Alexandra Weilenmann

Hunting for fun: solitude and attentiveness in collaboration

The design of online collaborative computer games and pervasive games can learn from the everyday practice of deer hunting. We present an ethnographic study revealing how hunters fine-tune their experience through temporal and spatial organization. The hunt is organized in a way that allows the hunters to balance between forms of collaboration ranging from solitude to face-to-face interaction, as well as between attentiveness and relaxation. Thus, the hunters deal with the task -- hunting down the prey -- while managing issues of enjoyment. We argue that understanding these experiential qualities is relevant for collaborative gaming, and adds to our understanding of leisure.

Mobile video literacy: negotiating the use of a new visual technology

In this article, we examine the practice of learning to produce video using a new visual technology. Drawing upon a design intervention at a science centre, where a group of teenagers tried a new prototype technology for live mobile video editing, we show how the participants struggle with both the content and the form of producing videos, i.e., what to display and how to do it in a comprehensible manner. We investigate the ways in which video literacy practices are negotiated as ongoing accomplishments and explore the communicative and material resources relied upon by participants as they create videos. Our results show that the technology is instrumental in this achievement and that as participants begin to master the prototype, they start to focus more on the narrative aspects of communicating the storyline of a science centre exhibit. The participants are explicitly concerned with such issues as how to create a comprehensible storyline for an assumed audience, what camera angles to use, how to cut and other aspects of the production of a video. We consider these observed activities to be candidate steps in an emerging mobile video literacy trajectory that involves developing a capacity to document and argue by means of this specific medium.

Five Provocations for Ethical HCI Research

We present five provocations for ethics, and ethical research, in HCI. We discuss, in turn, informed consent, the researcher-participant power differential, presentation of data in publications, the role of ethical review boards, and, lastly, corporate-facilitated projects. By pointing to unintended consequences of regulation and oversimplifications of unresolvable moral conflicts, we propose these provocations not as guidelines or recommendations but as instruments for challenging our views on what it means to do ethical research in HCI. We then suggest an alternative grounded in the sensitivities of those being studied and based on everyday practice and judgement, rather than one driven by bureaucratic, legal, or philosophical concerns. In conclusion, we call for a wider and more practical discussion on ethics within the community, and suggest that we should be more supportive of low-risk ethical experimentation to further the field.

Mobile phone talk in context

In light of recent attempts to design context-aware mobile phones, this paper contributes by providing findings from a study of mobile phone talk in context. We argue the benefits of investigating empirically the ways in which a place is interactionally constituted as appropriate, or not, for a mobile phone conversation. Based on a study of naturally occurring mobile phone talk, we show how people handle calls in potentially difficult situations. Availability is negotiated, and it is not always agreed on whether a situation is appropriate. These findings pose challenges to the design of context-aware telephony.

Managing Walking Together The Challenge of Revolving Doors

There are a number of mundane technologies which shape pedestrian mobility such as pavements, corridors and stairs. In this paper we focus on the practical implications revolving doors as a technology have for the social organisation of people walking together. Drawing upon video recordings we analyse the observable intersubjective resources produced and used by members of the setting when walking through doors, and the interaction between formations of people as they do this. Revolving doors are turn-taking technologies that challenge mobile formations because the formations need to disassemble in order to pass through the doors, and then re-assemble again on the other side. Using an ethnomethodologically guided approach we shed light on some of the accomplishment of walking together in mobile formations.

Situated Social Media Use: A Methodological Approach to Locating Social Media Practices and Trajectories

In this paper we draw upon a number of explorations of social media activities, trying to capture and understand them as located, situated practices. This methodological endeavor spans over analyzing patterns in big data feeds (here Instagram) as well as small-scale video-based ethnographic studies of user activities. A situated social media perspective involves examining how social media production and consumption are intertwined. Drawing upon our studies of social media use in cultural institutions we show how visitors orient to their social media presence while attending to physical space during a visit, and how editing and sharing processes are formed by the trajectory through a space. We discuss the application and relevance of this approach for understanding social media and social photography in situ.

Time to revisit mobility in mobile HCI

In this panel, we discuss the relevance of the concept of mobility in current mobile Human-Computer Interaction research. Is the term still useful to understand and design for interaction with computers, or has the concept of mobility run dry and void of meaning?

“It must not disturb, it’s as simple as that”: Students’ voices on mobile phones in the infrastructure for learning in Swedish upper secondary school

Drawing from a survey and focus group interviews, this study explores how Swedish upper secondary students reason about the usage of their personal mobile phones in school. As a contribution to the debate around the mobile phone’s role in school, we present the students’ own voices relative to the question of regulating mobile phone use. We use the notion of infrastructure for learning (Guribye and Lindström 2009) to analytically approach the social and technological dimensions of the students’ narratives on their use of mobile phones in school practice. The students’ narratives present an intricate account of students’ awareness and concern of the implications of mobile phone presence in school. The students describe that the mobile phone is both a tool that facilitates their school work and a distraction that the teachers pursue. In school, the students are balancing their mobile phone usage with the teachers’ arbitrary enforcement of policy. Despite this process, the mobile phone is becoming a resource in the students’ infrastructure for learning. The findings from this study add to the limited body of research on the use of mobile phone in upper secondary school from a student perspective.

Learning about friction: group dynamics in engineering students'work with free body diagrams

In educational research, it is well-known that collaborative work on core conceptual issues in physics leads to significant improvements in students’ conceptual understanding. In this paper, we explore collaborative learning in action, adding to previous research in engineering education with a specific focus on the students’ use of free body diagrams in interaction. By looking at details in interaction among a group of three engineering students, we illustrate how they collectively construct a free body diagram together when learning introductory mechanics. In doing so, we have focused on both learning possibilities and the dynamic processes that take place in the learning activity. These findings have a number of implications for educational practice.

Mobile Wellbeing

While mobile phones can be empowering, constant access to a world of people and information can also bring distraction from the present moment and from the people and things that are physically present in ways that are sometimes unwanted. Excessive use of mobile phones can also have negative consequences on our sleep and concentration. In many respects mobile phones are challenging for our general mental wellbeing. Many designers are now looking into ways to better support mental wellbeing, be it through apps for mindfulness and meditation, or the better design of notifications and sleep modes. People are also developing strategies and ways of coping with the negative aspects of mobile technology, from self-control based approaches such as uninstalling social media apps or not keeping phones by the bedside, to more practice-based approaches such as meditation. This workshop aims to bring researchers and practitioners together to discuss mobile technology, human practice and mental wellbeing.