Bill Gaver

Design: Cultural probes

A As the local site coordinator finished his introduction to the meeting, our worries were increasing. The group had taken on a glazed look, showing polite interest, but no real enthusiasm. How would they react when we presented them with our packages? Would disinterest deepen to boredom, or even hostility? Cultural Probes Homo ludens impinges on his environment: He interrupts, changes, intensifies; he follows paths and in passing, leaves traces of his presence everywhere.

Alternatives: exploring information appliances through conceptual design proposals

As a way of mapping a design space for a project on information appliances, we produced a workbook describing about twenty conceptual design proposals. On the one hand, they serve as suggestions that digital devices might embody values apart from those traditionally associated with functionality and usefulness. On the other, they are examples of research through design, balancing concreteness with openness to spur the imagination, and using multiplicity to allow the emergence of a new design space. Here we describe them both in terms of content and process, discussing first the values they address and then how they were crafted to encourage a broad discussion with our partners that could inform future stages of design.

Expected, sensed, and desired: A framework for designing sensing-based interaction

Movements of interfaces can be analyzed in terms of whether they are expected, sensed, and desired. Expected movements are those that users naturally perform; sensed are those that can be measured by a computer; and desired movements are those that are required by a given application. We show how a systematic comparison of expected, sensed, and desired movements, especially with regard to how they do not precisely overlap, can reveal potential problems with an interface and also inspire new features. We describe how this approach has been applied to the design of three interfaces: pointing flashlights at walls and posters in order to play sounds; the Augurscope II, a mobile augmented reality interface for outdoors; and the Drift Table, an item of furniture that uses load sensing to control the display of aerial photographs. We propose that this approach can help to build a bridge between the analytic and inspirational approaches to design and can help designers meet the challenges raised by a diversification of sensing technologies and interface forms, increased mobility, and an emerging focus on technologies for everyday life.

Provocative Awareness

Recently a number of systems have been designedthat connect remote lovers, or strangers in anurban setting. The forms these systems take andthe functions they serve may be unfamiliar, butthey can be seen as extensions of awarenesstechnologies to new domains. Awarenesstechnologies have often been specialised togive information for particular work activitiesor relationships. Given that relationships inthe home or in local communities tend to bedifferent from those of the workplace, it isappropriate that both the form and content ofinformation conveyed to increase awarenessshould be different as well. The systemsdescribed here, for instance, explore newsensory and interaction possibilities, useambiguity to increase engagement, and address awider range of emotional relationships than domost workplace awareness systems. They pointto ways of extending notions of peripheralawareness to new domains on the one hand, andpossibilities for new forms of workplaceawareness on the other.

Designing culturally situated technologies for the home

As digital technologies proliferate in the home, the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community has turned its attention from the workplace and productivity tools towards domestic design environments and non-utilitarian activities. In the workplace, applications tend to focus on productivity and efficiency and involve relatively well-understood requirements and methodologies, but in domestic design environments we are faced with the need to support new classes of activities. While usability is still central to the field, HCI is beginning to address considerations such as pleasure, fun, emotional effect, aesthetics, the experience of use, and the social and cultural impacts of new technologies. These considerations are particularly relevant to the home, where technologies are situated or embedded within an ecology that is rich with meaning and nuance.The aim of this workshop is to explore ways of designing domestic technology by incorporating an awareness of cultural context, accrued social meanings, and user experience.

Designing auditory interactions for PDAs

This panel addresses issues in designing audio-based user interactions for small, personal computing devices, or PDAs. One issue is the nature of interacting with an auditory PDA and the interplay of affordances and form factors. Another issue is how both new and traditional metaphors and interaction concepts might be applied to auditory PDAs. The utility and design of nonspeech cues are discussed, as are the aesthetic issues of persona and narrative in designing sounds. Also discussed are commercially available sound and speech components and related hardware tradeoffs. Finally, the social implications of auditory interactions are explored, including privacy, fashion and novel social interactions.

A modern role for the village elders

In this paper, the Presence team describes how, by thinking of older people as active participants in society, rather than as needy and dependent, innovative designs have been developed for systems that help elderly people remain part of the community. The team has done this by involving users in the design process by, engaging them in a dialogue with designers that has allowed both sides to influence each other.

Looking and leaping

Having come to design from a background in experimental psychology, I get a mischievous thrill from the way research through design can usefully break all the rules of science. Clearly articulated theories and analyses form the conceptual backbone of science - designers also draw inspiration from the popular press, contemporary art, and eccentric observations. Controlled, or at least accountable, empirical studies are sciences route to understanding people; designers improvise, provoke, and take extreme, even imaginary, individuals as an audience. Science lends empirical methods to test the success of new systems; as designers we hope that our examples will seduce and stimulate those who experience them. Design methods based on imagination and personal engagement may seem frivolous or gratuitously provocative, but they are based on a long tradition that allows us to question aesthetic, emotional, and cultural aspects of the artefacts and systems we develop. These issues seem to fall in sciences blindspot: difficult to theorize, analyze, or study empirically, they tend to be ignored by approaches to technology built on the scientific approach. This is a dangerous situation, because if left unexamined new technologies will tend to spread the aesthetics and values of the workplace throughout our lives. In this talk, I describe recent projects that suggest new ways that technology might enter our everyday lives, in order to illustrate the strengths and the blindspots of the design approach to research. Bill Gaver is a Senior Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art, currently focusing on design approaches to research, and technologies that promote the value of diversion and insight. His career has spanned experimental psychology and cognitive science, human computer interaction, and design. His early work on everyday listening and auditory interfaces influenced the ways sounds are used in interfaces such as the MacOS; later work extended the

Debating the media space design space

Why do Audio Video (AV) communications infrastructures differ so widely in some of their key features? What factors led designers and mearchers to choose radically different se Iutions to the same design problems? This panel brings to gether users, researchm and key designers to expose their rationale and debate some of the issues which are cunently being confronted in the development of such technology.

Using speech and audio in the interface (abstract)

TOPIC A workshop entitled The Future of Speech and Audio in the Interface [1] was held at CHI ’94 with the goal of further defining the emerging area of sound in user interfaces and applications, and exploring applications, research areas, and interaction techniques that use audio in the interface. The focus of the workshop was on the “CHI perspective” of using speech and sound to exploit the audio channel for the user’s benefit. This SIG is designed as a follow-on to that workshop; the focus of the workshop will provide the focus for this session as well.