We report on the outcomes of a hackathon organised around the themes of absurd musical interfaces, questionable sonic interactions and unworkable music designs. At the core of the project is the intention to explore absurd making as a way to support critical and disruptive design practices. We reflect on how surreal, nonsensical and fragile artefacts can be helpful to stretch and critique conventional ideas of what is useful and appropriate in technology research and development. After introducing both concepts and methods that shaped the event we present a selection of useless interfaces designed by the hackathon's attendees. These musical artefacts, and the considerations around them, are then discussed as a viable means for communicating both design concerns and future visions. We also consider two features identified as playing a crucial role within the event: the discovery of contradictions and the importance of context-based ingredients.

We expand the critical scope of HCI by discussing features of Magical Realism, a body of literature with roots in Latin America but now global in scope. Through the discussion of our failures to treat the canon of Magical Realism as a resource for designing an augmented reality app for children we expand to consider how the world view of Magical Realist literature presents challenges for design and new critical perspectives particularly around temporality, techno-politics, and reality and presence. We conclude by asking what a truly Magical Realist design practice that resists moves to treat literature as a resource to be used preferring instead to approach is as a context of engagement.

Empirical sociological and critical-reflective accounts of technology in action show how the design, development and use of interactive systems involves complex, changing configurations between participants, materials and the objects of design. Such observations make many rationalistic and normative accounts of design highly problematic (e.g. that design is essentially problem solving). Our work goes beyond such critical points and investigates practical strategies for managing complex projects that do justice to the entangled character of practice whilst enabling a high level of creative productivity. We report on a long-term collaboration between micro-businesses, artists, researchers, their institutions and their publics to create media, installations, performances, and participatory workshops. We document the range of design work that we were able to achieve and discuss a number of the challenges we encountered. We conclude by critically discussing several orientations to design research against our emerging image of design as "many makings".

This paper reports the results of a field trial of 130 bespoke devices as well as our methodological approach to the undertaking. Datacatchers are custom-built, location-aware devices that stream messages about the area they are in. Derived from a large number of 'big data' sources, the messages simultaneously draw attention to the socio-political topology of the lived environment and to the nature of big data itself. We used a service design consultancy to deploy the devices, and two teams of documentary filmmakers to capture participants' experiences. Here we discuss the development of this approach and how people responded to the Datacatchers as products, as revealing sociopolitical issues, and as purveyors of big data that might be open to question.

This paper describes three interactive artefacts created for a children's exhibition intended to encourage creativity and allow educational opportunities to emerge naturally through playful exploration. We describe five sensibilities that were used to inform our designs: considering artefacts as resources and scaffolds for imaginative engagement, rewarding extended investment, facilitating requisite unpredictability, encouraging an imaginative orientation to participation, and permitting multiple loci for interaction. Based on observation of how our interactives were used by the public, we discuss how our approach facilitated "open interactions" in a manner that was sensitive to the museum context, favoured a mix of materialities, and manifested a subtle mix of participation and designer autonomy.

This paper explores a design-led approach to digital fabrication which situates it in participatory data translation activities to demonstrate that this technology can find application beyond its use as tool for manufacture. We present two contrasting design contexts in which, respectively, data from conference twitter conversations and craft practitioners' movements are translated into interactively generated and fabricated physical artefacts. We argue that direct involvement in such digital fabrication activities can help people invest meaning into artefacts and facilitate social interaction and reflection upon their activities, while encouraging practitioners to incorporate new forms into their own work. On this basis, we reconsider digital fabrication within data translation activities as situated along an extended 'trajectory of use' in which reflective, meaningful 'data-things' can be created.

Much of the knowing employed in skilled craft practice is difficult to communicate solely through written or verbal description. Consequently, the reflection and development of a craft practice in this manner may miss important nuances of practitioners' skills and experiences. We created digital technologies to sonify (using audio to perceptualize data) a group of craft practitioners' gestures to explore how we can aid their reflection in and on their craft, and consequently develop it. Over a number of workshops, the design of these sonifications were iterated based on how the practitioners responded to them. We found that direct sonification of gesture (sounds generated directly from motion sensor data) helped practitioners understand and reflect upon their own and each other's practice, encouraged discussion and enabled modification of craft technique.

