This paper introduces a novel methodological approach for surfacing the acceptability and adoption challenges that confront future and emerging technologies from the perspective of mundane action, in which they will ultimately be embedded and used. This novel approach configures design fiction as a breaching experiment to surface taken for granted background expectancies that are fateful for acceptability and adoption. We explain the logic of this new interdisciplinary method and present a concrete case to demonstrate its viability: a design fiction called Experiencing the Future Mundane (EFM), which depicts a future world in which watching TV is driven by smart adaptive media. We explicate the design of the EFM, how it was configured to breach common sense knowledge and surface taken for granted background expectancies concerning how watching TV works and is expected to work, the acceptability and adoption challenges that emerge from user engagement with the experience, and how this novel approach may be adopted more broadly.

1. A key tenet to this paper’s contribution is the assertion that while there are many specialized terminologies relating to more-than-human design – terms including but not limited to posthumanism...

As novel media experiences turn towards audience personal data for enhancement, a range of socio-technical challenges that confront their adoption into the everyday lives of audiences are simultaneously surfaced. Podcasts, being the latest member of this emergent phenomena help present the next generation of challenges here like the management of trust within scenarios of implicit (audio-based experiences’) data collection and the consideration for real world social scenarios where these media experiences are shared. This paper reports the conceptualisation and design phase of the first adaptive podcast that seeks to explore these questions of management of trust and sociality of data through the application of the principles of Human Data Interaction, particularly the provision of scope for user data negotiations.

Abstract The home is a site marked by the increasing collection and use of personal data, whether online or from connected devices. This trend is accompanied by new data protection regulation and the development of privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) that seek to enable individual control over the processing of personal data. However, a great deal of the data generated within the connected home is interpersonal in nature and cannot therefore be attributed to an individual. The cardboard box study adapts the technology probe approach to explore with potential end users the salience of a PET called the Databox and to understand the challenge of collaborative rather than individual data management in the home. The cardboard box study was designed as an ideation card game and conducted with 22 households distributed around the UK, providing us with 38 participants. Demographically, our participants were of varying ages and had a variety of occupational backgrounds and differing household situations. The study makes it perspicuous that privacy is not a ubiquitous concern within the home as a great deal of data is shared by default of people living together; that when privacy is occasioned it performs a distinct social function that is concerned with human security and the safety and integrity of people rather than devices and data; and that current ‘interdependent privacy’ solutions that seek to support collaborative data management are not well aligned with the ways access control is negotiated and managed within the home.

UbiComp has been envisioned to bring about a future dominated by calm computing technologies making our everyday lives ever more convenient. Yet the same vision has also attracted criticism for encouraging a solitary and passive lifestyle. The aim of this paper is to explore and elaborate these tensions further by examining the human values surrounding future domestic UbiComp solutions. Drawing on envisioning and contravisioning, we probe members of the public (N=28) through the presentation and focus group discussion of two contrasting animated video scenarios, where one is inspired by 'calm' and the other by 'engaging' visions of future UbiComp technology. By analysing the reasoning of our participants, we identify and elaborate a number of relevant values involved in balancing the two perspectives. In conclusion, we articulate practically applicable takeaways in the form of a set of key design questions and challenges.

Abstract This paper presents findings from the deployment of a technology probe—the connected shower—and implications for the development of ‘living services’ or autonomous context-aware consumer-oriented IoT services that exploit sensing to gain consumer ‘insight’ and drive personalised service innovation. It contributes to the literature on water sustainability and the potential role and barriers to the adoption of smart showers in domestic life. It also contributes to our understanding of context, which enables user activity to be discriminated and elaborated thereby furnishing the ‘insight’ living services require for their successful operation. Problematically, however, our study shows that context is not a property of sensor data. Rather than provide contextual insights into showering, the sensor data requires contextualisation to discriminate and elaborate user activity. Thus, in addition to examining the potential of the connected shower in everyday life, we consider how sensor data is contextualised through the doing of data work and the relevance of its interactional accomplishment and organisation to the design of living services.

