Designing for Engaged Experience
From OZCHI
David Browning, Erik Champion, truna ak j.turner
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ABSTRACT
This full day workshop gives participants an opportunity to explore how their interaction with recorded research data might inspire designing digital technologies that enrich experience of natural places. The core theme is how, as designers, we might draw more deeply upon people's multi-varied experiences of their visits to such places. Juxtaposed to the more usual task-centred approach, experience-centred design and designing for affective computing leads us to use what might loosely be called 'ethnographic methods'. However, full-blown ethnography can be prohibited by numerous constraints, so we often end up analysing recorded media records of people interacting in a variety of contexts. The resulting artefacts are often enticing in their own right and interaction with them has a remediating and inspirational effect. How might we use them to inspire the design of technologies that capture the spirit of being there?
Keywords
Interaction Design, Place, Representation
INTRODUCTION
This workshop encourages participants whose research includes the experience of interaction in natural places and how understandings of people's experiences in natural places might be used in design. In a nutshell, we are concerned with getting closer to 'what it feels like' to be there. Experience centred design and designing for affective computing often leads to the use of what might loosely be called 'ethnographic methods'. Numerous constraints might prohibit full-blown ethnography, so we often end up with video, photographic or audible records of interactions, in an effort to 'extend' our time in the field.
We gain insights from analysing this data, but we do so in a world of sounds and images that are representations of the original interactions. Recorded images and sound are (and always have been) problematic and suspect [1] as the viewer is not situated in the full visual and sensorial panorama in which the interaction originally occurred. In employing such methods, as designers, we're seeking the material that affords interpretation of a participant's perspective and experience. What we do is reflexive, grounded in the cultural perspective from which we describe our interpretation of those practices, and the cultural perspective of our audience. So, a record of a participant's interaction might be, viewed, listened to, or transcribed and read, but it then carries only some of its original richness.
However, whilst watching a video of a participant's visit to a natural place might cue reflection on the interaction as a 'view from somewhere' [2], it also has the potential to become a 'view from somewhere else'. Our media recordings are not just the product of a toolbox of convenient methods. For us, as designers, the recorded data itself becomes a site of interaction. Our interactions during recollection and interpretation become a form of reportage that seeks to reveal the 'underlying logics of (the) social practice' [3] under review. Importantly, this is an interaction that adds to the original material; it is an interaction that inspires.
In order to benefit from different cultural perspectives, designing must be participatory in a profound sense. If we use cooperative, participatory design processes, the designers become observer-participants themselves as they re-present and interpret the data. Both the recollections triggered by the recorded material and the immediate interactive experiences are shared with other participants. This shared access is the foundation for a collective but heterogeneous sense of practice.
EXEMPLARS
We offer three examples of data collection during recent research, some of which will be used during the workshop. We encourage participants to make their own data available.
EgoPOV video
How can we draw upon a visitor's familiar experience of a natural place so as to inspire the design of a digital technology that might mediate others' experiences of that place? Whilst digital technology might never transfer the sense of embodiment in a place to those who have no in situ experience of the place, could it be used to augment the otherwise often flat and somewhat sterile depictions of place, for example, that one might come across in a tourist guide?
Egocentrically depicting visual resources supports interpreting the situated experience, as similarity between the speaker's and listener's eye-movements in viewing scenes promotes comprehension [4]. So egocentric Point of View (egoPOV) video can depict how both fleeting and temporally-ongoing experiences contribute to creating meaning during situated interaction.
EgoPOV video was used to capture some of the meaning associated with a natural, unbuilt place (Alligator Creek in north Queensland) as visitors familiar with the location talk about why the place is special to them [5]. This was intended to capture reflexive tailoring of deictic communications with physical contingencies to construct meaning. The focus was different participants' accumulated experience of places that had been visited regularly in the past. Natural places, that hold memories, enable uncovering ways that people recreate and augment place in managing space in subsequent visits [6]. This proposition was extended by framing the activity in participants' accounts of the place in their personal history. The researcher and participant were co-located to provoke articulating references to physical resources.
Participants were later interviewed, using the egoPOV video to assist recall. Analysis of the egoPOV video and later interviews is currently used to provoke ideas and inspiration for design.