There is longstanding interest in developing systems to support musical performances networked across multiple potentially geographically dispersed participants. Much past research has addressed technical problems such as latency to create simulacra of co-present performance settings. In contrast, we draw on the literature on digitally mediated performance in HCI to get a richer context for understanding networked live musical events. We describe a system, MESHWORKS, which permits the definition of varied participation roles and unusual network topologies, and explore its use to realize ArCCADE -- a project to create events that support multiple overlapping musical ensembles and invite curiosity-driven exploration by the audience. Our experience with the system, the events and the interfaces we built to support engagement are discussed. In particular, we document how a musical community has emerged around our research and discuss wider implications for how we conceive the cultural meshwork new performance technologies are implicated in.

We present the findings of an empirical design study exploring how situating digital fabrication within a souvenir-making activity can enrich an audience's encounter with cultural events and engage visitors in discussion and reflection upon their experiences. During an incremental accumulative design process, in collaboration with an arts organisation, we developed a series of fabrication activities that offered visitors the opportunity to create their own personalised souvenirs based on their experience of a cultural event. By analyzing visitors' trajectories of engagement with the event we explore three key findings: activity embedded digital fabrication engages new audiences, encourages conversation and reflection, and presents organisations with new and more playful ways to gain insights into audience experiences.

In this paper we present insights from an empirical analysis of data from an emergent social movement primarily located on a Facebook page to contribute understanding of the conduct of everyday politics in social media and through this open up research agendas for HCI. The analysis focuses on how interactions and contributions facilitated the emergence of a collective with political will. We lay out an exploration of the intrinsic relationship between cultural memories, cultural expression and everyday politics and show how diverging voices co-constructed dynamic collectives capable of political action. We look at how interactions through the Facebook page challenge traditional ways for conceiving politics and the political. We outline possible research agendas in the field of everyday politics, which are sensitive to the everyday acts of resistance enclosed in the ordinary.

In this project, we investigated how a ludic approach might open new possibilities for environmental HCI by designing three related devices that encourage environmental awareness while eschewing utilitarian or persuasive agendas. In addition, we extended our methodological approach by batch-producing multiple copies of each device and deploying them to 20 households for several months, gathering a range of accounts about how people engaged and used them. The devices, collectively called the 'Indoor Weather Stations', reveal the home's microclimate by highlighting small gusts of wind, the colour of ambient light, and temperature differentials within the home. We found that participants initially tended to relate to the devices in line with two 'orienting narratives' of environmental tools or ludic designs, finding the devices disappointing from either perspective. Most of our participants showed lingering affection for the devices, however, for a variety of reasons. We discuss the implications of this 'sporadic interaction', and the more general lessons from the project, both for environmental HCI and ludic design.

This paper examines Research Through Design as an orientation to so-called 'Third Wave' Human Computer Interaction (HCI). A number of recent critical reflections are reviewed and the 'disciplinary anxieties', which this approach to HCI has aroused, are discussed. Drawing on Feyerabend's philosophical scepticism over methods and contributions to the Sociology of Science, it is suggested that design research might build its own 'limited rationality' rather than be brought in line with supposed norms for good research or criteria for rigour and relevance of unfamiliar provenance. To this end, a concept of 'annotated portfolio' is advanced, and detailed, as a means for capturing the family resemblances that exist in a collection of artefacts, simultaneously respecting the particularity of specific designs and engaging with broader concerns. The concept is demonstrated through annotating nine well-known pieces created by the Goldsmiths Interaction Research Studio. Treating this collection as an annotated portfolio highlights, formulates and collates interaction design issues in this work in a novel manner. On this basis, annotated portfolios are proposed as a viable means for communicating design thinking in HCI in a descriptive yet generative and inspirational fashion, without having recourse to standards of 'theory' which fit design practice uncomfortably.

The Photostroller is a device designed for use by residents of a care home for older people. It shows a continuous slideshow of photographs retrieved from the Flickr™ image website using a set of six predefined categories modified by a tuneable degree of 'semantic drift'. In this paper, we describe the design process that led to the Photostroller, and summarise observations made during a deployment in the care home that has lasted over two months at the time of writing. We suggest that the Photostroller balances constraint with openness, and control with drift, to provide an effective resource for the ludic engagement of a diverse group of older people with each other and the world outside their home.