The domestic environment is a key area for the design and deployment of autonomous systems. Yet research indicates their adoption is already being hampered by a variety of critical issues including trust, privacy and security. This paper explores how potential users relate to the concept of autonomous systems in the home and elaborates further points of friction. It makes two contributions. The first one is of a methodological nature and focuses on the use of provocative utopian and dystopian scenarios of future autonomous systems in the home. These are used to drive an innovative workshop-based approach to breaching experiments, which surfaces the usually tacit and unspoken background expectancies implicated in the organisation of everyday life that have a powerful impact on the acceptability of future and emerging technologies. The other contribution is substantive, produced through participants’ efforts to repair the incongruity or “reality disjuncture” created by utopian and dystopian visions, and highlights the need to build social as well as computational accountability into autonomous systems, and to enable coordination and control.

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to enable applications that foster a more efficient, sustainable, and healthy way of life. If end-users are to take full advantage of these developments we foresee the need for future IoT systems and services to include an element of autonomy and support the delegation of agency to software processes and connected devices. To inform the design of such future technology, we report on a breaching experiment designed to investigate how people integrate an unpredictable service, through the veg box scheme, in everyday life. Findings from our semi-structured interviews and a two-week diary study with 11 households reveal that agency delegation must be warranted, that it must be possible to incorporate delegated decisions into everyday activities, and that delegation is subject to constraint. We further discuss design implications on the need to support people's diverse values, and their coordinative and creative practices.

This paper examines ‘the routine shop’ as part of a project that is exploring automation and autonomy in the Internet of Things. In particular we explicate the ‘work’ involved in anticipating need using an ethnomethodological analysis that makes visible the mundane, ‘seen but unnoticed’ methodologies that household members accountably employ to organise list construction and accomplish calculation on the shop floor. We discuss and reflect on the challenges members’ methodologies pose for proactive systems that seek to support domestic grocery shopping, including the challenges of sensing, learning and predicting, and gearing autonomous agents into social practice within the home.

Media researchers are adopting personalisation in diverse ways to deliver increasingly context-sensitive and customised media experiences. This paper explores user attitudes towards a personalised Electronic Programme Guide which tailors media recommendations based on users' personal data. We used scenario based exploration enabled by the use of probes to convey the functionalities of data-driven personalised EPGs and to facilitate user discussions around its potential use. Users preferred personalised EPGs over current popular EPGs but expressed a significant lack of trust in the personal data collection that drives personalisation. Users appreciated the functionalities afforded by personalisation of media but were apprehensive about the implications of the personal data being collected about them, particularly in the context of their homes. This calls for the need to design future personalised media experiences that help enhance trust in these socio-technical settings.

This paper outlines the IoT Databox model as a means of making the Internet of Things (IoT) accountable to individuals. Accountability is a key to building consumer trust and mandated in data protection legislation. We briefly outline the `external' data subject accountability requirement specified in actual legislation in Europe and proposed legislation in the US, and how meeting requirement this turns on surfacing the invisible actions and interactions of connected devices and the social arrangements in which they are embedded. The IoT Databox model is proposed as an in principle means of enabling accountability and providing individuals with the mechanisms needed to build trust in the IoT.

In this paper we examine the notion of privacy as promoted in the digital economy and how it has been taken up as a design challenge in the fields of CSCW, HCI and Ubiquitous Computing. Against these prevalent views we present an ethnomethodological study of digital privacy practices in 20 homes in the UK and France, concentrating in particular upon people’s use of passwords, their management of digital content, and the controls they exercise over the extent to which the online world at large can penetrate their everyday lives. In explicating digital privacy practices in the home we find an abiding methodological concern amongst members to manage the potential ‘attack surface’ of the digital on everyday life occasioned by interaction in and with the networked world. We also find, as a feature of this methodological preoccupation, that privacy dissolves into a heterogeneous array of relationship management practices. Accordingly we propose that ‘privacy’ has little utility as a focus for design, and suggest instead that a more productive way forward would be to concentrate on supporting people’s evident interest in managing their relationships in and with the networked world.

We present fieldwork findings from the deployment of an interactive sensing system that supports the work of energy advisors who give face-to-face advice to low-income households in the UK. We focus on how the system and the data it produced are articulated in the interactions between professional energy advisors and their clients, and how they collaboratively anticipate, rehearse, and perform data work. In addition to documenting how the system was appropriated in advisory work, we elaborate the 'overhead cost' of building collaborative action into connected devices and sensing systems, and the commensurate need to support discrete workflows and accountability systems to enable the methodical incorporation of the IoT into collaborative action. We contribute an elaboration of the social, collaborative methods of data work relevant to those who seek to design and study collaborative IoT systems.

