Devina Ramduny-Ellis

Artefacts as designed, artefacts as used: resources for uncovering activity dynamics

This paper addresses the use of artefacts as a powerful resource for analysis, focusing on the ‘artefact as designed’ as a means of eliciting the designers’ explicit and implicit knowledge and ‘artefacts as used’ as a means of uncovering the trail left by currently inactive processes. Artefact analysis is particularly suitable in situations where direct observation is ineffective, especially in activities that occur infrequently. We demonstrate the usefulness of our technique through the analysis of artefacts within both the office and the meeting environment. This is part of a wider study aimed at understanding the nature of decisions in meetings with the view of producing a tool to aid decision management and hence reduce rework. We conclude by drawing out some general lessons from our analysis, which reaffirms the intricate role that artefacts play in maintaining activity dynamics.

Physicality in Design: an exploration

ABSTRACT Both the nature of many products and their process of creation are becoming increasingly digitally mediated. However, our bodies and minds are naturally conceived to interact with the physical, so crucial design information can be elicited by constructing meaningful prototypes. This paper examines how physical materials impact early design through a study that explores how groups with very different materials tackle a common design challenge. The inherent physical properties of the materials and the ways in which designers interpret and manipulate them give rise to subtle patterns of behaviour. These include the ways in which groups move between abstract and concrete discussions, the way groups comply with or resist the materials they are given, and the complex interactions between the physicality of materials and the group dynamics. This understanding is contributing to our research in explicating the fundamental role of physicality in the design of hybrid physical and digital artefacts.

Physigrams: modelling devices for natural interaction

This paper explores the formal specification of the physical behaviour of devices ‘unplugged’ from their digital effects. By doing this we seek to better understand the nature of physical interaction and the way this can be exploited to improve the design of hybrid devices with both physical and digital features. We use modified state transition networks of the physical behaviour, which we call physiograms, and link these to parallel diagrams of the digital state. These are used to describe a number of features of physical interaction exposed by previous work and relevant properties expressed using a formal semantics of the diagrams. As well as being an analytic tool, the physigrams have been used in a case study where product designers used and adapted them as part of the design process.

The VoodooIO gaming kit: a real-time adaptable gaming controller

Existing gaming controllers are limited in their end-user configurability. As a complement to current game control technology, we present the VoodooIO Gaming Kit, a real-time adaptable gaming controller. We introduce the concept of appropriable gaming devices, which allow players to define and actively reconfigure their gaming space, making it appropriate to their personal preference and gaming needs. The technology and its conceived usage are illustrated through its application to two commercially available computer games, as well as through the results of a formal user study.

Physical Fidelity: Exploring the Importance of Physicality on Physical-Digital Conceptual Prototyping

The physicality of digital-physical devices is an essential part of our interaction and understanding of information appliances. This paper draws on the findings of an empirical study investigating the effect of physical fidelity on a series of user trials. Three prototypes of a single design intent were built, the standard of their construction dictated by the time imposed on the designer. In choosing this constraint, the authors present the argument that the most important driver in decisions that dictate fidelity levels is the available and/or necessary time required for making a prototype in order to generate information of the right quality. This paper presents the empirical and qualitative results of the trials, which suggest that there is little effect of fidelity on user performance, but the users ability to give constructive feedback on the design was influenced by the nature of the prototypes.

Modelling Devices for Natural Interaction

We do not interact with systems without first performing some physical action on a physical device. This paper shows how formal notations and formal models can be developed to account for the relationship between the physical devices that we actually press, twist or pull and their effects on systems. We use state diagrams of each but find we have to extend these in order to account for features such as bounce-back, where buttons or other controls are sprung. Critical to all is the fact that we are physical creatures and so formal models have to take into account that physicality.

Editorial: Physicality and interaction

We live in an increasingly digital world yet our bodies and minds are naturally designed to interact with the physical. The products of the 21st century are and will be a synthesis of digital and physical elements embedded in new physical and social environments. As we design more hybrid physical/digital products, the distinctions for the user become blurred. It is therefore increasingly important that we understand what we gain, lose or confuse by the added digitality. Digitally augmented physical artefacts can be tailored and adapted to operate within a wide range of ecological settings. However, they also become more complex and require a fairly intensive design process to make them not simply practical and functional but also engaging. As a result, the need becomes even more pressing to comprehend the underlying computational intricacies, the physical form, properties and behaviour, the physical and social contexts, and the issues of aesthetics and creativity. This special issue of Interacting with Computers arose out of series of workshops on the issue of Physicality (see http:// www.physicality.org/). These attracted a wide range of participants: artists and architects, designers and dancers, programmers and philosophers; all in different ways seeking to understand and exploit the physical nature of the world, things within the world and the human body itself. They also reflected intersections with other topical areas including ubiquitous computing and tangible interaction. The importance of issues surrounding physicality and materiality is clear. At the same time that the call for this special issue was issued there were two other journal special issue calls in closely related areas. However, the level of interest is such that despite this ‘competition’, the call for this issue was in fact heavily oversubscribed. The editors’ own interest in the issue of physicality cuts across a number of areas including: understanding the way physical artefacts act as prompts or triggers for action; using the placement of objects in the environment as a resource for the analysis of human activity; studying digital and electrical appliances in order to understand the role of physical form and behaviour in enhancing usability and user experience; and exploring the role of physical tools and models during the design process and how this affects the designers themselves and users testing early prototypes. The papers in this special issue also demonstrate the wide range of domains where issues of physicality are important. Antle, Corness and Droumeva in ‘‘What the Body Knows: Exploring the Benefits of Embodied Metaphor in Hybrid Physical Digital Environments” look at the use of physical metaphors to drive the design of tools for creating music. Khoo, Merritt and Cheok in ‘‘Designing Physical and Social Intergenerational Family Entertainment” focus on physical

Modelling in Practice

In previous chapters, we have argued that responsibility plays a key role in sociotechnical systems; however, the task of pinning responsibilities down to specific individuals or organisations is not trivial. In this book, we have presented three viewpoints for analysing responsibility. Firstly, the ethnographic approach (Chapters 3 and 4), while highlighting the difficulties associated with locating responsibilities, allows us to describe certain levels of responsibility and identify areas where responsibility needs to be clarified. Secondly, the management perspective (Chapters 5 and 6) enables us to model processes and tasks involved in job allocations in such a way that potential areas of responsibility conflicts can be revealed. Finally, the software engineering models in Chapters 8 and 9 complement these two viewpoints by providing a way of explicitly mapping responsibility to agents, thus making responsibility conflicts and neglects more evident, while also providing a method for analysis. In this chapter, we will build on the responsibility assignment models, described in Chapters 8 and 9, to demonstrate responsibility modelling in practice. In Section 10.2, we use the production of this book as a case study to analyse how the main goal of producing the book decomposes into multiple levels of sub-goals, each with attendant obligations and responsibilities by different agents. We examine this web of responsibilities, delegations and contractual obligations in more detail in Section 10.3. The case study highlights the dynamic way in which responsibilities flow between agents, come into being and are discharged. We discuss these issues in Section 10.4 before reflecting more broadly on issues of modelling in Section 10.5. The choice of the book production as a case study may appear somewhat inward looking and self-indulgent; however, we did not set out with this example in mind. Initially we intended to apply causal responsibility modelling to the data in the report of the inquiry into the London ambulance service (LAS), which is a classic case of failures at different levels (LAS Inquiry Report 1993). The post-mortem report did highlight the potential agents or authorities who were responsible for the failures, for example, ‘LAS management ignored or chose not to accept advice provided to it by many sources outside the Service on the tightness of the timetable