Darren J. Reed

Funology: designing enjoyment

Although the general interest of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research community in pleasure and fun as a goal of software design is growing (see for example [3, 10, 13]) we are far from having a coherent understanding of what enjoyment actually is and how it can be addressed by products and processes (see [7]). We might question whether designing for fun, pleasure and enjoyment is a desirable goal (e.g., [8]) and whether the processes and topics involved differ in any significant way from designing for usability.

NOW or NOT NOW: Coordinating Restarts in the Pursuit of Learnables in Vocal Master Classes

During the pursuit of learnables in vocal master classes, masters frequently produce lengthy clusters of directives, while students and accompanists orient to early opportunities for putting directives into practice. Participants are therefore faced with a continuous necessity to negotiate whether a directive is to be put into practice “now” or “not now.” Accompanists typically initiate musical (re)performances and are therefore the first to respond to a masters instruction completion, often preempting it early on in a masters potentially final turn constructional unit. Master class participants have to coordinate two action types: masters orient to giving instructions through talk; students and pianists orient primarily to restarting the musical performance.

Telephone conferences for fun: experimentation in people’s homes

The paper illustrates how communication experiments may be carried out in a domestic recreational context. Participants situated in their homes were connected into group telephone conversations and simply asked to “chat and enjoy yourselves”. Following the conversation, participants provided Likert scale ratings of the experience. In addition, the conversations were recorded and analysed. A total of 211 participants took part in two experiments. Telephone groups had an average size of five people, each speaking in the same conversation from their individual homes. Comments from the participants and Likert rating scales indicated that it was a positive recreational experience. The primary manipulation in each experiment was intended to encourage spontaneous co-involvement of all of the group. In Experiment 1 this was done by changing the way participants were introduced to the group, in Experiment 2 the group was made more salient by providing each member with a list of names. Open ended responses obtained from telephone interviews with participants in Experiment 1 were used to construct a questionnaire for Experiment 2 to measure presence, involvement and communication efficacy. The measures extracted from transcripts included the average length of utterances and equality of contribution as well as a new measure, the number of lines to the first “flow episode” in the transcript. While neither of the manipulations produced significant effects on Likert scale ratings made after the sessions or the measures extracted from transcripts, the paper is able to recommend the measures used and to provide practical advice for other investigators seeking to run communication experiments in a recreational context.

Design for Inclusion

We started this paper by asking about the definition of inclusive design and suggested an alternative formulation of design for inclusion. By prioritizing the social and personal concerns of older people, and presenting this information in a formalised template, we aim to provide a resource for understanding the complex layered and relational character of such problems. Using the net neighbours scheme as an example of a distributed socio-technical system that targets the concerns and capacities of different stakeholders, we gave an example of how such complex issues might be addressed through a user-centred mentality, and how future service based interventions may be developed.

Inclusive design: beyond capabilities towards context of use

Inclusive design is oriented to a particular outcome, to ensure that products and services address the needs of the widest possible audience. Approaches towards achieving this aim include the use of ergonometric data to predict product exclusion and the participation of extreme users in a design team. This discussion paper extends these approaches by comparing the inclusive design process to the design process that has evolved for Interaction Design within Human Computer Interaction, and in so doing identifies additional issues and processes. Potential ways practicing designers in an Inclusive Design context might approach these concepts are suggested. True Inclusive Design must engage the widest population as actual users not just potential users. This objective can only be achieved through a move from a view of Inclusive Design as solely concerned with individual capabilities to a view of Inclusive Design set in a social context.

Fun on the phone: the situated experience of recreational telephone conferences

Fun in telephone conferences in this analysis is defined in relation to what it is not: having fun is a matter of transforming the (necessarily) formal structured basis of activity into moments of triviality and playfulness. And as such it complements early sociological appreciation of play as not work. However by understanding fun as the consequence of particular interpretive transformations in ongoing interaction, our sociology of fun becomes a dynamic conceptualisation: fun is always interactionally achieved by active social actors.

Zombies and the Sociological Imagination: The Walking Dead as Social-Science Fiction

What is scarier than a dead body that moves? A key dynamic of the zombie genre is the ‘re-animation’ of lifeless corpses, granting movement where there should be none. At their inception, they are characterised by (unnatural) movement and (heightened) emotion. However, there is more to the zombie genre than it simply being frightening and gruesomely violent. Zombies, and more particularly the zombie apocalypse, are a backdrop and context for human drama. They allow a commentary on issues of consumerism, interpersonal cooperation and conflict, gender and race relations, highlighting that ‘Zombie films are about the humans. They [the humans] are the problem’.1 The mechanism by which they draw out these issues is by disorienting the audience through the depiction of extremes (violence and depravity such as cannibalism) and then reorienting audience experience through the narrative structure to make an ‘unsettling point, usually a sociological, anthropological, or theological one’ (Paffenroth, 2006, p. 2). We are less concerned with repeating these points than looking to extend beyond this content to grapple with wider conceptual issues. The zombie genre’s narrative energy is premised upon a ‘what if question, set in a fantasy world. In this sense such enquiries draw upon the concept of social-science fiction whereby fiction can encourage engagement of a non-sociologist with social-science themes and issues (Penfold-Mounce et al., 2011) through speculative ‘breeching’ (Garfinkel, 1967) or sociological provocation — in this case a playful evocation of ‘anti-structure’ (Turner, 1969).

Place and the Experience of BLISS

This paper builds on earlier work that understands the design of bus information panels as rooted in a landscape of human experience. It turns the mundane activity of waiting at a bus stop into a problematic space of emotion and volition by understanding the dialogic relationship between human and technology. It does this by developing a novel approach to interaction design, which combines a theoretical framework, which reveals the rich experience and ‘felt life’ of technology, with an empirical analysis of bus information. By imagining a series of conversation-like dialogues, based in a Conversation Analytic (CA) sensitivity to the achievement of meaning in sequence [Condor & Antaki 1997], it generates a series of experience narratives that provide for a critical analysis of the information presentation. It uses this to engage with the idea of place as a layered feature of the bus stop.

Critical perspectives on dependability: an older person's experience of assistive technology

This paper considers multiple meanings of dependability as part of a project investigating home based assistive and smart home technology for older people. It argues that because the term dependability is broad, clear levels of analysis must be articulated. It further situates engineering based definitions of dependability in wider critical perspectives. Five levels of analysis are proposed which expand from a single device to a set of devices in a particular building with primary and secondary users. These levels of analysis are then considered in relation to five contextual perspectives: the technological, the personal, the social, the cultural and the environmental. The approach is applied to a case study of an older persons experience of the installation of an automated front door.

LEARNING FROM LOSEABLES

There are a number of themes and descriptive categorisations of devices in HCI that act as positive common places. These include portable, wearable, and ubiquitous devices. In the this paper the category ‘loseables’, which includes misplaceables, forgetables and stealables, is offered as an alternative formulation of the self same devices. In a recent keynote address David Benyon proposed that HCI practitioners could utilise their own craft skill and tacit knowledge as users of devices to generate questions about design. He also suggested that there was a place for constructive criticism in relation to design that entails a role similar to that of the literary critic. The critical reflexivity method presented in this paper draws inspiration from these comments, and in combination with Philip Agre’s idea of HCI as a ‘critical technical practice’, offers an exercise in reflective HCI. It explores the essentially contested meaning inherent in devices and, in so doing, presents not only commentary on design itself - along with the simultaneously constructive and constrictive nature of such terms - but also, and more importantly, generates questions, insights and suggestions for design.