Study blog – Autumn 2015

Conclusions If I compare proposals of future development of HCI theory presented by Yvonne Rogers with those made by Stappers and Sanders from M6 readings, I would call Rogers’ more realistic however not such elaborate. In my opinion, she has had to focus more on future than only in one and half page.

Even larger vast and transdisciplinarity are coming. The science productions is growing and transdisciplinary researchers will be most probably valued. Rogers makes really nice point when talking about this:

“Many weeks, months and years can be spent by a team of researchers, to establish a new technology infrastructure that can help a local village collect water more efficiently, only for it not to be deemed methodologically rigorous enough for it to warrant publication at a CHI conference!”

I think that this turn to values and environment is being still hugely hindered by processes she is addressing (i.e. evalution of science, access to information etc.), power and money distribution in academia and also researchers’ own values which are definitely shaped by societal ones such as rapid (or sustainable rapid) growth, personal success and hedonism.

I really liked that criticism of theories and approaches to HCI because it provided interesting and new insight on some of them. I also confirmed my doubts about abstract modeling.

Here are the key concepts I tried to extract from my concept maps (only 27, order is based on personal importance = 1st is most important):

ethics

human values

responsibility

environment (ecological context)

cultural practices

context

holistic approach

user’s motivation

feminism

transdisciplinarity

role of technology

interactions

individual settings

embodiement

everydayness

human augmentation

in-situ research

situated action

ethnography

grounded theory

CSCW

modeling

user studies

importing theories

congitive science

pleasure

Contemporary theories (part II): turn to wild and turn to embodiement (reading and Cmap)

Map continues with description of another two turns – to wild and to embodiement. 

I spent more time than I expected on former one but hopefully it helped me to get the point. Turn to wild explores a change in behaviour while interacting through and with technologies. This change is challenge. We could enhance our everyday duties and activites based on implementation of those technologies.

It was quite hard for me to understand concept of embodied interaction by Paul Dourish. So far, I know that we can not think about it only in physical space. We should consider our intentions, behavior as embodied while interacting with system. 

Turn to design – G. Cockton: Designing Worth is Worth Designing

Author introduces worth-centred design (WCD) and states clear distinction between fuzzy value(s)-centred design and value-sensitive design which are different and sometimes confused. WCD seeks better solution and uses concept of worthiness, i.e. customer’s motivation to invest time, money, effort etc. After definition of VCD, WCD and key concepts, both, individual and collective discourse, are presented to understand worth.

Because of explicit focus on different types of design and its development one can say the paper is clearly connected to this turn in theoretical development.

Turn to culture – T. Alsheikh, J. A. Rode, S. E. Lindley: (Whose) Value-Sensitive Design? A Study of Long Distance Relationships in an Arabic Cultural Context

In this case study, researchers take ethnographic approach to study how technology is used to maintain partner relationships when one partner is apart from other in larger distance.  Sample includes both Christians and Muslims who are living/staying in Arabic countries and abroad. Two phases of semi-structured interview took place using messaging or VOIP service. Second phase of interviews was supported by diaries or their communication behaviour, emotions etc. After description of practices authors are using specific feminist interpretation of results to approach and carefully present context of Muslim culture.

Focus on cultural issues including role of technology and interactions, using Islamist feminist standpoint, implications for value-sensitive design are the main arguments for conclusion this is excellent example of turn to culture.

Contemporary theories (part I): turn to design and turn to culture (reading and Cmap) 

Map starts with general description of Contemporary theories. Then, firts two turns are described. This Cmap was easy one to develop. Partly because of careful reading and clear definitions in the text  However, I miss more elaborate chapter about cultural/critical theory in the book.

Modern theories of HCI (part II): situated action, ethnography and ethnomethodology, CSCW related theories and frameworks, activity, grounded and hybrid theories (reading and Cmap)

To be honest, it was most difficult Cmap so far. Firstly, it was bit hard to think about possible ways of building this concept map on my previous one. I was afraid about decreasing ability to read the map. This struggle took me a lot of time but in the end I decided to find connections among distributed cognition and other modern concepts according to the chapter from book.

