William Simm

VoiceYourView: collecting real-time feedback on the design of public spaces

This paper reports on VoiceYourView, a kind of intelligent kiosk, which uses speech recognition and natural language processing to gather the publics creative input on the public space designs. Over a six week period, VoiceYourView was deployed in a public space and 2000 design critiques were collected from 600 people. The paper shows that people are capable of providing creative input on their environment using unstructured speech or text and that a good proportion of these comments are actionable. The paper also investigates the use of public displays to auto-summarize comments left by the public so far. Although there is anecdotal evidence that this encourages participation, an experiment found that filtering comments (e.g., to display only positive responses) had no effect on what people had to say.

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.

Classification of Short Text Comments by Sentiment and Actionability for VoiceYourView

Much has been documented in the literature on sentiment analysis and document summarisation. Much of this applies to long structured text in the form of documents and blog posts. With a shift in social media towards short commentary (see Facebook status updates and twitter tweets), the difference in comment structure may affect the accuracy of sentiment analysis techniques. From our VoiceYourView trial, we collected over 2000 individual short comments on the topic of library refurbishment, many of which are transcribed spoken comments. We have shown success in determining the theme of comments by looking for the first noun and using a semantic tag set to categorise this noun and hence the comment for short comments. Sentiment is a measure of how positive or negative a comment is, and the actionability metric is a measure of how actionable the comment is, i.e. how useful it is. This paper looks towards applying methods from the literature to our dataset with the aim of evaluating methods of automatic sentiment and actionability analysis for our VoiceyourView application data and has relevance to data from other applications, e.g. those from the social media. With many social media commentary applications moving to add speech platforms, VoiceYourView data may be representative of the type of free-form spoken text input to be expected in such platforms.

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.

Prototyping 'clasp': implications for designing digital technology for and with adults with autism

This paper presents Clasp, a novel tactile anxiety management, communication and peer support tool developed with, by and for adults diagnosed with High Functioning Autism (HFA). Clasp connects a tactile anxiety coping device to a smartphone, which records and communicates anxiety levels for self-feedback and reflection. By adopting an iterative prototyping approach, we gained a deep insight into anxiety experienced by adults with HFA and evaluated the role of digital technology in its management. The paper describes our development approach, which we argue is unique to this multidisciplinary and multiorganizational design context involving hard-to-reach and vulnerable groups. Finally, we reflect on lessons learned from this process and share a set of design implications for the future development of digital tools that, like Clasp, are specifically designed with, by and for adults with HFA.

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.

On the role of the user in monitoring the environment in self-adaptive systems: a position paper

Self-adaptive systems (SASs) have the ability to reconfigure their behavior to respond to changing external conditions. A key element of a SAS, therefore, is how to monitor the environment so that appropriate adaptations can be triggered. In complex systems, monitoring the environment in its entirety is either impossible or too expensive. As a result, some adaptations are not possible because there is no monitor in place to trigger them. This paper discusses the role of human input, given as speech or text, as a way to provide environmental information to a SAS. The idea is that, given the limitations of monitoring the environment in full, human commentary can potentially be used to build up a more complete picture of the operating context of a SAS. The paper describes existing technology that could be used to realize this idea and describes a number of scenarios where the idea could be useful.

Mobile Age: Open Data Mobile Apps to Support Independent Living

We present design insights for developing mobile services for senior citizens which have emerged through substantive engagement with end users and other stakeholders. We describe the aims of the Mobile Age project, and the ideas and rationale for applications that have emerged through a co-creation process. A trusted data platform is proposed along with apps that bring open data and mobile technology to work for an underserved population.