Kirsten Boehner

How HCI interprets the probes

We trace how cultural probes have been adopted and adapted by the HCI community. The flexibility of probes has been central to their uptake, resulting in a proliferation of divergent uses and derivatives. The varying patterns of adaptation of the probes reveal important underlying issues in HCI, suggesting underacknowledged disagreements about valid interpretation and the relationship between methods and their underlying methodology. With this analysis, we aim to clarify discussions around probes, and, more importantly, around how we define and evaluate methods in HCI, especially those grounded in unfamiliar conceptions of how research should be done.

Affect: from information to interaction

While affective computing explicitly challenges the primacy of rationality in cognitivist accounts of human activity, at a deeper level it relies on and reproduces the same information-processing model of cognition. In affective computing, affect is often seen as another kind of information - discrete units or states internal to an individual that can be transmitted in a loss-free manner from people to computational systems and back. Drawing on cultural, social, and interactional critiques of cognition which have arisen in HCI, we introduce and explore an alternative model of emotion as interaction: dynamic, culturally mediated, and socially constructed and experienced. This model leads to new goals for the design and evaluation of affective systems - instead of sensing and transmitting emotion, systems should support human users in understanding, interpreting, and experiencing emotion in its full complexity and ambiguity.

The disenchantment of affect

In computing design, experience is often broken down, compartmentalized, and engineered: a process that often disenchants the original experience. In this paper, we demonstrate the possibility to design for experience, not by formalizing and rationalizing it, but instead by supporting open-ended engagement and appropriation. We illustrate this approach through Affector, a case study in affective computing, in which we focus on user interpretation and construction of emotional experience over its computational modeling. We derive design and evaluation strategies for enchantment that focus on supporting the ongoing construction and interpretation of experience by human participants over the course of interaction. We suggest that enchanting experiences may be designed only by approaching enchantment obliquely: not by engineering it in, but by providing opportunities where it may emerge.

Culturally embedded computing

In culturally embedded computing, we begin by examining how the technology is emblematic of its cultural context. Culturally embedded computing explicitly situates embedded computing in society, individual experience, culture, and history. Based on this new emphasis, five projects explore alternatives to traditional human-computer interaction design. Designing and building these new technologies requires more than simply building and understanding hardware and software. It also requires analyzing and incorporating the stories, meanings, and social networks that these devices engage.

Nourishing the ground for sustainable HCI: considerations from ecologically engaged art

Sustainable HCI is now a recognized area of human-computer interaction drawing from a variety of disciplinary approaches, including the arts. How might HCI researchers working on sustainability productively understand the discourses and practices of ecologically engaged art as a means of enriching their own activities? We argue that an understanding of both the history of ecologically engaged art, and the art-historical and critical discourses surrounding it, provide a fruitful entry-point into a more critically aware sustainable HCI. We illustrate this through a consideration of frameworks from the arts, looking specifically at how these frameworks act more as generative devices than prescriptive recipes. Taking artistic influences seriously will require a concomitant rethinking of sustainable HCI standpoints - a potentially useful exercise for HCI research in general.

Advancing ambiguity

Ambiguity is an important concept for HCI because of its pervasiveness in everyday life, yet its emergent nature challenges the role of design. We examine these difficulties with regards to Aoki and Woodruffs [1] proposal to use ambiguity as a resource for designing space for stories in personal communication systems. We challenge certain assumptions about ambiguity and propose a set of design and evaluation guidelines that flow from this re-conceptualization of ambiguity and design.

Evaluating experience-focused HCI

There is growing interest in experience-focused, rather than task-focused, HCI. Task-focused HCI has developed methods for creating and validating knowledge, but those methods may not be applicable or sufficient for experience-focused technology. In particular, new evaluation techniques to validate knowledge need to be created, discussed, and understood. I address this in three ways. First, it is important to understand the historical, technical and social factors that impact the evaluation criteria the community consider valid today. Second, I propose an ethnomethodological approach to evaluation that emphasizes the ways users use and make sense of technologies. And third, I demonstrate the validity of my approaches by means of several case studies.

Imprints of place: creative expressions of the museum experience

Personalization and social awareness, important aspects in the definition of a place, are traditionally overlooked in the design of technology for museums. We describe Imprints, a system to enhance the role of visitor participation beyond information receiver to active creator of sense of place. Overall response to the Imprints system is explored through interviews and log analysis of use. Despite some usability issues, response to the system was positive, and it was appropriated for both personalization and awareness of others. The results suggest an opportunity to introduce technology that plays with the dynamic between private expression and public presence in the traditional environment of the art museum.

Beyond just the facts: transforming the museum learning experience

We present Museum Detective, a handheld system designed for use by school children to encourage guided learning through paired discovery of one object in an art museum. Initial analysis showed that children were able to use the devices cooperatively and exhibited longer-term retention of information about the artifacts in the gallery. We propose that the design of the Museum Detective interface can be refined to further encourage students to actively transform their museum learning experience.

Networks of Sensors in Public Spaces: Combining Technology with Art

This paper presents ongoing work with a wireless sensor network application at the Herbert Johnson Art Museum. We discuss the design and deployment of networked motes for the purpose of collecting information about museum visitors including number, density and tempo of group movement within the space. We also address the use of the collected data for dynamic real-time artistically-rendered feedback to those interacting with the system. In particular, the paper focuses on practical aspects of secure communication protocol design, mote application programming, network setup, gateway and server considerations, data processing and output of the system designed to accomplish these tasks. A discussion of major privacy concerns for uses of sensor networks in public spaces, such as a museum space, is introduced and methods of user-privacy protection are discussed. Finally, the paper introduces possible future deployments and upgrades to the system as well as enhanced privacy protections for museum visitors.