Strolls
'Strolls' is an ongoing project inspired by research into the representation of experience and the problematic of REpresentation and remediation [7] of interaction designing. Transmission or sharing of experience is complex, the stuff of Art and Culture, subjective (walk a mile in my shoes) and ultimately enticing. Tolstoy argues for the goal of art being the handing on of experience; Huizinga [8] asks for the sense of being there, living that life; and Foucault [9] notes the impossibility of the same across epistemes, his denial implying the desire: "In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing that … is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that." (1973 xv)
A number of projects seek to explore this desire within the rich three dimensional visualisation engines, typically used to produce game worlds (see [10]). The apparently simple dictum of "show, don't tell" disguises an interesting nexus of issues and questions, particularly in the ramifications for cultural dimensions and participatory interaction design. Research into dealing with these two core issues led us to clarifying two distinct design parameters: firstly that it is essential to enable a direct conduit for the tellers of stories; and second, that the underlying design metaphor is a critical element in the subsequent shaping of the stories and experience.
The "Stroll" concept arises as an adjunct to this research. The first stroll was produced in order to share the experience of one's immediate locale. The aim was to capture a vignette of daily life and mundane experience of the place as lived [11] rather than the iconic imagery of the public perspective. Subsequent sharing of the initial "sunday morning in rosalie" stroll inspired colleagues to make a similar record. Others were also moved to explore their own environs in a similar mode and we now have a developing public website where people are sharing their own small stories of place.
The project is successful in terms of its initial design metaphor - the stroll - but what is really interesting is that the data itself now manifests potential to become an object of interaction and offers opportunity for further designing.
Culture and Place [15]
There has been much recent discussion on place and especially on experiential richness (or the lack thereof) in digital places [12]. Yet, apart from counterfactual game-worlds, there seems to be little progress in developing digital environments that improve situated historical understanding, a sense of place, and an understanding of how people with different cultural frameworks experience that place. So, is new media unable to live up to the hype or do we need to rethink how historical and cultural understanding is most effectively transmitted via new technology? What are the requirements for a digital place to support historical understanding? Must it be persistent, mark-able, socially reconfigurable or reconfiguring? Could interaction actually obstruct and impede the appreciation of place and history? Mot importantly, how can we learn about the views and cultural understanding of others?
A number of ways have been suggested in which different experiences of place can be evoked and transmitted. Firstly, via biofeedback, environments can be created whereby indirect and automatic participant responses are dynamically encoded into the environment. Not only does biofeedback allow for immediate and intuitive and immersive interaction, it allows for cultural and social filtering. Digital media can transfigure participant reactions in a more nuanced and subtle fashion than via the keyboard and mouse.
Imagine your friends could trigger your aversions via digital media, and your bodily reactions could portray (or even betray) your innermost fears and phobias. To what extent would such social interaction turn into anti-social interaction? And to what extent could this technology be used positively; are there any guidelines to help direct us? And in light of the conference theme, could biofeedback be used both to convey additional senses of place, and to convey cultural aspects of place perception and place experience? This is not a pipe dream. A biofeedback environment has been created and evaluated and there are ongoing evaluation issues we wish to discuss at the workshop, as well as the ethical issues of biofeedback.
The second project is the cultural Turing test. A scenario example was begun but not completed in 2006. It will be revisited in the near future. It involves reversing and reapplying the conventional view of Turing's test of artificial intelligence, but in the context of cultural heritage. Instead of the participant evaluating and judging the artificial intelligence of the non-playing characters, what if they judged the intelligence and social attunement of the participant? Consider a role-playing game, the human participant must convince the NPCS he or she is actually a local. The NPCs are suspicious. The human participant must develop their sense of situated mimicry, copying the situated behaviour and socially framed responses of the local characters in order to avoid detection. How could this be evaluated for effectiveness, learning, and for fun? Are there historical or cultural scenarios that easily lend themselves to this method?
AIMS & OBJECTIVES
The workshop aims to explore how we get from the products of data collection (artefacts, recollections and ideas) to a prototype. It offers a forum in which to discuss and evolve forms of data collection, participation, design methods and practice that aid the task of the experience or cultural designer interested in natural places. Objectives in the first instance are focused on interaction design opportunities with participant materials.
Method - Process
We are all familiar with iterative design methods that incorporate a desire for the participation of potential interactants. Often this approach is implemented in a demarchic and action research cycle process. In practice, such an approach rarely remains 'pure' for anything beyond the experimental or research stage because, as the saying goes, "too many cooks spoil the broth". In order to turn a design into an actual object the practicalities of production sooner or later require some form of more traditional project management.
There are a number of ways of coping with this conundrum. One is to present the basic tools for production in the mode of so-called Web 2.0 projects. An empty framework is presented, with the site open and dependent on participant contribution (see [13]). Another, albeit perhaps more extreme, form is the open source process. However, this somewhat libertarian approach does not necessarily fit in with responsibilities towards all stakeholders and funding bodies.