This paper presents findings from a co-design project that aims to augment the practices of professional energy advisors with environmental data from sensors deployed in clients' homes. Premised on prior ethnographic observations we prototyped a sensor platform to support the work of tailoring advice-giving to particular homes. We report on the deployment process and the findings to emerge, particularly the work involved in making sense of or accounting for the data in the course of advice-giving. Our ethnomethodological analysis focuses on the ways in which data is drawn upon as a resource in the home visit, and how understanding and advice-giving turns upon unpacking the indexical relationship of the data to the situated goings-on in the home. This insight, coupled with further design workshops with the advisors, shaped requirements for an interactive system that makes the sensor data available for visual inspection and annotation to support the situated sense-making that is key to giving energy advice.

This paper is about human interaction with things in the home. It is of potential relevance to developers of the Internet of Things (IoT), but it is not a technological paper. Rather, it presents a preliminary observational study of a day in a life of things in the home. The study was done out of curiosity - to see, given the emphasis on 'things' in the IoT, what mundane interaction with things looks like and is about. The results draw attention to the sheer scale of interaction with things, key areas of domestic activity in which interaction is embedded, and what it is about domestic life that gives data about interaction its sense. Each of these issues raises possibilities and challenges for IoT development in the home.

Notions like 'Big Data' and the 'Internet of Things' turn upon anticipated harvesting of personal data through ubiquitous computing and networked sensing systems. It is largely presumed that understandings of people's everyday interactions will be relatively easy to 'read off' of such data and that this, in turn, poses a privacy threat. An ethnographic study of how people account for sensed data to third parties uncovers serious challenges to such ideas. The study reveals that the legibility of sensor data turns upon various orders of situated reasoning involved in articulating the data and making it accountable. Articulation work is indispensable to personal data sharing and raises real requirements for networked sensing systems premised on the harvesting of personal data.

This series of studies make it clear that a wide range of both physical and digital resources are involved in domestic music consumption. The selection of digital resources is particularly evident, and it can be observed that domestic music consumption is a fragmented business, taking advantage of many different “channels” for getting, using and preparing music. While there are not a series of common channels, each home displayed a variety of methods in respect to using metadata in multiple different modalities: regardless, the activities involved in getting, using and preparing music cohere through a noticeable, emergent set of workflows . We find that not only does metadata support searching, as one might expect, but also it pervades all parts of the workflow and is used in real-time as a reflexive artifact and in terms of its future perceived/prescribed use. The findings of the research raise a series of possibilities and issues that form the basis for understanding and designing for metadata use.

This paper offers a sociological perspective on data protection regulation and its relevance to design. From this perspective, proposed regulation in Europe and the USA seeks to create a new economic actor—the consumer as personal data trader—through new legal frameworks that shift the locus of agency and control in data processing towards the individual consumer or “data subject”. The sociological perspective on proposed data regulation recognises the reflexive relationship between law and the social order, and the commensurate needs to balance the demand for compliance with the design of computational tools that enable this new economic actor. We present the Databox model as a means of providing data protection and allowing the individual to exploit personal data to become an active player in the emerging data economy.

This paper reports on a study of 4CG, a cooperative enterprise located in rural Wales. 4CG operates for the good of the local economy and seeks to diversify its commercial portfolio through the creation of an online shop retailing goods and services from local suppliers. The paper compliments prior field studies focusing on rural enterprise and the challenges posed by this category of business for IT support. The current study is motivated by 4CG’s interest in setting up a local online shop and explicates the organisational issues that this venture turns upon and elaborates for broader sustainability agendas.

This paper reports on a field study of small market in Wales undertaken as part of broader research project aimed at developing IT solutions to support rural enterprise. The project is predicated on the assumption that the primary challenge facing rural enterprise is that of scale and that IT solutions could and should add value by enabling growth. The study suggests that many rural enterprises are micro in character, that they are not driven by the need to grow, and that value is and can be added in different ways that reflect the social values oriented to and employed by micro businesses and their consumers. The paper elaborates vernacular understandings of supply chains and their coordination, along with business and consumer motivations to consider alternative possibilities for design that place emphasis on making micro rural enterprise "pay a bit better" rather than scaling it up.

