Tara Capel

Exploring Motivations of Young Adults to Participate in Physical Activities

This paper investigates the motivations of young adults aged 18 to 24 years to participate in physical activities and how technology might best support this motivation. Motivational factors were studied through contextual interviews, an adapted cultural probe activity and a survey with a group of young adults currently active in sports. From our preliminary findings we determine that staying healthy, achieving specific goals and socialising represent key motivational factors for young adults to be active in sports, but also, that exercise is not considered a high priority in their daily lives. A link between the motivation of achieving specific goals and a technology to measure and track activities was established. The study concludes with three implications for the design of technology to motivate young adults to participate in sports.

Design participation lab

How would you describe your lab to visitors? At the Design Participation Lab, our projects have a humanitarian or environmental focus. We work with Indigenous communities, older people, children with autism, and people with intellectual disabilities, seeking to understand how they appropriate technologies and how we might co-design desirable technologies. We value pluralism, seeking to make technologies that reflect the rich diversity and idiosyncrasies of people and the ways in which they wish to interact. Recently we have extended our work to exploring interaction between people and nature. Working with ecologists, eco-acoustics researchers, communities, and government organizations, we aim toward new kinds of socio-enviro-technical systems that make it easier, more interesting, and more fun to monitor and understand species.

Women in Crisis Situations: Empowering and Supporting Women Through ICTs

Women are more likely to experience poverty than their male counterparts, through negative life events that can potentially place women in a crisis situation. Past studies highlight that there is a need for a better understanding of the tools that could both support and empower women in crisis situations. We respond to this with a study that illustrates how we may be able to generate ideas for designing technologies that are both empowering and supportive. In collaboration with a non-profit community care center in Australia, we undertook a qualitative study of thirteen women in crisis situations to better understand the issues they faced. We took an in-situ approach, where we provided video and disposable cameras to these participants letting them record their experiences. Through an analysis of their videos and photos followed by semi-structured interviews, we show that while each participant had different life experiences that initially appear unrelated, there are three common challenges they face. These are: their living conditions, social isolation and stigma. As our findings are from an exclusively female perspective, through this research we contribute to the HCI literature on understanding the specific issues faced by women in crisis situations and aim to inform designs for technology that can support and empower women in challenging circumstances.

Understanding the Use of a Bug Tracking System in a Global Software Development Setup

Bug fixing is a highly cooperative work activity where developers, testers, product managers and other stakeholders collaborate using a bug tracking system. In the context of Global Software Development (GSD), where software development is distributed across different geographical locations, we focus on understanding the role of bug trackers in supporting software bug fixing activities. We carried out a small-scale ethnographic fieldwork in a software product team distributed between Finland and India at a multinational engineering company. Using semi-structured interviews and in-situ observations of 16 bug cases, we show that the bug tracker 1) supported information needs of different stake holder, 2) established common-ground, and 3) reinforced issues related to ownership, performance and power. Consequently, we provide implications for design around these findings.