Andree Woodcock

‘Playtime in the Borderlands’: Children's Representations of School, Gender and Bullying through Photographs and Interviews

Abstract Photography has been commonly used as a research tool in studies of childhood/children. However images of school children in official documentation are rarely taken or chosen by children and may not reflect their real experiences. This research considered the photographs taken by year six primary school children of their school and the images they chose to represent themselves. Subsequent interviews with children revealed attitudes to school, the importance of playground relationships in the construction of gender, leading to the concept of ‘borderlands’ inhabited by some boys who adopt non-hegemonic masculinities.

VoiceYourView: collecting real-time feedback on the design of public spaces

This paper reports on VoiceYourView, a kind of intelligent kiosk, which uses speech recognition and natural language processing to gather the publics creative input on the public space designs. Over a six week period, VoiceYourView was deployed in a public space and 2000 design critiques were collected from 600 people. The paper shows that people are capable of providing creative input on their environment using unstructured speech or text and that a good proportion of these comments are actionable. The paper also investigates the use of public displays to auto-summarize comments left by the public so far. Although there is anecdotal evidence that this encourages participation, an experiment found that filtering comments (e.g., to display only positive responses) had no effect on what people had to say.

Animating pervasive computing

It is difficult to present new, complex ideas in ways that are informative and interesting in situations where a vast amount of information has to be delivered and understood quickly. Given short attention spans, boredom thresholds and limited capacity to assimilate new information, it is essential to use an effective conveyor of the message, which presents the content in a clear and unambiguous manner whilst helping the receiver to remain alert and focused and integrate the information with existing knowledge. This paper introduces a collaboration between computer scientists and artists to develop an effective, animation based information communication tool, in the form of an application scenario, to be used for communicating to students (and wider audiences) dry technical aspects of Pervasive Computing.

Improving wheelchair prescription: an analysis of user needs and existing tools

Wheelchair users experience many situations that affect the stability and associated performance of their wheelchair. Stability is affected by user characteristics and abilities, environmental features and conditions, and wheelchair modification and accessories. Wheelchair prescribers need effective tools and methods to provide quantitative evaluation and prediction of the behavior of the user-wheelchair system in a variety of static and dynamic situations. Such information is very important to guide efficient management of associated risks and adjust chairs accordingly. This project involves a user-centered approach for design and evaluation of a load cell based wheelchair stability assessment system (Wheel-SAS). Here, the current methods for assessing stability are described, and their shortcomings explained. The user-centered design approach being applied to the development of the associated Wheel-SAS hardware and software is described. Future work including semi-structured interviews and an online survey with wheelchair prescribers and associated healthcare professionals for deriving user requirements and a design specification for a load cell system for measuring dynamic wheelchair stability are detailed.

MyCare Card Development: Portable GUI Framework for the Personal Electronic Health Record Device

In most emergency situations, health professionals rely on patients to provide information about their medical history. However, in some cases patients might not be able to communicate this information, and in most countries an online integrated patient record system has not been adopted yet. Therefore, in order to address this issue the ongoing project MyCare Card (MyC2, www.myc2.org) has been established. The aim of this project is to design, implement, and evaluate a prototype patient held electronic health record device. Due to the wide range of user requirements, the device, its communication interface, and its software have to be compatible with many common platforms and operating systems. Thus, this paper is addressing one of the software compatibility matters-the cross-platform GUI implementation. It introduces a portable object-oriented GUI framework, suitable for a declarative layout definition, components customization, and fine model-view code separation. It also rationalizes the hardware and software solutions selected for this project implementation.

Post occupancy evaluation of primary schools in Saudi Arabia

The physical school environment has been shown to be important in helping children fulfill their academic potential and in providing appropriate working conditions for staff. However, few tools have been developed that enable multi stakeholder consultation which takes into account the opinions of young students. In Saudi Arabia there has been widespread investment in schools, but few guidelines have been provided to assist design or continuous evaluation. A Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) method was developed and used to evaluate three international primary schools in Saudi Arabia. The methods identified weaknesses in the three schools and differences in responses from the three groups consulted (children, teachers and parents). Conclusions drawn from the study are that greater efforts need to be made to draw together research about how school facilities can support teaching and learning, increase effectiveness and levels of satisfaction. POE, when used in conjunction with checklists could be used as a means of driving up standards of educational facilities.

VoiceYourView: anytime, anyplace, anywhere user participation

Citizens are increasingly called upon to comment on issues that directly concern them. However, such consultations may be tokenistic [1] as they occur with limited respondents, or may be at a time, or in a format which is inconvenient to the user. To encourage wider participation, the VoiceYourView project (vYv) has developed a system allowing people to make comments in a manner, time and place convenient to them. A real world trial of the prototype system was conducted at Coventry University campus to explore issues related to the systems usability and usage, as a means of enabling campus users to comment on their environment. Members of the university population were invited to comment on the university estate using one of five technologies (e-mail, online form, iPhone app, SMS message, or electronic kiosk). Although the immediate application area in this case was the design of public spaces, the approach can be transferred to other domains and thus provide a new way of gathering user information. Submitted comments were automatically analysed in terms of theme, sentiment, location and actionability and displayed online in a 2D visualisation. It is argued that that online data collection (crowd sourcing and skimming social networks) may provide a rich source of information for future ergonomists.

Development of a personal electronic health record card in the United Kingdom

In most emergency situations, health professionals rely on patients to provide information about their medical history. However, in some cases patients might not be able to communicate this information, and in most countries, including the UK an on-line integrated patient record system has not been adopted. Therefore, in order to address this issue the ongoing project MyCare Card (MyC2, www.myc2.org) has been established. The aim of this project is to design, implement and evaluate a prototype patient held electronic health record card. One of the tasks involved in the project was to develop a Graphical User Interface (GUI) software, which provides access to the data stored on the card. The requirements for this software had to be established via questionnaire surveys and end user evaluations, conducted simultaneously with the software development. This paper is addressing development of the MyCare Card GUI software. It also overviews the hardware and open-source software solutions selected for the MyCare Card implementation.

Applying the Hexagon-Spindle Model to the design of school environments for children with Autistic spectrum disorders

Schools and other educational environments beyond serving as the primary work places of children provide the backdrop against which formative emotional, psychological, cognitive and physical development takes place. However, ergonomists have paid little attention to the design of these environments, the interactions within them or their organization from a childs perspective. Children with special education needs, such as those with hearing or visual difficulties, cognitive or social disabilities, or even those with different learning styles may be placed in mainstream schools ill-equipped to suit their needs. Rather than retrofitting classrooms as children with different requirements enter the school, a ground-up approach could be taken to create effective educational environments based on an understanding of the learning tasks to be supported, the learner characteristics and the facilities and interactions needed to effect task completion. The application of an holistic ergonomic model, such as the Hexagon-Spindle model provides a means of systematically considering the variables which need to be included in the design and evaluation of such environments. This paper presents a case study of the application of this model to the design of low sensory classrooms and interactive learning experiences for children with an autistic spectrum disorder.

New insights, new challenges; person centred transport design

This paper uses the Hexagon Spindle model of ergonomics to provide a framework for the development of person centred approaches to vehicle and transport design. The benefits of taking this approach, and the factors that might be included under a more inclusive definition of automotive and Transport ergonomics are explained.