Joshua Tanenbaum

Democratizing technology: pleasure, utility and expressiveness in DIY and maker practice

DIY, hacking, and craft have recently drawn attention in HCI and CSCW, largely as a collaborative and creative hobbyist practice. We shift the focus from the recreational elements of this practice to the ways in which it democratizes design and manufacturing. This democratized technological practice, we argue, unifies playfulness, utility, and expressiveness, relying on some industrial infrastructures while creating demand for new types of tools and literacies. Thriving on top of collaborative digital systems, the Maker movement both implicates and impacts professional designers. As users move more towards personalization and reappropriation, new design opportunities are created for HCI.

Futura: design for collaborative learning and game play on a multi-touch digital tabletop

This paper introduces a collaborative learning game called Futura: The Sustainable Futures Game, which is implemented on a custom multi-touch digital tabletop platform. The goal of the game is to work with other players to support a growing population as time passes while minimizing negative impact on the environment. The design-oriented research goal of the project is to explore the novel design space of collaborative, multi-touch tabletop games for learning. Our focus is on identifying and understanding key design factors of importance in creating opportunities for learning. We use four theoretical perspectives as lenses through which we conceptualize our design intentions and inform our analysis. These perspectives are: experiential learning, constructivist learning, collaborative learning, and game theory. In this paper we discuss design features that enable collaborative learning, present the results from two observational studies, and compare our findings to other guidelines in order to contribute to the growing body of empirically derived design guidelines for tangible, embodied and embedded interaction.

Why we use and abandon smart devices

Smart devices are becoming increasingly commercially available. However, uptake of these devices has been slow and abandonment swift, which indicates that smart devices may not currently meet the needs of users. To advance an understanding of the ways users benefit from, are challenged by, and abandon smart devices, we asked a group of users to purchase smart sensing devices to advance themselves towards a personal, self-defined goal. We found that participants abandoned devices because they did not fit with the their conceptions of themselves, the data collected by devices were perceived to not be useful, and device maintenance became unmanageable. Participants used devices because they had developed routines and because devices were useful, satisfied curiosity, and held hope for potential benefit to them. We propose ways to reduce barriers, motivate use, and argue for envisioning an additional function of these devices for short-term interventions, in addition to standard long-term use.

Steampunk as design fiction

In this paper we look at the Steampunk movement and consider is relevance as a design strategy for HCI and interaction design. Based on a study of online practices of Steampunk, we consider how, as a design fiction, Steampunk provides an explicit model for how to physically realize an ideological and imagined world through design practice. We contend that the practices of DIY and appropriation that are evident in Steampunk design provide a useful set of design strategies and implications for HCI.

Design fictional interactions: why HCI should care about stories

T he notion of design fiction is relatively new to the scene of HCI and interaction design research, but increasingly prevalent. First coined by science fiction author and futurist Bruce Sterling in his 2005 book Shaping Things, the term has found adherents within the HCI community, driven in part by the work of Julian Bleecker and in part by its appearance in a cover story in Interactions (written by Sterling). Its meaning has remained somewhat up for grabs within the research community, however. Is it fiction about design? Is it science fiction? Is it speculative design? The HCI community, broadly speaking, has a longstanding interest in design, both as a practical tool for materializing technical knowledge and as a way of knowing and exploring the world. We know plenty about how one designs, and about how that process creates knowledge, but we have much to learn about how one design fictions (if such a verb might be coined). I favor Sterling’s recent definition of design fiction as “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change” [1]. If you aren’t a film scholar or a narratologist, you might get hung up on the word diegetic, a term that has its roots in Greek philosophy and narrative theory. Sterling is borrowing the notion of “diegetic prototypes” from Bleecker, who in turn was borrowing from David Kirby, a film scholar who coined the term to describe “cinematic depictions of future technologies...that demonstrate to large public audiences a technology’s need, benevolence, and viability” [2]. Design fiction, then, uses these fictional depictions of future technology to tell a story about the world in which that technology is situated: It uses narrative structures to explore and communicate the possible futures for technology. It is the notion of diegesis that I want to dig into here, because I think it is easy for us to lose sight of its importance when attempting to incorporate designfiction-based methods into our own practice and research. In contemporary narratology, diegesis has come to refer to anything that exists within the reality of a fictional world. I like to explain this in terms of the difference between the underscoring in a film and the music playing on a radio in a film. Underscoring exists as part of the film as a media artifact, but only the audience hears it: Having no presence within the fictional world, it is thus nondiegetic. Music playing on a radio, on the other hand, is there to be heard by the characters as much as by the audience: It is considered diegetic because it exists within the film’s reality. Diegesis is important to our understanding of design fiction because it requires that we take the world of a story seriously: Objects and technologies that exist within the fictional world must abide by the rules of that world. Even if we don’t fully understand those rules, they still must be seen to exist and to operate with consistency. We don’t know how the teleporters in Star Trek work, but we know they have specific constraints and affordances that govern their operation within the story. The logics of the story are what give a design fiction its power, and I would argue that in the absence of those logics, a design fiction ceases to operate. It becomes something else—speculative design, or imaginative design. I believe that design fiction, if it is to remain design fiction, needs to have a story to contain it. Narratives and stories are among the oldest human information technologies. Narrative structures are uniquely suited to preserve and communicate experiential knowledge and to teach new information. We learn from an early age to use stories to make sense of the world, and we continue throughout our lives to frame our experiences in terms of narrative scripts that we acquire in childhood. Situating a new technology within a narrative forces us to grapple with questions of ethics, values, social perspectives, causality, politics, psychology, and emotions. This type of work can serve several important roles within HCI research and practice. First, it can be a method for envisioning new futures and technologies. This includes envisioning not just the technical aspects of an invention, but also the possible social, political, and personal consequences and outcomes of a world with that technology. Second, it can be a tool for communicating innovations to other Joshua Tanenbaum, Simon Fraser University