The "older old" (people over eighty) are a largely invisible group for those not directly involved in their lives; this project explores the ways that technology might strengthen links between different generations. This paper describes findings from a two-year study of a residential care home and develops the notion of cross-generational engagement through ludic systems which encourage curiosity and playfulness. It outlines innovative ways of engaging the older old through "digital curios" such as Bloom, the Tenori On and Google Earth. The use of these curios was supplemented with portraiture by three local artists, nine school children and the field researcher. The paper describes four technological interventions: "video window", "projected portraiture", "blank canvas", and "soundscape radio". These interventions attempt to reposition "off the shelf technologies to provide a space for cross-generational engagement The notion of inter-passivity (the obverse of interaction) is explored in relation to each intervention.

In this paper we describe the Prayer Companion, a device we developed as a resource for the spiritual activity of a group of cloistered nuns. The device displays a stream of information sourced from RSS news feeds and social networking sites to suggest possible topics for prayers. The nuns have engaged with the device enthusiastically over the first ten months of an ongoing deployment, and, notwithstanding some initial irritation with the balance of content, report that it plays a significant and continuing role in their prayer life. We discuss how we balanced specificity in the design with a degree of openness for interpretation to create a resource that the nuns could both understand and appropriate, describe the importance of materiality to the device's successful adoption, consider its implications as a design for older people, and reflect on the example it provides of how computation may serve spirituality.

In this paper, we describe the failure of a novel sensor-based system intended to evoke user interpretation and appropriation in domestic settings. We contrast participants' interactions in this case study with those observed during more successful deployments to identify 'symptoms of failure' under four themes: engagement, reference, accommodation, and surprise and insight. These themes provide a set of sensitivities or orientations that may complement traditional task-based approaches to evaluation as well as the more open-ended ones we describe here. Our system showed symptoms of failure under each of these themes. We examine the reasons for this at three levels: problems particular to the specific design hypothesis; problems relevant for input-output mapping more generally; and problems in the design process we used. We conclude by noting that, although interpretive systems such as the one we describe here may succeed in a myriad of different ways, it is reassuring to know that they can also fail, and fail incontrovertibly, yet instructively.

Threshold devices present information gathered from the home's surroundings to give new views on the domestic situation. We built two prototypes of different threshold devices and studied them in field trials with participant households. The Local Barometer displays online text and images related to the home's locality depending on the local wind conditions to give an impression of the sociocultural surroundings. The Plane Tracker tracks aircraft passing overhead and imagines their flights onscreen to resource an understanding of the home's global links. Our studies indicated that the experiences they provided were compelling, that participants could and did interpret the devices in various ways, that their form designs were appropriate for domestic environments, that using ready-made information contributed to the richness of the experiences, and that situating the information they provided with respect to the home and its locality was important for the ways people engaged with them.

Domestic ubiquitous computing systems often rely on inferences about activities in the home, but the open-ended, dynamic and heterogeneous nature of the home poses serious problems for such systems. In this paper, we propose that by shifting the responsibility for interpretation from the system to the user, we can build systems that interact with people at humanly meaningful levels, preserve privacy, and encourage engagement with suggested topics. We describe a system that embodies this hypothesis, using sensors and inferencing software to assess 'domestic wellbeing' and presenting the results to inhabitants through an output chosen for its ambiguity. In a three-month field study of the system, customised for a particular volunteer household, users engaged extensively with the system, discussing and challenging its outputs and responding to the particular topics it raised.

This article describes field trials of 3 electronic furniture prototypes designed to encourage ludic engagement in the home. The Drift Table shows slowly scrolling aerial photography controlled by the weight of the objects on its surface. The History Tablecloth creates slowly growing “halos” around things left on it. The Key Table measures the force with which people put things on it and tilts a picture frame to indicate their mood. The pieces were loaned to different households for periods of 1 to 3 months. Because they were designed for user appropriation, a hypothesis-testing paradigm is inappropriate for evaluating their success. The focus instead was on gathering rich, multilayered accounts of people's experience through ethnographic observations and documentary videos. The results helped assess the particular designs, draw lessons for ludic design more generally, and reflect on field methods for evaluating open-ended designs.

