Elizabeth Goodman

The familiar stranger: anxiety, comfort, and play in public places

As humans we live and interact across a wildly diverse set of physical spaces. We each formulate our own personal meaning of place using a myriad of observable cues such as public-private, large-small, daytime-nighttime, loud-quiet, and crowded-empty. Not surprisingly, it is the people with which we share such spaces that dominate our perception of place. Sometimes these people are friends, family and colleagues. More often, and particularly in public urban spaces we inhabit, the individuals who affect us are ones that we repeatedly observe and yet do not directly interact with - our Familiar Strangers. This paper explores our often ignored yet real relationships with Familiar Strangers. We describe several experiments and studies that led to designs for both a personal, body-worn, wireless device and a mobile phone based application that extend the Familiar Stranger relationship while respecting the delicate, yet important, constraints of our feelings and affinities with strangers in pubic places.

Understanding interaction design practices

There is an undesirable gap between HCI research aimed at influencing interaction design practice and the practitioners in question. To close this gap, we advocate a theoretical and methodological focus on the day-to-day, lived experience of designers. To date, this type of theory-generative, experientially oriented research has focused on the users of technologies, not the designers. In contrast, we propose that HCI researchers turn their attention to producing theories of interaction design practice that resonate with practitioners themselves. In part one of this paper, we describe the mismatch between HCI research and interaction design practices. Then we present vignettes from an observational study of commercial design practice to illustrate the issues at hand. In part two, we discuss methodological and theoretical changes in research practice that might support the goal of integrating HCI research with interaction design practices. We then discuss current research methods and theories to identify changes that might enlarge our view on practice. In part three, we elaborate on our theoretically minded agenda and a kind of ideal-type theory.

Three environmental discourses in human-computer interaction

A review of the past decade of human-computer interaction relating to environmental issues identifies three discourses whose commitments and assumptions have consequences for the design of new interfaces and interactive systems: sustainable interaction design, re-visioning consumption and citizen sensing. It suggests two promising directions for future research: participatory design and infrastructure.

Design and ethics in the era of big data

In 2003, I was working at a research lab on what then seemed like a new and unmapped field: urban computing. We envisioned a network of devices that would playfully engage urban dwellers with the strangers around them. In an initial vision, sensors at points of interest, such as bus stops or coffee shops, would track nearby devices. That information could then drive placebased recommendations along the lines of Amazon’s product recommendations. A visitor to our lab immediately pointed out that the system would harvest easily identifiable location data—data that corporations and governments could use to assemble individual profiles. I was too polite to pooh-pooh him, but I thought our visitor was unrealistically paranoid. What would be the point of such a sparse surveillance network? Setting up towers would cost too much for the limited data they would provide. Or so I thought. Fast forward 10 years to the antigovernment protestors in Kiev’s Maidan Square. According to The New Yorker, many protestors received SMS notifications, likely from the Ukrainian government, noting their presence at the demonstration [1]. Observers explain that it’s easy to set up the unofficial, temporary honeypot cell towers that had harvested protestors’ telephone numbers before passing connections on to the wider telecom network. Reading the article, I thought of our “familiar stranger” devices—and our visitor’s warning. We meant the project to inspire new directions for interaction design. With 10 years of development in mobile devices and networked sensing behind us, the project now spurs me to reconsider the ethics of interaction design in the age of big data. From fitness trackers to car sensors that monitor speed and position, the R&D proposals of 10 years ago are now hitting the market. These new products and services produce and consume a tremendous amount of personally identifiable information about people’s characteristics, opinions, and behavior. Some of the data comes from intentional contributions, such as status updates. Some comes from unwitting or background capture, as with car insurance modules that sense speed and location. As ever more data is collected, increasing numbers of products depend on reused data, as with the targeted advertising services that combine data from many sources to customize online advertising. Personally identifiable data is now a commodity, transferred to others for reuse beyond the initial context in which it was captured. Yet the fate of this data is largely opaque to the people who provide it. Philosopher Helen Nissenbaum defines privacy as “contextual integrity”—that is, sharing information according to the expectations under which it was originally offered [2]. Selling or reusing data is a great way to destroy contextual integrity. Even if the users consented to the original capture and use of their data, they do not always know when it is later used in ways they did not expect or desire. My ethical concerns emerge from four related trends: • The sensor-infused world. Embedded sensing allows many more types of devices to collect data about the actions of users and conditions of the world around them. It’s not just specialpurpose devices such as the Nike+ or the Nest thermostat. Cars, such as the Prius, are increasingly instrumented. Telephones, too, host an array of sensors. Applications that bridge multiple devices (such as the Kindle or Instagram) allow the integration of sensor and online behavior data. Combined with the systemic tracking of online activities, networked devices that monitor and share offline human behavior can potentially enable companies and governments to assemble a 360-degree profile of individual characteristics and behavior. Even if the results are intended to benefit users, this is, to put it bluntly, mass-market consumer surveillance. • Data as a commodity. Once collected, data can be stored indefinitely, passing into new management and new uses. Consider the horrified reactions of British citizens who discovered recently that the National Health Service was preparing to sell access to the entire country’s health records—only barely anonymized—through a consultancy [3]. And that the consultancy had already uploaded those records to a distribution service. Even if they could have chosen not to have health information recorded, how could citizens in the 1980s have anticipated the technology, business, and government policies of the 2010s? • The opacity of back-end information exchange. What’s often called the data curtain veils the circulation of data in uncertainty. Where is your data stored? Who has access, whether openly or through secretive (but legal) back doors? Do managers share your beliefs about what they can or should do with it? • Mass scale. When millions of users are scattered around the world, how are Elizabeth Goodman, UC Berkeley