Mass Effect 2 A Case Study in the Design of Game Narrative

Digital games have matured substantially as a narrative medium in the last decade. However, there is still much work to be done to more fully understand the poetics of story-based-games. Game narrative remains an important issue with significant cultural, economic and scholarly implications. In this article, we undertake a critical analysis of the design of narrative within Mass Effect 2: a game whose narrative is highly regarded in both scholarly and vernacular communities. We follow the classic humanities methodology of “close-reading”: the detailed observation, deconstruction, and analysis of a text. Our close-reading employs a critical framework from our previous work to isolate and highlight the central narrative design parameters within digital games. This framework is grounded in the scholarly discourse around games and narrative, and has been tested and revised in the process of close-reading and analyzing contemporary games. The narrative design parameters we examine are character, storyworld, narrativized interface, emotion, and plot coherence. Our analysis uses these parameters to explicate a series of design decisions for the effective creation of narrative experience in Mass Effect 2, and by extension, for game narratives in general. We also expand our previous methodology through a focused “edge-case” strategy for exploring the limits of character, action, and story in the game. Finally, we position our analysis of Mass Effect 2 within contemporary discourses of “bounded agency”, and explore how the game negotiates the tension between player-expression, and narrative inevitability to create opportunities for sophisticated narrative poetics including tragedy and sacrifice.

Experiencing the reading glove

In this paper we describe the Reading Glove, a wearable RFID reader for interacting with a tangible narrative. Based on interviews with study participants, we present a set of observed themes for understanding how the wearable and tangible aspects of the Reading Glove influence the user experience. We connect our observational themes to theoretical notions from interactive narrative and tangible interaction to create a set of design considerations such as enacting a role, ownership and permission, multiplicity of interpretations and boundary objects.

Balancing act: enabling public engagement with sustainability issues through a multi-touch tabletop collaborative game

Despite a long history of using participatory methods to enable public engagement with issues of societal importance, interactive displays have only recently been explored for this purpose. In this paper, we evaluate a tabletop game called Futura, which was designed to engage the public with issues of sustainability. Our design is grounded in prior research on public displays, serious games, and computer supported collaborative learning. We suggest that a role-based, persistent simulation style game implemented on a multi-touch tabletop affords unique opportunities for a walk-up-and-play style of public engagement. We report on a survey-based field study with 90 participants at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics (Canada). The study demonstrated that small groups of people can be immediately engaged, participate collaboratively, and can master basic awareness outcomes around sustainability issues. However, it is difficult to design feedback that disambiguates between individual and group actions, and shows the temporal trajectory of activity.

Rock Band: a case study in the design of embodied interface experience

There has been a recent surge of novel interface devices available for home gaming systems. With the rise in popularity of games like Guitar Hero and consoles such as Nintendos Wii comes new opportunities for game design at the interface level. In this paper we propose three interrelated dimensions for the analysis of embodied and gestural game interface hardware devices. We demonstrate how gestural and embodied interactions can be understood as ludic, kinesthetic and narrative experiences. We ground this discussion in a close analysis of the interface affordances of the game Rock Band and demonstrate how these three dimensions allow us to understand more clearly the place of the interface in the design and the experience of games.

Improvisation and Performance as Models for Interacting with Stories

One common metaphor for Interactive Storytelling has been the notion of Interactive Dramas, in which players assume the first-person role of the main character in a digitally mediated narrative. In this paper we explore the model of improvisation as a means of understanding the relationship between the author/designer and the reader/player of such narratives. This model allows for a new formulation of the notion of agency, by shifting the concept of the reader from a player-centric model to a performer-centric model. We also show how we can conceive of interactions between performers and authors as being governed by the same rules that are in play between multiple performers in a piece of improvisational theatre. We connect this idea to a phenomenological theory of human computer interaction and cognition which foregrounds the role of communication and commitment between interactors.