A recently suggested approach would be to apply a core element of the values model [14]. The value model of designing essentially posits the overall design metaphor and subsequent parameters or outcome values as a design goal so that participant input can be demarchic but product goal retains the top down form necessary for projects that have to maintain milestones and outcomes.
This workshop invites participants to explore the potential of this third approach and other models. Can the interaction artefacts produced in the course of research and their application within the values model (or some other suggested model) inspire to new interaction designs? There will be opportunity for participants to present their own material and potential design metaphors in order to then work collaboratively in small groups. We intend that participants not only find this experience of designing useful but that it gives them some design ideas and prototypes to take away and explore further.
Specific goals
- To share findings and insights about data collection in natural places.
- To discuss using new media to capture gestalt sensory data of place, particularly in natural places and the impact such methods might impact on experience-centred design of appropriate affective and experiential technologies.
- To consider the challenges of bringing these insights into the design process.
- To explore the remediation produced by practical interaction with participant's materials.
- To evolve and paper prototype new interaction designs that portray or mediate experiences of natural places already captured and externalised and afford the addition of new experiences.
Before the workshop
If you are a researcher: submit a short paper (no more than 3 pages) that describes your use of video and/or photographs and/or audio. Include media examples. If you have not yet done this sort of work, detail your interest (no more than 1 page). If you are a practitioner: detail your interest and processes (no more than 1 page). Include media examples if you wish.
Workshop Program
Full day (max 25 participants)
a) Participants present their own experience and examples of data and subsequent analysis (All)
b) Review published methods of making use of video (All)
Morning tea
c) Inspiration - brainstorming: participants explore interaction with participant material and initial design responses (groups)
d) Production of new artefacts (groups)
Lunch
e) Evolution of early designs after interaction with new artefacts (groups) and Paper prototyping (groups)
f) Scenarios (groups)
g) Show and tell - tea and discussion of futures (All).
After
The workshop will be archived on a website and further collaboration will be encouraged with a view to further research.
CONCLUSION
We intend this workshop to provide a hands-on developmental forum, aimed at advancing the discussion of how designers might best use data collected in the field. We're not so interested in 'what the implications for design' are, but in whether and how we might use interactions around recorded material during the course of our practice as designers to inspire new design or extend existing design. To be sure, not all analysis coming out of the ethnographic and analytic parts of the exercise can be translated into design - somehow, magically. A new subjective view, not an objective representation of the original interaction, emerges during the course of this subsequent interaction. It is this subjective perspective that might be the inspirational source material for further design. We hope to explore the processes involved.
REFERENCES
1. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). Picture theory: Essays on verbal and visual representation. University of Chicago Press.
2. Suchman, L. (2003). Located Accountabilities in Technology Production. http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Suchman-Located-Accountabilities.pdf
3. Dourish, P. (2006). Implications for Design. Proc. ACM Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2006, Montreal, Canada.
4. Richardson, D. C. & Dale, R. (2004). Looking to Understand: the Coupling Between Speakers' and Listeners' Eye Movement and Its Relationship to Discourse Comprehension. Proc. Cognitive Science Society.
5. Bidwell, N. & Browning, D. (2006). Making There: Methods to Uncover Egocentric Experience in a Dialogic of Natural Places. Proc. OZCHI, Sydney.
6. McCarthy, J. & Wright, P. (2005). Technology in Place: Dialogics of Technology, Place and Self. Proc. INTERACT, Rome, Italy.
7. Bolter, J. D. & Gromala, D. (2003). Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency. Cambridge, MA, USA.
8. Huizinga, J. (1924). The Task of Cultural History in Men and Ideas: Essays on History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance. Harper Torchbooks.
9. Foucault, M. (1973). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1966. New York: Vintage.
10. truna aka Turner, J., Browning, D., & Bidwell, N. (2007). Wanderer Beyond Game Worlds. Proc. DAC '07, Perth, WA.
11. Tuan, Y. F. (1977). Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. Univ. Minnesota Pr.
12. Kalay, Y. E. & Marx, J. (2001). The role of place in cyberspace. Virtual Systems and Multimedia, 2001. Proceedings. Seventh International Conference on, 770-779.
13. Bruns, A. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage.
14. Passfield, J. & Jaffit, M. (2008). Creativity and design for games: New school vs. old school. Proc. Framework: create, Brisbane.
15. Champion, E. M. (2008) Otherness of Place: Game-based Interaction and Learning in Virtual Heritage Projects. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 14, 210 - 228 %U http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/13527250801953686 %@ 1352-7258 %[ September 09, 2008.