We explore the approach of performance-led research in the wild in which artists drive the creation of novel performances with the support of HCI researchers that are then deployed and studied at public performance in cultural settings such as galleries, festivals and on the city streets. We motivate the approach and then describe how it consists of three distinct activities -- practice, studies and theory -- that are interleaved in complex ways through nine different relationships. We present a historical account of how the approach has evolved over a fifteen-year period, charting the evolution of a complex web of projects, papers, and relationships between them. We articulate the challenges of pursuing each activity as well as overarching challenges of balancing artistic and research interests, flexible management of relationships, and finally ethics.

introduction Share on Introduction to the Special Issue of "The Turn to The Wild" Guest Editors: Andy Crabtree View Profile , Alan Chamberlain View Profile , Rebecca E. Grinter View Profile , Matt Jones View Profile , Tom Rodden View Profile , Yvonne Rogers View Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 20Issue 3Article No.: 13pp 1–4https://doi.org/10.1145/2491500.2491501Published:01 July 2013Publication History 80citation1,259DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations80Total Downloads1,259Last 12 Months98Last 6 weeks14 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

We are starting to see a paradigm shift within the field of HCI. We are witnessing researchers leaving the safety and security of their controlled, lab-based environments and moving their research out into 'the wild'. Their studies are carrying out in-situ development and extended engagement, sampling experiences and working with communities in their homes and on the streets. This research has initially focused upon understanding the impacts that technological intervention has upon our day-to-day life and is leading us to explore the ways in which in-situ design, development and evaluation can be used to understand and explore these technological interventions. Is it the case that lab-based studies, taking people out of their natural environment and designing in the lab without long term user engagement are no longer appropriate to properly understand the impacts of technology in the real world?

This paper extends the focus of current research into home networks. It represents a shift in perspective from the home network as something that is essentially understood as a technological object by the inhabitants of the home, to something that is understood by household members as a sociological object wrapped up in the organisation of their everyday lives. This shift in perspective is significant. It moves the focus of design from developing home network technologies that better support users' management of the home network and the devices that hang off it, to developing home network technologies that support household members' management of everyday life and the social activities that compose it. Through a range of ongoing ethnographic studies we elaborate this turn to the social, and a number of sensitising concerns informing the continued development of home network technologies.

An ethnographic study uncovers the work of nightclub DJs, which extends far beyond the act of mixing tracks to also encompass collecting music, preparing for performances, and promotion and networking. We reveal how DJs value vinyl and digital formats in different ways, acquire music through 'crate digging', prepare physical and digital crates of music before gigs, and how these underpin improvised selections during their performances. We document how DJs interact with promoters, venues, dancers and other DJs, revealing an etiquette that governs how they select and share music, and manage an ongoing tension between revealing and hiding metadata so as to maintain a competitive edge. We raise implications for technologies to support DJs, while also shedding light on previous studies of music consumption and sharing in other settings.

An ethnographic study of Irish music sessions in pubs elaborates the collaborative work involved in making traditional music. Central to this distinctive achievement is the sequencing of tunes so that they hang together and combine to form discrete "sets", which rely on a shared knowledge of musical repertoires. Our study shows how musicians develop this musical knowledge through the use of digital resources and social networks. It also reveals how musicians construct and make use of various paper props to help bring their knowledge to bear in the actual in vivo course of a session so as to maintain the moral order of making music together in a demonstrably traditional way. The social demands of musical "etiquette" sensitise CSCW to the need to design technologies to support the "situated discretion" that is essential to traditional practices. We elaborate this notion through a discussion of requirements for technologies that bridge between online resources and the collaborative sequencing of tunes during performance.

Ethnographic studies have played a key part in informing the design and development of a multitude of ubiquitous systems, from control room systems to pervasive games. While other papers have often focused on systems developed for urban contexts, this paper presents the initial findings of a study that focuses on a rural produce market in West Wales as a site for ubiquitous multimedia system-based intervention, digital economic considerations and co-design. The findings relate to the initial ethnographic fieldwork, digital-economic considerations for the site, the evolution of a participatory design strategy for developing a Market Portal and - importantly -- the way that these are informing the design of the ubiquitous technologies relating to the Market Portal.

This paper presents a user driven redesign of the domestic network infrastructure that draws upon a series of ethnographic studies of home networks. We present an infrastructure based around a purpose built access point that has modified the handling of protocols and services to reflect the interactive needs of the home. The developed infrastructure offers a novel measurement framework that allows a broad range of infrastructure information to be easily captured and made available to interactive applications. This is complemented by a diverse set of novel interactive control mechanisms and interfaces for the underlying infrastructure. We also briefly reflect on the technical and user issues arising from deployments.

