Abigail Durrant

Automics: souvenir generating photoware for theme parks

Automics is a photo-souvenir service which utilises mobile devices to support the capture, sharing and annotation of digital images amongst groups of visitors to theme parks. The prototype service mixes individual and group photo-capture with existing in-park, on-ride photo services, to allow users to create printed photo-stories. Herein we discuss initial fieldwork in theme parks that grounded the design of Automics, our development of the service prototype, and its real-world evaluation with theme park visitors. We relate our findings on user experience of the service to a literature on mobile photoware, finding implications for the design of souvenir services.

Designing family photo displays

We present efforts to explore the relatively underdeveloped area of digital photo display. Using examples from two empirical studies with family homes, we develop our results around three broad themes related to the display of photos and their arrangement. The first theme highlights the collaborative as well as individual work that goes into preparing photos for display. The second attends to the obligations families have to put particular photos on display. The third introduces the notion of curatorial control and the tensions that arise from one person controlling a home!s photo displays. Drawing on these themes, we go on to describe how we have used a critical design approach to open up the possibilities for future display innovations. Three critical design proposals are presented as sketches to illustrate the development of our ideas to date.

Slow technology: critical reflection and future directions

Over a decade ago Hallnäs and Redströms seminal article on Slow Technology [6] argued that the increasing availability of technology in environments outside of the workplace requires interaction design to be expanded from creating tools for making peoples lives more efficient to creating technology that could be embedded in everyday environments over long periods of time. Since then, the Slow Technology design agenda has expanded to include issues such as (i) designing for slowness, solitude, and mental rest, (ii) designing interactive systems to be used across multiple generations and lifespans, and (iii) designing for slower, less consumptive lifestyles and practices. This workshop aims to advance the Slow Technology design program by exploring the various practical, methodological and theoretical motivations, challenges, and approaches implicated in doing research and design in this growing space.

A Quantified Past: Toward Design for Remembering With Personal Informatics

This article questions how people will interact with a quantified past—the growing historical record generated by the increasing use of sensor-based technologies and, in particular, personal informatics tools. In a qualitative study, we interviewed 15 long-term users of different self-tracking tools about how they encountered and made meaning from historical data they had collected. Our findings highlight that even if few people are self-tracking as a form of deliberate lifelogging, many of them generate data and records that become meaningful digital possessions. These records are revealing of many aspects of people’s lives. Through considerable rhetorical data-work, people can appropriate such records to form highly personal accounts of their pasts. We use our findings to identify six characteristics of a quantified past and map an emerging design space for the long-term and retrospective use of personal informatics. Principally, we propose that design should seek to support people in making account of their data and guard against the assumption that more, or “better,” data will be able to do this for them. To this end, we speculate on design opportunities and challenges for experiencing, curating, and sharing historical personal data in new ways.

Editorial: Collocated social practices surrounding photos

Recent developments in technology mean that it is becoming increasingly possible to support collaboration around digital photos. This makes an exploration of the existing collocated social practices that are associated with photos both timely and relevant. This workshop will explore social practices in the areas of photowork, photo sharing and photo displays, with the aim of drawing together current research and considering how the findings might inform technology innovation.

A study of the challenges related to DIY assistive technology in the context of children with disabilities

The term Do It Yourself Assistive Technology (DIY-AT) refers to the creation and adaptation of AT by non-professionals, including people with disabilities and their families, friends and caregivers. Previous research has argued that the development of technologies and services that enable people to make their own DIY-AT will lead to the rapid and low cost development of assistive devices that are tailored to meet the complex needs of individual people with disabilities. We present the results of a qualitative study that explored challenges related to the process of making DIY-AT for children with disabilities. A series of eleven semi-structured interviews with a broad range of stakeholders involved in the current use, provision and adaptation of AT for children with disabilities revealed a number of challenges relating to the prevalence and scope of ongoing DIY-AT practice, barriers to participation, and the challenges faced by makers and users of DIY-AT.

On Speculative Enactments

Speculative Enactments are a novel approach to speculative design research with participants. They invite the empirical analysis of participants acting amidst speculative but consequential circumstances. HCI as a broadly pragmatic, experience-centered, and participant-focused field is well placed to innovate methods that invite first-hand interaction and experience with speculative design projects. We discuss three case studies of this approach in practice, based on our own work: Runner Spotters, Metadating and a Quantified Wedding. In distinguishing Speculative Enactments we offer not just practical guidelines, but a set of conceptual resources for researchers and practitioners to critique the different contributions that speculative approaches make to HCI discourse.

Speculative devices for photo display

In this paper, we describe three purposefully provocative, digital photo display technologies designed for home settings. The three devices have been built to provoke questions around how digital photographs might be seen and interacted with in novel ways. They are also intended for speculation about the expressive resources afforded by digital technologies for displaying photos. It is hoped interactions with the devices will help researchers and designers reflect on new design possibilities. The devices are also being deployed as part of ongoing home-oriented field research.

Pursuing Leisure: Reflections on Theme Park Visiting

In this paper, we present the theme park as a novel commercial setting and distinct cultural ecology for CSCW research, presenting challenges to technology designers interested in supporting cultural visiting activities. We report findings from an empirical field study of theme park visiting by groups. Our account focuses on how visitors encountered the theme park, and how they worked with or “geared in” to what the park provided in order to pursue leisure activities to their own ends. We further demonstrate that, whilst theme park visiting features thrilling and fun activities, it also features the prosaic concerns of planning, parenting and money that connect it to ordinary social life. As such, we present the theme park as a setting in which work and leisure are intertwined as concerns of both visitors and the park, for producing and consuming theme park experience. We have focussed on the work of visiting groups to pursue leisure, and their combined use of park-provided and personal technologies in various “trajectories of interaction” within the park. Our findings point to considerations for the design of services that connect with park-provided and personal technologies to support group visiting, in theme parks and related settings.

The secret life of teens: online versus offline photographic displays at home

In this article we describe findings from a recent study in which we interviewed four British teenage girls about their photo display practices, online and offline, in family homes. We adopted a phenomenological approach to inquiry, with a particular interest in exploring how photographic representations of self and family signal self-development in emerging adulthood. Findings reveal how teens portrayed themselves differently to friends, online, and family, offline. Self-presentation to peers through photographs was managed separately from the family and largely free from parental control. The separate, online domain was used to explore alternative self-representations with real friends. Our findings appear to signal changing politics of photograph ownership and family representation between the generations.