Miriam Mara

Capturing social value in UX projects

In this experience report, authors detail how qualitative User Experience (UX) research aligned the interests of UX researchers with the interests of the communities being investigated to increase participant engagement. Because UX research is designed to maximize insights into user motivation, part of UX ethical concerns should include how insights get integrated into the communities where the technology is deployed. This report discusses successes and challenges of drawing conclusions from qualitative research in an annual art event. In the Fargo-Moorhead Art Marathon, content creators collected user data, collaboratively strategized with participants, and refined a three-year-old event that has grown from a loose assortment of performances into a ten-day multi-mediated art event created for alternative art engagement. The authors, who conducted initial research to create a phone app to track the participant progress, report on how event data during was evaluated and folded into the next iteration.

Mundane Doubles: Anorexia in Stories by Anne Enright and Colum McCann

Two contemporary Irish short stories, “Sisters” by Colum McCann and “Little Sister” by Anne Enright, describe the progression of anorexia nervosa on central characters who meet gruesome endings. Both authors create sister protagonist characters as narrators of their siblings’ disordered eating. In each story, the doubling of an anorexic sister with a healthy sister as protagonist allows the author to portray women in “horizontal” relationships with other women, rather than with men or with parents and offspring. In creating such doubled relationships, Enrigh and McCann also reveal a narrative strategy for dealing with characters who suffer silently. The textual supplement of a doubled character gives voice to women whose autonomous choices to refuse food and to die—without reproducing—disrupts the narratives of continuity that are traditionally ascribed to women in Irish short fiction. In these stories, the surviving double bears the weight of explaining and contextualizing a choice neither to create the next Irish generation, nor to sustain their own bodies for any socially acceptable alternate role that might transmit Irish culture into the future. In both short stories, and in research and policy documents about anorexia in Ireland, eating disorders (and anorexia nervosa, specifically) are constructed as mental and physical disorders that place victims at significant risk. In a sense, this article undertakes another sort of doubling, analogous to the joiningtogether of disparate siblings in these fictions; it attempts to establish links between the textured, personal stories of McCann and Enright and the dispassionate observations of social scientists and clinicians. Working with medical and policy documents in tandem with literary texts creates a thick cultural seam of

Just this Once: urban Ireland in film

By focusing on the city of Dublin as both setting and character, Once, written and directed by Dublin native John Carney, portrays urban Ireland in the global context. Using a series of replacements – replacing population loss with in-migration, and replacing parochial ideals with multicultural ones – the film re-places Dublin, both representing the city it has become and providing space for continuing growth and change. For Dublin, as elsewhere, change enters as global flows of information and people become part of the city. Rather than conforming to the traditional global power of American culture, Bord Scannán na hÉireann (Irish Film Board) is striking its own global poses, producing and distributing films that construct an urban Irishness for international audiences. In my article, I examine how this award-winning Irish film constructs Irish urban identity in the face of globalisms cultural flattening.