Andrew Garbett

FeedFinder: A Location-Mapping Mobile Application for Breastfeeding Women

Breastfeeding is positively encouraged across many countries as a public health endeavour. The World Health Organisation recommends breastfeeding exclusively for the first six months of an infants life. However, women can struggle to breastfeed, and to persist with breastfeeding, for a number of reasons from technique to social acceptance. This paper reports on four phases of a design and research project, from sensitising user-engagement and user-centred design, to the development and in-the-wild deployment of a mobile phone application called FeedFinder. FeedFinder has been developed with breastfeeding women to support them in finding, reviewing and sharing public breastfeeding places with other breastfeeding women. We discuss how mobile technologies can be designed to support public health endeavours, and suggest that public health technologies are better aimed at communities and societies rather than individual.

Validating a mobile phone application for the everyday, unobtrusive, objective measurement of sleep

There is an identified need for objective, reliable, and scalable methods of measuring and recording sleep. Such methods must be designed for easy integration into peoples lives in order to support both sleep therapy and everyday personal informatics. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a mobile phone application to record sleep, the design of which has substantive foundation in clinical sleep research. Two user studies were carried out which demonstrate that the application produces valid measurements of sleep quality and high levels of usability, whilst not seriously disturbing sleep or the sleep environment. These findings suggest that the app is suitable for both everyday sleep monitoring in a personal informatics context, and for integration into sleep interventions.

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.

App Movement: A Platform for Community Commissioning of Mobile Applications

There is an increasing demand to encourage inclusivity in the design of digital services. In response to this issue we have created App Movement, a platform that enables the promotion, collaborative design, and deployment of community-commissioned mobile applications. The platform facilitates collaborative customization of a common app template, for which the development and deployment of the app is fully automated. We describe the motivation, design and implementation of App Movement, and report the findings from an 8 month deployment wherein 27 campaigns were created, 11 of which have been successful, and over 1,600 users pledged their support using the platform. We present three case studies to demonstrate its use and adoption in successful and unsuccessful campaigns. We discuss the implications of these studies, including questions of governance (ownership of content, liability of user generated content and moderation), sustainability and the potential to extend App Movement beyond location-based review apps.

Finding "real people": trust and diversity in the interface between professional and citizen journalists

The increase of social media and web blogs has enabled a new generation of citizen journalism to provide new perspectives into local communities. However traditional news organisations are currently struggling to incorporate this new form of journalism into their existing organisational workflow. We present an analysis from 10 interviews with professional journalists and explore the current issues faced by professional journalists when searching for reliable and reputable local news sources as well as the perceived role of citizen journalists within a large news organisation. From this analysis we present a set of design implications for building systems that support interaction between citizen and professional journalists in order to encourage participatory news production and diversify national news perspectives.

ThinkActive: Designing for Pseudonymous Activity Tracking in the Classroom

We report on the design of ThinkActive - a system to encourage primary aged school children to reflect on their own personal activity data in the classroom. We deployed the system with a cohort of 30 school children, over a six-week period, in partnership with an English Premier League Football clubs health and nutrition programme. The system utilizes inexpensive activity trackers and pseudonymous avatars to promote reflection with personal data using an in-situ display within the classroom. Our design explores pseudonymity as an approach to managing privacy and personal data within a public setting. We report on the motivations, challenges, and opportunities for students, teachers, and third-party providers to engage in the collection and sharing of activity data with primary school children.

A network epidemic model for online community commissioning data

A statistical model assuming a preferential attachment network, which is generated by adding nodes sequentially according to a few simple rules, usually describes real-life networks better than a model assuming, for example, a Bernoulli random graph, in which any two nodes have the same probability of being connected, does. Therefore, to study the propagation of “infection” across a social network, we propose a network epidemic model by combining a stochastic epidemic model and a preferential attachment model. A simulation study based on the subsequent Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm reveals an identifiability issue with the model parameters. Finally, the network epidemic model is applied to a set of online commissioning data.