Nassim JafariNaimi

Breakaway: an ambient display designed to change human behavior

We present Breakaway, an ambient display that encourages people, whose job requires them to sit for long periods of time, to take breaks more frequently. Breakaway uses the information from sensors placed on an office chair to communicate in a non-obtrusive manner how long the user has been sitting. Breakaway is a small sculpture placed on the desk. Its design is inspired by animation arts and theater, which rely heavily on body language to express emotions. Its shape and movement reflect the form of the human body; an upright position reflecting the bodys refreshed pose, and a slouching position reflecting the bodys pose after sitting for a long time. An initial evaluation shows a correlation between the movement of the sculpture and when participants took breaks, suggesting that ambient displays that make use of aesthetic and lifelike form might be promising for making positive changes in human behavior.

Values as Hypotheses: Design, Inquiry, and the Service of Values

Values: A Problem of Practice The question of the relationship of design and values has sparked much scholarship during the past 30 years. These investigations have led to the growing consensus that design is not a neutral activity; rather, it is value-laden: design is laden with, or bears, values. Despite substantial agreement that design is value-laden, significant variation arises in understanding how and why design bears values.1 Some scholars argue that artifacts act to determine what is possible and impossible in human engagements with the world—that is, products bear consequences that affect what we value in human life and living.2 Others note that products, broadly conceived, bear the conscious and unconscious intentions, values, and politics of the individuals and corporations that designed them.3 Some scholars propose that designed products bear the preferences and values of those who use them,4 while others view values as ideals, and design bears the burden of approximating an ideal.5 Others speak of products as embodying values, as valuebearing material expression.6 Others emphasize the capacity of designers and publics to give voice to values, to contest and argue for what should be valued; here, values are born and borne in argument.7 None of these positions offers a definitive, settled, or uncontested account of the relation of design and values. This scholarship, however, has led to calls for practitioners to explicitly address values in their everyday design practice. Values-oriented practitioners not only are faced with a variety of theoretical understandings; they also regularly encounter the empirical fact that a given value (e.g., autonomy) can be both valuable and not valuable in its participation in design products and practices. Batya Friedman provides a useful example that illustrates this problem. She describes a situation in which a new computer workstation, designed to support speech input and multimedia, includes a built-in, always-on microphone. When a user of this workstation wishes to have a conversation that is not recorded, she must go through multiple steps to turn off the microphone—a cumbersome solution. Out of this case, Friedman explores the concept of autonomy, she asks: 1 For a thorough scholarly explication of the history of ethics and design from a European perspective see, Anna Valtonen, “Back and Forth with Ethics in Product Development—A History of Ethical Responsibility as a Design Driver in Europe” (presentation, Conference of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM), CergyPontoise, France, October 13, 2006). 2 Bruno Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 225–58. 3 Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for the Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19–39. 4 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1st edition, Annette Lavers, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972); cf. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957). 5 Victor J. Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). 6 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects (Boston: August Media, 2001). 7 Carl DiSalvo, Adversarial Design (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012).

Collective Intelligence or Group Think?: Engaging Participation Patterns in World without Oil

This article presents an analysis of participation patterns in an Alternate Reality Game, World Without Oil. This game aims to bring people together in an online environment to reflect on how an oil crisis might affect their lives and communities as a way to both counter such a crisis and to build collective intelligence about responding to it. We present a series of participation profiles based on a quantitative analysis of 1554 contributions to the game narrative made by 322 players. We further qualitatively analyze a sample of these contributions. We outline the dominant themes, the majority of which engage the global oil crisis for its effects on commute options and present micro-sustainability solutions in response. We further draw on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of this space to discuss how the design of the game, specifically its framing of the problem, feedback mechanism, and absence of subject-matter expertise, counter its aim of generating collective intelligence, making it conducive to groupthink.

Our Bodies in the Trolley’s Path, or Why Self-driving Cars Must *Not* Be Programmed to Kill:

The discourse around self-driving cars has been dominated by an emphasis on their potential to reduce the number of accidents. At the same time, proponents acknowledge that self-driving cars would inevitably be involved in fatal accidents where moral algorithms would decide the fate of those involved. This is a necessary trade-off, proponents suggest, in order to reap the benefits of this new technology. In this article, I engage this argument, demonstrating how an undue optimism and enthusiasm about this technology is obscuring our ability to see what is at stake and explaining how moving beyond the dominant utilitarian framings around this technology opens up a space for both ethical inquiry and innovative design. I suggest that a genuine caring concern for the many lives lost in car accidents now and in the future—a concern that transcends false binary trade-offs and that recognizes the systemic biases and power structures that make certain groups more vulnerable than others—could serve as a starting point to rethink mobility, as it connects to the design of our cities, the well-being of our communities, and the future of our planet.

