Stephen Forshaw

Tiree Energy Pulse: Exploring Renewable Energy Forecasts on the Edge of the Grid

In many parts of the world, the electricity supply industry makes the task of dealing with unpredictable spikes and dips in production and demand invisible to consumers, maintaining a seemingly unlimited supply. A future increase in reliance on time-variable renewable sources of electricity may lead to greater fluctuations in supply. We engaged remote islanders as equal partners in a research project that investigated through technology-mediated enquiry the topic of synchronising energy consumption with supply, and together built a prototype renewable energy forecast display. A number of participants described a change in their practices, saving high energy tasks for times when local renewable energy was expected to be available, despite having no financial incentive to do so. The main contributions of this paper are in: 1) the results of co-development sessions exploring systems supporting synchronising consumption with supply and 2) the findings arising from the deployment of the prototype.

Software engineering for 'social good': integrating action research, participatory design, and agile development

Software engineering for ‘social good’ is an area receiving growing interest in recent years. Software is increasingly seen as a way to promote positive social change: this includes initiatives such as Code for America and events such as hackathons, which strive to build innovative software solutions with a social conscience. From a software engineering perspective, existing software processes do not always match the needs of these social software projects, which are primarily aimed at social change and often involve vulnerable communities. In this paper, we argue for new software processes that combine elements of agile, iterative development with principles drawn from action research and participatory design. The former allow social software projects to be built quickly with limited resources; the latter allow for a proper understanding of the social context and vulnerable user groups. The paper describes Speedplay, a software development management framework integrating these approaches, and illustrates its use in a real social innovation case study.

On the edge of supply: Designing renewable energy supply into everyday life

With peak oil behind us, nuclear generation capacity dwindling, and increasingly daunting looking carbon emissions targets, we are moving to a world where we must consider transitioning to renewable energy sources. Renewables are time varying and their inherent unpredictability must challenge our everyday assumptions around energy availability—leading, we believe, to an emphasis on ‘supply’ rather than ‘demand’. Using a range of methods including action research, participatory design and technology mediated enquiry, we report on our work in partnership with the community of Tiree as an exemplar of this future. Tiree is the outermost of the Scottish Inner Hebrides— a remote island on the edge of the national electricity grid with a precarious grip on energy—here we uncover the role of renewables and the resilience of a community in moving away from traditional energy provision. We offer opportunities for designing ICT to support supply driven practices in this context, and a simple framework for exploiting under and over supply.

Seeding the Design Process for Future Problems

Designing with the community brings about a number of benefits, including tacit and contextual knowledge about the problem domain; this is especially apparent in rural settings. However, designing for problems that have yet to embed themselves in the fabric of society i.e. future problems poses a number of challenges, as they typically present intangible scenarios and concepts that have yet to be experienced by the wider-community. Using the OnSupply project as a case study, we share our experience in working with the Tiree community to address a future problem through a technology-mediated enquiry. Furthermore, we present a novel process that uses creative workshops augmented with physical artefacts to inform and learn from the community about a problem space, and to seed the design of a system that addresses it.

Stimulating a dialogue on renewable energy through making

We are exploring attitudes to renewable energy supply with the remote island community of Tiree. As part of this engagement, we are working with local children to introduce the topic of the energy generation potential of renewables (i.e. from wind and solar power). In this paper, we report on our early attempts to broker this engagement using a physical, co-constructed artefact (the PREP energy detector). Through making and co-construction, our goal was to encourage an ownership in the artefact, and thus foster enthusiasm for exploring energy potential. Observations from a recent workshop based on PREP suggest a high level of engagement and enthusiasm was engendered, which we believe was facilitated through co-construction of the artefact.

Computing and mental health: intentionality and reflection at the click of a button

Automated passive sensing applications and self-reported smart diaries seem to hold promise for the management of anxiety in autism and other mental health conditions. However, passive sensing often struggles with noisy data, ambiguous feedback and weak user agency over the device, whilst self-reporting relies on user-entered data which can be time consuming and cognitively demanding. To address these limitations, we explore a different approach, whereby individuals consciously actuate personal data capture and are in control of it at all times; yet, the interaction solely involves clicking a button, thus avoiding cognitive overload whilst supporting immediate reflection. We call this approach intentive computing. Through our initial investigations we found that conscious interactions cannot only provide real-time relief in anxiety management, but can also function as memory anchors irrespective of the content captured and even prior to data visualization.

Tunneling Through Alternative Facts: The Qwand Problem Space Machine

The Post-Truth Age is characterized by an information multiverse where truths are multiple and simultaneously manifest. Post-truth appeals to emotions and personal beliefs, and is often based on alternative facts. Truth, instead, sits at the center of scientific endeavor, which is based on observable and measurable evidence. Design is less concerned with truth than science and it is at ease with deception, misdirection and magic as it is with facts. In other words, design tunnels through science and belief. This paper reports on the design of the Qwand, a Quantum Wand, that invokes the parallel exploration of all the possible truths of a given problem space.