Mapchat: conversing in place

Arranging a social meeting often involves collaborative consideration of events, locations and time. In studying online dating, we observed people using multiple information sources and applications to arrange suitable activities and rendezvous locations/times. Would-be socializers then exchange URLs and discuss ideas until a decision is made. To reduce the work of collaborative event planning, we have designed MapChat, a novel, map-based combination of existing services. MapChat allows people to chat synchronously over an interactive map, transforming online maps into shared digital environments for place/location exploration and rendezvous negotiation.

Communicating actionable user research for human-centered design

Abstract In human-centered design, user research drives design decisions by providing an understanding of end users. In practice, different people, teams, or even companies manage each step of the design process, making communication of user research results a critical activity. Based on an empirical study of current methods used by experts, this paper presents strategies for effectively communicating user research findings across organizational or corporate boundaries. To build researcher–client relationships, understand both user and client needs, and overcome institutional inertia, this paper proposes viewing user research clients as users of user research outcomes. This reframing of the crafting of communication across boundaries as a parallel internal human-centered design process we refer to as a double ethnography.

After the match: mobility and first dates

Matchmaking has moved online. More and more people actively seekromantic partners using specialized dating websites. Afteridentifying potential partners on the Internet, “onlinedaters” invest considerable time, effort and emotion gettingoffline setting up activities, locations and times to meetface-to-face. And once offline, daters spend a lot of moneyexploring the potential for compatibility with people met online.While online dating services have optimized the profile-basedsearch and match component of “matchmaking”, few offersupport for the time-consuming and potentially nerve-wrackingprocess of planning those first face-to-face meetings. Thisresearch sketch introduces an ongoing project aimed at helpingpeople who meet online connect offline.

The Making of Cross-Device Experiences: A Hands-on Workshop

Studies show that people often use several devices together to carry out everyday tasks, but there are tremendous challenges when it comes to building effective and usable cross-device experiences. In this workshop, participants will explore these challenges through collaborative prototyping. Specifically, this workshop explores a number of design and prototyping issues such as maintaining consistency between platforms, anticipating cross-device usage, prototyping testable cross-device experiences, and directing user attention in cross-device interactions. By bringing together researchers, practitioners, designers and makers in an intense but reflective day of prototyping cross-device experiences, we believe this workshop will advance the development of new frameworks, tools, and techniques for designing cross-device interactions.

Hand waving and the real work of design

tions and future imagined interactions through hand waving. That is, they supplement visual representations with verbal explanations and evocative body movements. This hand waving for clients is treated as a routine part of their jobs, but is often dismissed as not “real work.” For many designers, the real work of interaction design does not happen in client meetings. Real work involves collaboratively envisioning future products and services, then creating artifacts that represent them, such as wireframes, videos, and site architectures. It takes place in generative, free-flowing team meetings and in focused, solitary “heads down” work on computers as the ideas move from paper sketches and Post-it notes to InDesign and Keynote. So, despite the visible presence of client communication in project schedules and everyday conversations, hand waving is often invisible in accounts of interaction design as a profession. Nevertheless, if we closely observe designers’ hand waving in the context of their work on commercial interaction design projects, it looks more and more like a very hard-won accomplishment. I’d like to argue that instead of dismissing the kind of articulation work involved in hand waving, educators, students, and certainly working designers It’s the second week of a six-week website redesign at a San Francisco design consultancy. The visiting researcher asks the senior interaction designer about his work. He responds, “Oh, I’m not doing any real work on the project anymore. I’m just showing up at client meetings and hand waving.”