MRX: an interdisciplinary framework for mixed reality experience design and criticism

Abstract We explore design strategies for mixed reality (MR) in relation to Milgrams definition, which has been central to its development in the past 20 years. We argue for the need to rethink the technical focus of this definition in order to capture the experiential dimensions of MR and offer a humanistic framework for a growing class of experiences that we label MRx. We list three characteristics of MRx applications (esthetic, performative and social) and provide a context for the three subsequent articles in this special issue.

MRx as a participatory platform

Abstract Facilitating and supporting various modes of social interaction has been part of Mixed Reality (MRx)1 design experiments and discourse over the past twenty years. But what vision of social interaction is sought and advanced through Mixed Reality environments? In this paper, I identify two dominant ways that social interaction is envisioned in MRx designs, broadly construed as material and political, and illustrated through a series of examples. I further draw on them to highlight the potentials, boundaries, and limitations of each with regards to the kinds of social interactions that are sought and cultivated through the integration of digital media on physical space. I suggest that as MR becomes mainstream, it is important to go beyond these visions to consider whether and how MRx environments might connect with the economic, social, and cultural specificity of local sites to meaningfully serve the always evolving social needs and purposes of their communities.

Parental controls: reimagining technologies for parent-child interaction

This article questions existing approaches in designing parental controls and puts forward a hypothesis to reimagine technologies to mediate parent-child interactions. First, we present an overview of the current parental controls. Second, we explain the gradual shift away from the idea of ‘harmful’ digital media in parental mediation studies and introduce previous work in CSCW and HCI that has proposed solutions to support discussions about digital media between parents and children. Then, we hypothesize that an emphasis on collaboration and mutual learning might help researchers and designers to rethink and reimagine technologies that support parent-child interactions with and through digital media. Finally, we share our findings of two co-creation workshops with children and parents on ways to instill parental involvement in children’s digital media use. The workshop yielded insights on the differing views between parents and children about how technologies might instill long-term negotiations based on parents’ and children’s experiences, enriched by real-use data.

Meta-making: crafting the conversation of values and design

critical moment, when the academic practices of labeling and claiming risk fragmenting this multifaceted and generative conversation into separate intellectual silos. Prompted by what we consider to be a problematic cleaving in this area, the five co-authors of this article came together to explore our shared interests in the intersection of values and design. To spur our attempts at synergy and integration, we challenged ourselves to design and make something of our own—in this case, a workshop for the 2012 iConference in Toronto last February [1]. Early planning conversations for the workshop uncovered distinct positions on such foundational concepts as the nature of products, the place of values in design, the role of material objects, and the function of reflective discourse in design activities. We debated the connotations and relations among the terms values, design, critique, design that grasps values beyond those found in the traditional contexts of business and work, such as efficiency and optimization. In HCI, however, many of our design principles have not grown beyond the rational goals of production-oriented design. We feel it is time for our field to embrace a conversation that draws on a new, expanded canon of values—values such as equity or transparency or any number of others that often go unrecognized or are relegated to personal categories of taste and opinion. This conversation isn’t new. Design scholars have long written about the relationship of design and values. In our own field, we can credit a few foundational voices with establishing a discourse in this area over the past two decades. But however rich the scholarship on value-sensitive design, values at play, values in design, and critical making and similar initiatives is, we are at a Our relationship to technology continues to change, in no small part due to the insights of those involved in the design and critique of technological systems and devices. During the past few decades, we have moved beyond a functionalist understanding of the ways in which we engage with technology and embraced the idea that the humantechnology relationship is complex and nuanced. Rather than see technologies as external and separate from us, we now understand that we exist within socio-technical infrastructures. We inhabit technological ecosystems that allow us to shift from one device to another, move from one context to the next, and enact multiple identities. We are embedded within technologicallymediated groups, organizations, and cultures that generate their own norms, rituals, and practices. Understanding this complex reality requires an engagement with in te ra c ti o n s J u ly + A u g u s t 2 0 1 2

Play it seriously: fostering innovative engagement with sustainability

In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. --- Lisa Nathan and Samuel Mann, Editors

MRx design and criticism: the confluence of media studies, performance and social interaction

Abstract In this article, we bring together the lenses of media studies, performance studies and social interaction offered in the other essays in this special issue and discuss their collective contribution towards a more nuanced understanding of MRx. We illustrate this capacity by a brief critical review of a recent MRx environment: Mégaphone. We suggest how the lenses can also contribute to a design vocabulary for future MRx experiences.