interaction considers • How knowledge of various systemic interactions inside the body inform interactions by the body interacting as a whole in the world • In other words, we will consider how inbodied interactions inform embodied interactions. Inbodied interaction as practice like embodied interaction refers to a particular design focus. Understanding inbodied processes enables us to ask novel questions about designing technology to better support embodied interactions from social engagement online to navigating city spaces to learning a new language.

For example, we are all told to move more, and CHI has published a bevy of papers exploring mechanisms to motivate, track and nudge movement; success levels reported are not fantastic. From this course, participants may ask: is the lack of effect related to focusing on the site of pain as the source of pain – that is to get people to move more, we must focus on people’s movement first.

in5 and experiment in a box method described as deployed at Ogilvy

Model 2: In5 (inbodied five) From this course we will use the in5 model that pulls together each of the 11 systems of the body within five fundamental processes between inbodied and embodied interactions, that fundamentally affect our wellbeing, ability to perform at any level cognitively or physically, and impact our quality of life. In brief these 5 processes are: eat, cogitate, engage, move, sleep. We will go into why these five relative to the more formal systems of the body in the course. With this simple model, we gain two things:

BENEFIT1: first we can start with any one of the five to improve each of the other five simultaneously. We can find either the easiest path or the weakest link to achieve benefit.

BENEFIT 2: second, with this model, we have a pathway into the more specific 11 systems of the body. We will for example be able to explore the endocrine system connection with sleep and social engagement as effectors on movement, and from here how movement affects other systems not only cardio-vascular and musculo-skeletal but visceral and lymphatic as well. In other words, by understanding how the in5 approach can be a framework to understand inbodied interaction, we build a secure and robust map to guide us into the richer complexity of the underlying physical systems.

BENEFIT 3: broadening opportunities for HCI lead innovation. In this example the inbodied approach to explore performance/wellbeing via the interplay of any of these 5 interactions – interactions we all already perform all the time anyway – opens up new opportunities for design. For instance, how might an intelligent application be able to leverage a focus on rather than a focus on movement to achieve more movement? Because of the interdisciplinarity of HCI, we have the skills within our community, from sensors to machine learning to ethnography, using this inbodied approach to innovate approaches to health practices. We also have the opportunity to understand WHY we might want to design something other than a step counter, too.

Model 3: Binary Body Fundamental to design in HCI research is the efficacy with which we can evaluate our designs. Part of the goal of inbodied interaction as a research and design practice is to support improving human performance. Human performance from an holistic, inbodied to embodied perspective refers to our capacity to engage with the world. If we are hungry not only is that a distraction, we are also nutrient deficient and this may affect our ability to carry out a particular task. If we are under slept, we may not make more errors than when we are well slept, but our ability to recognize them and correct them deteriorates exponentially.

BENEFIT 4: In the course we will learn how to leverage the very fast binary assessment used by the always on system of the body – the nervous system – to determine positive, negative or null effect of an intervention to affect human performance, immediately.

Course Organization

The approach of the course will be a mix of instruction and practicum across each of the two 80 minute sessions. Session One will cover InBodied Interaction and an introduction to the in5 model. Session Two Will go into more detail of in5 in terms of connecting these processes to internal systems. We will also cover the Binary Body evaluation model and practice this assessment. After instruction in each component, we will have small group practice sessions to develop a new interaction approach demonstrating an application of the concepts just learned.

BENEFIT 5: By the end of the two sessions participants will have practical experience with these three approaches, and potentially both a novel interaction to explore with new collaborators.

Course Instructor

The course is developed and delivered by m.c. schraefel. m.c. is a professor of computer science and human performance at the University of Southampton where she runs the WellthLab (mission: make better normal). m.c. is also a certified, practicing strength and conditioning coach, nutritionist and functional neurology practitioner and coach.

m.c.’s research and publications in HCI are related to information systems design and health interaction; on the physiological side her research is around active mechanisms to alleviate workplace pain (pubmed). More information can be found on m.c.’s websites www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~mc, begin2dig.com and youtube.com/begin2dig

Sign up when you register for CHI2017

Related

motivating article in IEEE Computer.

another in Interactions

what we can learn from sport for knowledge work (interactions)

and a think piece on design

Related Related

some functional/practical info and research overview about sitting and standing and moving.

ever wonder about going minimal footwear/barefoot (connections to the brain will consider in the course)

and even more about the microbiome - and how to assess your health with it.

Stay in touch on twitter - follow @mcphoo

A word from Our Sponsors!

Inbodied Interaction is part of a series of activities within the GetAMoveOn ESPRC Health+ Network - join us, eh?