The History Tablecloth is a flexible substrate screen-printed with electroluminescent material forming a grid of lace-like elements. When objects are left on the table, cells beneath them light to form a halo that grows over a period of hours, highlighting the flow of objects in the home. The Tablecloth explores an approach to design that emphasises engaging, open-ended situations over defined utilitarian purposes. Long-term deployment of the History Tablecloth in a volunteer household revealed complex ways that people experienced and interacted with the Tablecloth. Beyond evoking reflection on the flow of objects over a particular table, the Tablecloth served as a ground for interpretative reflection about technology, an asset for social interaction, and an aesthetic object. Even behaviours we saw as system errors were interpreted by the users as interactively rich. Their experience highlights the subtlety of domestic ubiquitous computing, illustrating alternatives to traditional views of technology's domestic role.

The needs of blind and visually impaired users are seriously under-investigated in CSCW. We review work on assistive interfaces especially concerning how collaboration between sighted and blind users across different modalities might be supported. To examine commonly expressed design principles, we present a study where blind and sighted persons play a game to which the former has an auditory interface, the latter a visual one. Interaction analyses are presented highlighting features of interface design, talk and gesture which are important to the participants' abilities to collaborate. Informed by these analyses, we reconsider design principles for cooperative interfaces for the blind.

We present four contrasting interfaces to allow multiple viewers to explore 3D recordings of dramas in on-line virtual worlds. The first is an on-line promenade performance to an audience of avatars. The second is a form of immersive cinema, with multiple simultaneous viewpoints. The third is a tabletop projection surface that allows viewers to select detailed views from a bird's-eye overview. The fourth is a linear television broadcast created by a director or editor. A comparison of these examples shows how a viewing audience can exploit four general resources - interactivity, influence, space, and time - to make sense of complex, non-linear virtual drama. These resources provide interaction designers with a general framework for defining the relationship between the audience and the 3D content.

We present a field study of an organisation which designs and constructs precision mechatronic devices, which typically integrate electronics, mechanical assemblies, computer hardware and software. We study how organisation members seek out answers to questions and solutions to problems as they arise in their work. We examine how project documentation is used, how chance encounters are capitalised upon, how advice is sought, the role of meetings, training and competence-enhancing activities, and the use of the organisation’s information systems. We develop an account of ‘finding things out’ as an orderly and practically situated organisational affair, and compare this with recent studies in CSCW of ‘expertise location’. The paper closes with an examination of potential technology development programs to support people in finding things out in organisations while suggesting the re-specification of research on ‘organisational memory’, ‘knowledge managem ent’ and allied notions in CSCW. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This paper presents analyses of calls to a bank's telephone call centre documenting the way calls are opened, closed, and how financial services are actioned. Throughout, how the social interaction between caller and operator is interleaved with the human-computer interaction between operator and the bank's accounts database is attended to. We show participants varying in their orientation to each other and to providing and receiving database information, and how these matters are influenced by the recent introduction of more active, intelligent technology. Implications for design of interactive technology in such settings and for the study of organisations in CSCW are offered.

Inhabited Television" combines multiuser virtual environments with television, so that online audience-members can participate in TV shows staged in a virtual world.It is presented simultaneously both to conventional passive viewers and to online participants.In many cases it benefits from being broadcast live.This paper is based on our fourth major experiment with Inhabited TV, a live virtual game show called "Out Of This World".For this event we adopted non-automated approaches to camera control and mixing to allow an exploration of appropriate forms of presentation for inhabited television.We describe the techniques which were used to create and enhance the live video output which was produced during the show: appropriate world design; dynamic constraints on participant movements; and a performance-oriented virtual camera control interface.This camera control interface includes explicit support for a range of spatial and temporal control styles.We also give evaluative feedback on the camera control interface and the event's (television-based) approach to mixing and directing, drawing on a social scientific field study conducted on-site during the preparation for, and performances of, the show.

Requirements engineering (RE) is an inherently social process, involving the contribution of individuals working in an organizational context. Further, failures in the RE process will potentially lead to systematic failures in the products that are produced as a result. Consequently, the RE process for dependable systems development should itself be considered as a dependable process, and therefore subject to greater scrutiny for vulnerabilities to error. Research on human error has typically focused on the work of individual actors from a cognitive perspective. This paper presents a survey which broadens the view on what contributes to human error by also examining work from the social and organizational literature. This review was conducted to inform efforts to improve the systems development process for dependable systems, and in particular their requirements engineering process

