Frances Aldrich

Designing for or designing with? Informant design for interactive learning environments

The value of involving people as ‘users’ or ‘participants’ in the design process is increasingly becoming a point of debate. In this paper we describe a new framework, called ‘informant design’, which advocates efficiency of input from different people: maximizing the value of contributions tlom various informants and design team members at different stages of the design process. To illustrate how this can be achieved we describe a project that uses children and teachers as informants at difTerent stages to help us design an interactive learning environment for teaching ecology.

Smart Homes: Past, Present and Future

A “smart home” can be defined as a residence equipped with computing and information technology which anticipates and responds to the needs of the occupants, working to promote their comfort, convenience, security and entertainment through the management of technology within the home and connections to the world beyond. The full-blown concept of the smart home is the acme of domestic technology we can envisage at present. The concept, at one time only encountered in science fiction, has moved closer to realisation over the last ten years. Although the gap between reality and fantasy is still wide, it is important that we start to give proper consideration to the implications this technology holds for the way we will live in our homes in the future. To date, the limited amount of research into smart home that has been carried out has been primarily focused on the technical possibilities. As a social scientist myself, I am concerned that the personal and social consequences of smart home technology are largely being overlooked. (A notable exception is the work of Mynatt and colleagues at the Everyday Computing Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, e.g. Mynatt et al., 2001; Siio et al., 2002; Voida and Mynatt, 2002.) The home is a quintessential “human” place, with all the intricacies that entails. As I hope to persuade you in this chapter, the smart home is far too sensitive and important a sphere for social scientists to ignore any longer. If we take up the challenge which the smart home presents, we can make a significant contribution – the evolution of the technology itself will be shaped by our discussion and research. With this chapter I am aiming to provide the motivation and the background for social scientists to become involved with the emerging phenomenon of the smart home. The chapter is divided into three sections looking at the past, the present and the future of the smart home – at the historical context which brought about the emergence of the 11

Getting to grips with “interactivity”: helping teachers assess the educational value of CD-ROMs

Many commercial CD-ROMs are now being marketed as suitable for home and school use, increasingly promoted as covering the National Curriculum. However, such promises are failing to be realised because many CD-ROMS are poorly constructed, consisting simply of a mishmash of images, sounds and video that offer little more than light entertainment. The aim of this paper is to provide guidance on assessing the added value of educational CD-ROMs compared with traditional materials by explicating more the notion of interactivity as it pertains to learning.

Errorless learning and the acquisition of word processing skills

Word processing and other computer-based tasks represent an important dimension to rehabilitation because of the increasing prevalence of computers in both recreation and employment. This study describes an investigation into the use of errorless learning (EL) as a means of teaching basic word processing skills to a memory-impaired individual. The protocol we used incorporated established EL methods together with spaced repetition. The basic training was carried out using a simplified version of a commercially available word processing package. The package was menu-driven and therefore encouraged the use of recognition memory rather than explicit recall of commands. The task of word processing was broken down into a hierarchy of subskills. An incremental learning procedure was applied in which the subject was taught one set of subskills and given plenty of practice, before the next set was introduced in parallel. The participant was trained to follow a set procedure, for example, to open and edit an exist...

Tactile graphics in school education: perspectives from pupils

Graphic literacy is increasingly expected of all school leavers. This is particularly demanding on blind and visually impaired pupils who access graphically displayed information by touch. Through focus group discussions with 40 primary and secondary pupils in special schools, we sought to learn about their perspectives on the design and use of tactile graphics. The findings emphasise the challenges involved, not only for the users themselves, but also for their teachers and for specialist designers of tactile graphics.

Tactile graphics in school education: perspectives from teachers

Teachers are uniquely placed to comment on the design and use of tactile graphics in school education. It is surprising then that their opinions on this topic do not appear to have been sought previously. A postal questionnaire was used to gather the perspectives of 24 teachers working with visually impaired children, in special or mainstream schools, at primary or secondary level. The questionnaire allowed the teachers themselves to put forward those issues they considered important. Some very positive and enthusiastic remarks about tactile graphics were received but the general emphasis was on the difficulties of using tactile graphics in the classroom, such as the labour-intensiveness of production, problems of information overload within a graphic, and the challenge of making tactile graphics meaningful to learners.

First steps towards a model of tactile graphicacy

This paper describes our initial steps towards developing a model of how blind people comprehend tactile graphics. In the first half of the paper we set out the aims of the model, and then consider other key issues such as the nature and scope of the model, the information it must incorporate and the outcomes it should provide. In the second half of the paper we present our ideas for the model itself, outlining the four facets that make it up - perceptual processing, cognitive skills, knowledge and cognitive development Throughout the paper we raise questions for open debate and invite feedback on our ideas.

Listening at speed

We report two experiments investigating the comprehension of speeded speech. In the first experiment it is shown that acceleration of speech has no effect on the comprehension of text spoken by a male speaker but causes substantial reduction in the comprehension of a female voice. The second experiment shows that the comprehension of the female voice at high speed can be significantly improved if the speech is processed through a commercially available compression device.

Tangible line graphs: an experimental investigation of three formats using capsule paper

This study explores three formats for the presentation of tangible line graphs to visually handicapped people, using the capsule-paper production process. The formats are L/no-grid (standard x and y axes/data curves on smooth background), box/no-grid (duplicated axes enclose graph space on all four sides/smooth background), and box/grid (duplicated axes/data curves superimposed on grid). Subjects answered questions concerning the coordinate value of points, the difference in coordinate value between two points, and configurational aspects of the data. Questions that involved determining coordinate values were answered most accurately from the box/grid format, followed by the box/no-grid, and, lastly, the L/no-grid. Response times did not differ. A different pattern emerged with questions concerning configurational aspects of the graph. With these there was no difference in accuracy between the formats, but the L/no-grid format led to faster responding than the box/no-grid, which in turn was faster than the box/grid. The practical implications of these data are considered.

Pager messages as self reminders: A case study of their use in memory impairment

Each year many people suffer an accident or illness which leaves them with a permanent memory impairment. As a result they will fail to remember to do things, making it difficult for them to maintain employment or independent leisure activities. Conventional memory aids offer little assistance because their use depends on relatively normal memory functioning. A system designed specifically for memory-impaired people has been developed recently in the USA, however. ‘NeuroPage’ uses a combination of computing and telecommunications to store and transmit reminders to a pager worn by the user. The system is designed to place minimal demands on memory. This paper presents a case study evaluation of NeuroPage in use by a young man with a severe memory impairment. The pager messages led to a marked increase in the probability that he would carry out his intended tasks. Issues of usability and acceptability of the system to the user and his family are also reported. A number of possible developments to the system are considered, including the incorporation of artificial intelligence and context-sensitivity. Broader issues in the design of memory aids for people with and without memory impairments are also considered, as well as the potential role of memory-impaired people in the design of technology for their own use.