Rachel Clarke

Enabling empathy in health and care: design methods and challenges

The role of empathy has come to prominence in HCI as the community increasingly engages with issues in medical, health and emotionally charged contexts. In such settings empathizing with others is crucial in understanding the experience of living with specific conditions, or in being sensitive to the concerns and emotions of potentially vulnerable participants. Researchers in these areas become implicated in designing new tools and technologies that support empathic relations. This workshop therefore aims to build an interdisciplinary community of researchers, designers and practitioners to share and discuss their work and the challenges they encountered when establishing empathic relationships within health or care contexts. We will work towards developing a richer conceptual and practical understanding of empathic engagement and design methods in this context to support and shape an agenda for future research.

Sharing narrative and experience: digital stories and portraits at a women's centre

We present our work-in-progress designing technologies to foster social connection with isolated immigrant women in the UK. We report our preliminary studies using digital storytelling and digital portrait methods with participants at a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) centre supporting women who have experiences of domestic violence. While these methods have provided valuable insights, in contexts where participants feel vulnerable and cultural diversity is the norm, HCIs conventional assumptions about storytelling and probe use cannot be taken for granted. We describe our rationale for the adaptation of methods and tensions highlighted through the process.

Making the Invisible Visible: Design to Support the Documentation of Participatory Arts Experiences

We explore how digital technology might support the documentation of experiences of participatory arts engagement. During a fourteen session workshop series, we worked with artists, project managers, support workers and participants to explore the integration of digital media capture and presentation technologies into participatory arts workshops, and the implications that this would have for the experiences and practices of key stakeholders involved. We contribute insight into the social and practical challenges faced when using digital technology to create documentation of participatory arts. Our findings highlight the importance of situating documentation, sense making and re-telling of experiences in sensitive contexts such as participatory arts within the practices of skilled interpreters that are mindful of the complexities involved.

Socially engaged arts practice in HCI

Socially engaged methods are increasingly being used within HCI research, yet arts practice in this context has been little explored. HCI research that aligns with socially engaged arts practices encourages debate around societal challenges; for example discussion of issues surrounding the role of digital technology in sustainability, inclusion, community, identity and the politics of participation. Building on existing research, this workshop will bring together a diverse group of HCI researchers, artists and other creators whose work or interests align with socially engaged arts practice, to foster critical exploration and creative collaboration.

The beginnings, middles and endings of participatory research in HCI

An introduction to the special issue of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, which focuses on the perspectives on participation of the beginnings, middles and endings of participatory research in HCI, is presented. The HCI research community is increasingly engaging in participatory research that involves citizens, community members, multiple institutions, organizations and interested parties across the entire lifespan of projects. Participatory design projects also include the potential for integrating multiple voices and the challenge of aligning interested parties in design. The special issue includes discussions on reflexivity and reflection during the process of conducting participatory research in HCI.

Understanding the Experience-Centeredness of Privacy and Security Technologies

The joint study of computer security, privacy and human-computer interaction (HCI) over the last two decades has shaped a research agenda focused upon usable privacy & security. However, in HCI research more generally there has long been an awareness of the need to understand and design for user experience, in recognition of the complex and multi-faceted role that technology now plays in our lives. In this paper we add to the growing discussion by introducing the notion of experience-centered privacy and security. We argue that in order to engage users of technology around issues related to experiences of privacy and security, research methods are required that may be outside of the normal repertoire of methods that we typically call upon. We describe three projects that developed non-typical research methods to reveal experiential insights into user interactions with privacy and security-related technologies. We conclude by proposing a research agenda that begins to illustrate how the discourse and methods of experience-centered design might serve to provide valuable alternative perspectives on new and enduring user-facing privacy and security problems.

Invited SIG - participation and HCI: why involve people in design?

Participation is of high relevance to the CHI Design community. Participatory work has been performed with very different intentions: to democratize the design process; to better inform the design of new systems; to engage the public in the construction of their own futures; or simply to appease funding commitments. Whilst this increased attention has lead to a large amount of methodological innovation, very little effort has been spent reflecting on why various participatory approaches should, or should not be, used and how we can assess their impacts on the design process and products. This invited SIG will bring together invited experts who have explored participation to different degrees within their past work to provoke group and plenary audience discussion. The aim of this SIG is to provide an opportunity for discussion and reflection on how and why participative methods are used in HCI research and practice.

Evocative of experience: crafting cross-cultural digital narratives through stories and portraits

Storytelling has become a notable part of HCI research on experience, not only as a method of inquiry but also as a focus to design interaction. Much of this work takes for granted that spoken or written stories are an accessible way to engage users in reflecting on and recounting their experiences. This paper outlines exploratory workshops conducted to inquire into cross-cultural stories with vulnerable women. Taking a narrative inquiry approach we co-created digital stories and digital portraits with a group highlighting different perspectives of womens experiences over time. The approach underlined the importance of crafting and listening to stories as evocative, imaginative responses to rather than representative of experience. The paper is a report of a situated adaptation of experience-centred design methods for working sensitively with users on stories.

Bridging the gap: implementing interaction through multi-user design

We describe an interactive museum installation designed to extend visitor participation through personal reflection and contribution. The case study describes design approaches, which focused on multiple individual simultaneous use, which we describe as multi-user design. These approaches were deployed to support the visitor moving from viewer to contributor in a temporary museum exhibition. We present the anticipated use and early analysis of some of the data from actual use of the system. We outline our initial findings for the opportunities and limits in designing for personalised user-generated content through such approaches within museums and suggest areas of future work on qualities of participation and visitor contribution.

Situated Encounters with Socially Engaged Art in Community-based Design

With the increased relevance of digital technologies in civil life comes the challenge of how to design research for citizen engagement. Drawing from three reflexive case studies presenting socially engaged arts (SEA) projects, we describe how, as artists, collaborators and researchers, we engaged in socially inclusive community-based projects. We argue that our roles required us to be both flexible and to adopt critical openness in practices of collaborative social facilitation. We conclude with insights to inform community-based research and enable nurturing and inclusive engagement in research design for the exploration of near-future digital technologies.