Nadine Jarvis

The prayer companion: openness and specificity, materiality and spirituality

In this paper we describe the Prayer Companion, a device we developed as a resource for the spiritual activity of a group of cloistered nuns. The device displays a stream of information sourced from RSS news feeds and social networking sites to suggest possible topics for prayers. The nuns have engaged with the device enthusiastically over the first ten months of an ongoing deployment, and, notwithstanding some initial irritation with the balance of content, report that it plays a significant and continuing role in their prayer life. We discuss how we balanced specificity in the design with a degree of openness for interpretation to create a resource that the nuns could both understand and appropriate, describe the importance of materiality to the devices successful adoption, consider its implications as a design for older people, and reflect on the example it provides of how computation may serve spirituality.

Attention to detail: annotations of a design process

This paper takes the form of a photo essay that exposes the design process at a level of detail seldom found in traditional academic publications. With this format we document the development of a set of devices for exploring the microclimate of the home, with the intention of advancing current approaches to communicating (and understanding) practice-based research.

Power to the people: dynamic energy management through communal cooperation

In this paper we propose that design and HCI research address domestic energy management as a matter of timeliness, and organised on a community scale. We argue that instead of focusing on the financial benefits of energy saving, technologies can be used to connect users in systems that promote better understandings of the impact of their behaviours. We review current policy and practice and outline design proposals for systems that bring people together to work as a team to reduce the strain on national energy generating infrastructure. We argue that by exposing some of the complexity of power generation people can make more informed energy consuming choices.