An ethnographic study reveals how professional artists created a spectator interface for the interactive game Day of the Figurines, designing the size, shape, height and materials of two tabletop interfaces before carefully arranging them in a local setting. We also show how participants experienced this interface. We consider how the artists worked with a multi-scale notion of interactional trajectory that combined trajectories through individual displays, trajectories through a local ecology of displays, and trajectories through an entire experience. Our findings shed light on discussions within HCI concerning interaction with tangible and tabletop displays, spectator interfaces, ecologies of displays, and trajectories through cultural experiences.

We review the current status of ethnography in systems design. We focus particularly on new approaches to and understandings of ethnography that have emerged as the computer has moved out of the workplace. These seek to implement a different order of ethnographic study to that which has largely been employed in design to date. In doing so they reconfigure the relationship ethnography has to systems design, replacing detailed empirical studies of situated action with studies that provide cultural interpretations of action and critiques of the design process itself. We hold these new approaches to and understandings of ethnography in design up to scrutiny, with the purpose of enabling designers to appreciate the differences between new and existing approaches to ethnography in systems design and the practical implications this might have for design.

Different kinds of computing environment effect human interaction in different kinds of ways and understanding how different environments 'work', as it were, is important to their evaluation and ongoing design. Ethnographic studies of media spaces and CVEs, for example, showed that these kinds of environment introduce asymmetry and fragment the reciprocity of perspectives that is essential to human interaction. Users are therefore obliged to engage in 'compensation work' if interaction is to proceed. However, asymmetry and fragmentation are intentional features of the hybrid ubiquitous computing environments that have emerged over recent years, which is to say that they are deliberately 'built in' to the environment through the design of heterogeneous interaction mechanisms. Interaction in hybrid ubicomp environments therefore relies upon a different order of interactional work, namely 'reconciliation work'.

Householders are increasingly adopting home networking as a solution to the demands created by the presence of multiple computers, devices, and the desire to access the Internet. However, current network solutions are derived from the world of work (and initially the military) and provide poor support for the needs of the home. We present the key findings to emerge from empirical studies of home networks in the UK and US. The studies reveal two key kinds of work that effective home networking relies upon: one, the technical work of setting up and maintaining the home network, and the other, the collaborative and socially organized work of the home which the network is embedded in and supports. The two are thoroughly intertwined and rely upon one another for their realization, yet neither is adequately supported by current networking technologies and applications. Explication of the “work to make the home network work” opens up the design space for the continued integration of the home network in domestic life and elaboration of future support. Key issues for development include the development of networking facilities that do not require advanced networking knowledge, that are flexible and support the local social order of the home and the evolution of its routines, and which ultimately make the home network visible and accountable to household members.

Deploying research technology in real homes is an important way of uncovering new possibilities for design. We reflect upon the deployment of a simple technological arrangement which might be construed of as a 'breaching experiment' that reveals significant challenges for technology deployment in the home. Of particular issue is the extent to which research deployments resonate with existing infrastructure and disrupt ordinary processes of domestication; the degree of ownership household members exercise over research prototypes and how this constrains domestication; and the nature of research practice and the limits this places on our understanding of domestication.

A proliferation of mobile devices in everyday life has increased the likelihood of technologically mediated interruptions. We examine ethnographic data from an SMS-based pervasive game in order to explicate the situated character of interruption. Ethnomethodological analysis of gameplay in the context of participants' everyday lives shows that interruption handling is shaped by its accountability to the various people or 'cohorts' whose concerns participants need to juggle simultaneously. Findings inform existing approaches to design where certain presuppositions regarding the nature of interruption prevail. Accordingly, we propose an approach to interruption handling that respects the ways in which people orient to and reason about interruptions locally in the conduct of situated action.

Ethnography has become a staple feature of IT research over the last twenty years, shaping our understanding of the social character of computing systems and informing their design in a wide variety of settings. The emergence of ubiquitous computing raises new challenges for ethnography however, distributing interaction across a burgeoning array of small, mobile devices and online environments which exploit invisible sensing systems. Understanding interaction requires ethnographers to reconcile interactions that are, for example, distributed across devices on the street with online interactions in order to assemble coherent understandings of the social character and purchase of ubiquitous computing systems. We draw upon four recent studies to show how ethnographers are replaying system recordings of interaction alongside existing resources such as video recordings to do this and identify key challenges that need to be met to support ethnographic study of ubiquitous computing in the wild.