I am pretty sure that is “piece of Cmap art” looks messy or chaotic on first sight. But when focusing on each theory and following sentences, it could make sense. At least to me. Sometimes, I tried hard (maybe too much hard) to capture and visualize lot of facts or aspects of some theories or issues related to them than necessary. My other intention was also to avoid repeating of too much concepts.

For better orientation I created some colour-based system:

group of theories (bold, darker background),

theories (bold, lighter background, smaller font).

And content? This part of book just strenghtened my thoughts about vast character of HCI. Based on reading, if I have to conduct a research I will choose grounded theory or ethnography since they provide more space for deciding about object of research.

Modern theories of HCI (part I): distributed cognition (reading and Cmap)

As always, I started to construct a map in the very begining of reading. In this case, Cmap helped me much in understanding and keeping focus on reading. “In a Nutshell” textboxes are also very useful for pointing out the most important facts.

Classical theories of HCI (reading and Cmap)

I started to create a map already during reading of the fourth chapter. As the author did not focus much on details and clear distinction of classical theories or approaches, I tried to point out something what characterizes each of them. I know it is difficult and maybe impossible to exactly distinguish differences. At least, I tried to follow those 3 approaches and proposed chronology of their development. I hope I am reflecting them correctly in my concept map.

There are my answers.

How did you get to the 20 most important concepts? Briefly describe the process and the underlying rationale. After choosing 20 most important articles, I opened each of them and tried to recall the reason why it was so relevant for me. Identification of article’s topic was really helpful as well as asking questions like: “What did they found?” “What was the purpose of research?” I checked also abstract and keywords once again and then, based on found information, defined related concepts. Sometimes I tended to generalize because e.g. “development of application” is not the concept in my opinion. I think this is quite quick and efficient way how to do this.

What was the overall experience of the QnD Review? QnD Review is really useful. I would recommend it for quick overview of field, current methods and topics not only in HCI. I suppose I will use this method to find my master thesis or research topic. However, for me personally it was more difficult to manage this task. During my studies I am focusing rather on deep (and slow to be honest) understanding so I spent a lot of time to convince myself to speed up and just skim. Formulation of sentences describing core idea took also a lot of time. On the other hand, at least it helped to think about it and sum it up.

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)

DiSalvo, C., Lukens, J., Lodato, T., Jenkins, T., & Kim, T. (2014). Making public things: How HCI Design Can Express Matters of Concern. In: Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '14. (pp. 2397-2406). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. DOI: 10.1145/2556288.2557359.

Yu, L., Kittur, A., & Kraut, R. (2014). Distributed analogical idea generation: Inventing with Crowds. In: Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '14. (pp. 1245-1254). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. DOI: 10.1145/2556288.2557371.

How much time did you spend on this homework? It took me more than 20 hours. I have to admit that I got distracted sometimes and my later sickness did not help to finish it at all.

What was the most difficult part of this homework? I suppose that biggest challenge for me was staying focused and motivated to complete the work. I couldn’t complete more than 20 articles in one “session”. :(

How to make the quick and dirty review better? I encourage future students to do this task together. Sitting next to a partner and discussing findings and difficulties could be really useful. It should help also in preventing distraction. Writing paper’s core idea in one short sentence could be challenging in academia. What about summarization of results or keywords (minimum 5 per paper including topic, method, observed population/prototype etc.)?

Human-computer interaction has a very important role nowadays. It is most likely that we will tend to be more and more connected, computerized, digitalised and augmented in the future. To bear all those challenges we need to reflect and explore technologies as well as humans and natural environment. Based on transdisciplinary approach, HCI has a potential (or duty?) to analyse and contribute to implementation of all those prospective developments in very sensitive way integrating conclusions and theories from other fields. In my opinion, it is about meaningful designing and transforming ways and channels of interaction or communication in society through digital technologies. It is a situation when human, driven by rational or irrational motivations and tasks, meets sophisticated and highly structured machine or system. HCI specialist creates the walkthrough. We could ask questions like: “Why do people use this structure?”; “How to organize stuff?”; “What about consequences of developing this app?”