Julian Dax

Work or leisure? Designing a user-centered approach for researching activity in the wild

Mobile devices have conquered nearly all parts of the daily life. These devices support their owners in specific situations, both at work and in leisure contexts, and therefore make it increasingly difficult to keep work and private life separated. Examining the practices around the use of mobile technology has become a topic of some interest as issues around “work–life balance” emerge. Although the field of HCI provides different approaches for capturing people’s activities in situ, we will show that an additional value can be obtained from a consideration of the “situated” view of contextuality, one which incorporates concerns of privacy and which identifies the reasons people might have for long-term user participation in this kind of study. Despite the undoubted sophistication of existing platforms, the issue of how to provide for dynamic adjustment to meet emerging research questions over time remains challenging. In this paper, we examine how one might approach the design of an observation environment that includes methods for understanding the way of how users reason about research, based upon the context they find themselves in. We have developed a research framework called “PartS,” which captures in situ information about the individual as well as his/her (work/personal) context and offers functionality for collaborative discussions about the information collected. Based on its evaluation, we outline six lessons that need to be considered when designing a study for capturing the subjective context and related activities from an individual user’s as well as a researcher’s perspective.

FRAMES – A Framework for Adaptable Mobile Event-Contingent Self-report Studies

With the emergence of smart, sensor-equipped mobile devices, the gathering and processing of data concerning the everyday lifestyles of the people using these devices has become a matter of course within the field of HCI. New standards in mobile technologies provide new opportunities for empirical studies, which allow researchers to explore people’s everyday lives unobtrusively. Furthermore, mobile, sensor-based approaches enhance empirical studies by automatically recognizing events of interest such as the arrival at specific locations. In this paper we describe how end-user development can be used to empower researchers without technical expertise to adjust their empirical studies to the individual dynamics of daily life. To do so, we implemented and evaluated the framework ‘FRAMES’ that allows researchers to flexibly specify and adopt mobile event-contingent self-report studies. The evaluation shows the potential of our framework for spontaneous customizations of the study without the need for redeployment or modification of the application.

A Practice-Oriented Paradigm for End-User Development

What is end-user development (EUD) and when does a user become an end-user developer? Since the concept of EUD encompasses methods as well as practices of appropriating technology, it is not easy to answer these questions and several researchers already dealt with these issues. Within our chapter we suggest to conceptually extend our understanding of both EUD and the end user (developer). We draw on experiences we gained from past research exploring EUD in practice. We reflect upon the concepts of “gentle slope of complexity,” “tailoring languages” and “appropriation” which we situate within the broader concept of “infrastructuring.” We claim that EUD is given whenever an end user starts modifying the permanent aspects of an application (soft- or hardware) and, thus, starts climbing the tailorability mountain – or in our words, the tailorability staircase – and switching to a higher level to perform a specific practice. In our newly developed terminology this very moment, called “point of infrastructure,” is characterized by a break-down in the current practices which leads an end user to becoming an end-user developer.

Making and Understanding

We present a vision for the IoT makerspace of the future. Currently, makers design their spaces with a focus on building (or making), but the core challenge they face in the IoT era is understanding. In our vision this is archived by gathering data about the IoT devices and their environment, storing that data in a central repository, consolidating it and making it easily accessible. We also describe the first steps we took towards this vision.