Article Talk and embodiment in collaborative virtual environments Share on Authors: John Bowers Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K. Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K.View Profile , James Pycock Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K. Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K.View Profile , Jon O'Brien Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, U.K. Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, U.K.View Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '96: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 1996 Pages 58–65https://doi.org/10.1145/238386.238404Online:13 April 1996Publication History 88citation1,748DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations88Total Downloads1,748Last 12 Months108Last 6 weeks9 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Article Free Access Share on Practically accomplishing immersion: cooperation in and for virtual environments Authors: John Bowers Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K. Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K.View Profile , Jon O'Brien Department of Sociology Lancaster University, U.K. Department of Sociology Lancaster University, U.K.View Profile , James Pycock Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K. Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K.View Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1996 Pages 380–389https://doi.org/10.1145/240080.240349Published:16 November 1996Publication History 50citation877DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations50Total Downloads877Last 12 Months48Last 6 weeks5 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Article Free Access Share on Getting others to get it right: an ethnography of design work in the fashion industry Authors: James Pycock Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K. Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K.View Profile , John Bowers Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K. Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K.View Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1996 Pages 219–228https://doi.org/10.1145/240080.240257Published:16 November 1996Publication History 21citation1,711DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations21Total Downloads1,711Last 12 Months96Last 6 weeks11 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Urban planners have developed many theories of how urban design affects people's experience of real-world cities. This paper considers how this body of work might be applied to the design of virtual environments. The paper presents and compares two pieces of research, each proposing algorithms for automatically enhancing or generating virtual environments and each inspired by a different theory of urban design. The first describes how Kevin Lynch's work on the legibility of cities can be applied to improve the navigability of three dimensional information visualisations. The paper describes the design, construction and experimental evaluation of a system called LEADS which implements some general purpose legibility enhancing algorithms. The second describes how Hillier and Hansen's work on the social logic of space has been applied to the construction of multi-user virtual cities. The paper describes the design, implementation and experimental evaluation of a city generation system called The Virtual City Builder (VCB). It then describes simulation experiments with VCB which uncover relationships between different city layouts and opportunities for navigation and social encounter. The paper concludes by comparing both pieces of work and by outlining possibilities for their future integration.

This paper explores the issue of user embodiment within collaborative virtual environments. By user embodiment we mean the provision of users with appropriate body images so as to represent them to others and also to themselves. By collaborative virtual environments we mean multi-user virtual reality systems which explicitly support co-operative work (although we argue that the results of our exploration may also be applied to other kinds of collaborative system). The main part of the paper identifies a list of embodiment design issues including: presence, location, identity, activity, availability, history of activity, viewpoint, actionpoint, gesture, facial expression, voluntary versus involuntary expression, degree of presence, reflecting capabilities, physical properties, active bodies, time and change, manipulating your view of others, representation across multiple media, autonomous and distributed body parts, truthfulness and efficiency. Following this, we show how these issues are reflected in our own DIVE and MASSIVE prototype systems and also show how they can be used to analyse several other existing collaborative systems.

This paper explores the use of multi-actor virtual reality systems to support communication and cooperation between groups of people. In particular, it introduces a spatial model of interaction which aims to support people in using their natural social communication skills when working together. First, we briefly review some of the social science background which has informed the development of this model. Next, we define the model's main concepts, i.e. aura, awareness, focus, nimbus, adapters and boundaries. We also explore the issues of user embodiment and spatial structure, the latter leading to the concept of Populated Information Terrains. We then show how a few simplifying assumptions results in the notion of awareness states and discuss how these link to the results of previous studies of cooperative work. Following this, we present some early prototypes which realise our concepts within the DIVE distributed virtual reality system. In the first of these, a simple discrete version of the spatial model has been constructed based on the notion of awareness states. The second, Q-PIT, demonstrates an early Populated Information Terrain. Finally, we briefly reflect on the relationship between this work and other CSCW systems based on the metaphor of shared space.

This paper is concerned with the development of a language/action perspective in the Cosmos project. We emphasize the importance of seeing cooperative work in terms of participants' communicative actions. In contrast to some explorations of speech act theory, we argue that communicative actions should be seen as essentially embedded in dialogical contexts. In particular, we attempt to show the relevance of concepts derived from the analysis of actually occurring conversations, for computer mediated communication in general and cooperative work in particular. We distinguish between local and global structuring of communication and argue that many group working situations combine both sorts. These observations have influenced our work in the Cosmos project on the design of a structure definition language (SDL) by means of which users can configure their computer mediated communication environment. We describe SDL and show how its interpretation is influenced by our conversation analytic approach. We illustrate our arguments with an example of cooperative document preparation.