Hugo R. Mills

Breaking the book: translating the chemistry lab book into a pervasive computing lab environment

The UK e-Science programme is relying on the evolution of the paper lab book into a pervasive data gathering lab system. To date take up of existing commercial or research lab book replacement systems has not been great. In this paper, we reconsider both the role of the lab book in the experimental cycle, as well as its affective and experiential properties as an artefact, in order to design an e-Science lab book that will be acceptable to the scientists who will use it. To this end we combined and extended existing design analysis models in order to assess the artefact functionally and experientially. We present the approach we developed, the prototype we designed based on our analysis, and the results of the formative study we performed of the artefact in real use. We show that our design elicitation method strongly contributed to the success of our prototypes take up.

The semantic smart laboratory: a system for supporting the chemical eScientist

One goal of eScience is to enable the end-to-end publication of experiments and results. In the Combechem project we have developed an innovative human-centred system which captures the process of a chemistry experiment from plan to execution. The system comprises an electronic lab book replacement, which has been successfully trialled in a synthetic organic chemistry laboratory, and a flexible back-end storage system. Working closely with the users, we found that a light touch and a high degree of flexibility was required in the user interface. In this paper, we concentrate on the representation and storage of human-scale experiment metadata, introducing an ontology to describe the record of an experiment, and a storage system for the data from our lab book software. Just as the interfaces need to be flexible to cope with whatever a chemist wishes to record, so the back end solutions need to be similarly flexible to store any metadata that may be created. The storage system is based on Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, and Web Services. It gives a much higher degree of flexibility to the type of metadata it can store, compared to the use of rigid relational databases.

Making tea: iterative design through analogy

The success of translating an analog or manual practice into a digital interactive system may depend on how well that translation captures not only the functional what and how aspects of the practice, but the why of the process as well. Addressing these attributes is particularly challenging when there is a gap in expertise between the design team and the domain to be modeled. In this paper, we describe Making Tea, a design method foregrounding the use of analogy to bridge the gap between design team knowledge and domain expertise. Making Tea complements more traditional user-centered design approaches such as ethnography and task analysis. In this paper, we situate our work with respect to other related design methods such as Cultural Probes and Artifact Walkthroughs. We describe the process by which we develop, validate and use analogy in order to maximize expert contact time in observation, interviews, design reviews and evaluation. We contextualize the method in a discussion of its use in a project we ran to replace a paper-based synthetic chemistry lab book with an interactive system for use in a pervasive lab environment.