David Browning

Pursuing genius loci: interaction design and natural places

Human computer interaction (HCI) has little explored everyday life and enriching experiences in rural, wilderness and other predominantly “natural” places despite their socioeconomic importance. Beyond simply addressing the challenge arising from applying an urban perspective to designing technologies for use in natural places, we wish to provoke integration of the natural and computational worlds. To stimulate design that both draws upon and affords such integration, we propose seven themes we have distilled from the literature and supplement these with our own research observations. Bodies Imagine and Remember recognizes the inseparability of meanings and corporeal experience of natural places for design. Indexicality and Habitus refers to the need for design to be sensitive to the processes by which natural features become intelligible in our actions and communication. Values and Story-spaces observes the way representations and infrastructures, infused with particular values, become dominant. Identity and Belonging, suggests the need to reconcile designs with couplings between physical settings, processes of community and personal identity. Rhythm and Dynamism considers links between people’s daily routines, nature’s events and patterns and spatial and social issues pertinent to design and in Revealing and Receding we suggest that design must simultaneously fade into the background and provoke seeing natural places differently. Fragility, Liability and Spirituality refers to technological opportunities to support positive relations within ecosystems and recognizing the limits of technological control.

Making there: methods to uncover egocentric experience in a dialogic of natural places

We reflect on two methods that explore personal experience of natural places within a human-centred framework for design. The methods attend to the meanings people make of their experiences in natural places and emotional and intellectual sense of being in a place. We use Egocentric Point-of-View video to explore transformations of immediate sensory transactions in natural places and Nature Probes to elicit affective qualities of experiences. We apply McCarthy and Wrights dialogical approach (2005) to uncover relationships between place and self and discuss insights emerging from our methods with respect to belonging to a community through its natural landscape.

Rural encounters: cultural translations through video

Requirements gathering for design in rural and remote areas needs to be considered within the prevailing cultural context. We explain our use of video as a technological site for cultural encounters during the preparatory elicitation of cultural influences and determinants. We outline the factors leading to the development of a co-generative approach arising from our understanding of the role played by indexicality during such encounters with different cultural systems of knowledge.

Designing for Naturally Engaging Experiences

This full day workshop explores how insights from artefacts, created during data collecting and analysis, are translated into prototypes. It is particularly concerned with getting closer to peoples experience of shaping a design space. The workshop draws inspiration from data-products resulting from interactions in natural, unbuilt places with the intention of supporting both those with work integrating understandings of such experiences into design and those interested in the way material provokes ideas and inspiration for design.