By considering the spatial character of sensor-based interactive systems, this paper investigates how discussions of seams and seamlessness in ubiquitous computing neglect the complex spatial character that is constructed as a side-effect of deploying sensor technology within a space. Through a study of a torch (aka 'flashlight') based interface, we develop a framework for analysing this spatial character generated by sensor technology. This framework is then used to analyse and compare a range of other systems in which sensor technology is used, in order to develop a design spectrum that contrasts the revealing and hiding of a system's structure to users. Finally, we discuss the implications for interfaces situated in public spaces and consider the benefits of hiding structure from users.

Mobile experiences that take place in public settings such as on city streets create new opportunities for interweaving the fictional world of a performance or game with the everyday physical world. A study of a touring performance reveals how designers generated excitement and dramatic tension by implicating bystanders and encouraging the (apparent) crossing of normal boundaries of behaviour. The study also shows how designers dealt with associated risks through a process of careful orchestration. Consequently, we extend an existing framework for designing spectator interfaces with the concept of performance frames, enabling us to distinguish audience from bystanders. We conclude that using ambiguity to blur the frame can be a powerful design tactic, empowering players to willingly suspend disbelief, so long as a safety-net of orchestration ensures that they do not stray into genuine difficulty.

This paper argues that the design of remote help-giving systems should be grounded in articulation work and the methodical ways in which help-givers and help-seekers coordinate their problem solving activities. We provide examples from ethnographic studies of both immediate and remote help-giving to explicate what we mean by articulation work and to tease out common and characteristic methods involved in help-seeking and the giving of expert advice. We then outline how emerging technologies might best be used to support articulation work in the design and development of systems for remote troubleshooting of devices with embedded computing capabilities.

We present a study of a mobile mixed reality game calledCan You See Me Now?in which online players are chased through a virtual model of a city by ‘runners’ (professional performers equipped with GPS and WiFi technologies) who have to run through the actual city streets in order to catch the players. We present an ethnographic study of the game as it toured through two different cities and draws upon video recordings of online players, runners, technical support crew, and also on system logs of text communication. Our study reveals the diverse ways in which online players experienced the uncertainties inherent in GPS and WiFi, including being mostly unaware of them, but sometimes seeing them as problems, or treating the as a designed feature of the game, and even occasionally exploiting them within gameplay. In contrast, the runners and technical crew were fully aware of these uncertainties and continually battled against them through an ongoing and distributed process of orchestration. As a result, we encourage designers to deal with such uncertainties as a fundamental characteristic of location-based experiences rather than treating them as exceptions or bugs that might be ironed out in the future. We argue that designers should explicitly consider four potential states of being of a mobile participant: connected and tracked, connected but not tracked, tracked but not connected, and neither connected nor tracked. We then introduce five strategies that might be used to deal with uncertainty in these different states for different kinds of participant: remove it, hide it, manage it, reveal it, and exploit it. Finally, we present proposals for new orchestration interfaces that reveal the ‘seams’ in the underlying technical infrastructure by visualizing the recent performance of GPS and WiFi and predicting the likely future performance of GPS.

IT research is often informed by studies of the practices that new technologies are to be embedded in and which they transform in their use. The development of mixed reality, tangible, ambient, ubiquitous, mobile, and wearable computing have seen the emergence of a range of technological innovations that have little or no grounding in current practices, however. Such developments create new practices where none existed before and the challenge for multi-disciplinary research is to adapt to this situation. This paper articulates a novel methodology that treats technological innovations as 'breaching experiments', whose situated use beyond the confines of the research lab may be studied ethnographically to support innovation.

This paper presents the development of a lightweight component model that allows user to manage the introduction and arrangement of new interactive services and devices in the home. The model is responsive to ethnographic studies of the interplay between the Space-plan or interior layout and Stuff or artefacts placed within the fabric of the home. Interaction techniques developed through user-participation enable household members -- rather than designers -- to configure and reconfigure interactive devices and services to meet local needs. As a result, we have developed a tablet-based editor that discovers available ubiquitous components and presents these to users as 'jigsaw pieces' that can be dynamically assembled and recombined.

Successfully staging a mixed reality game in which online players are chased through a virtual city by runners located in the real world requires extensive orchestration work. An ethnographic study shows how this concerted achievement extends beyond the control room to the runners on the street. This, in turn, suggests the need to 'decentralize' orchestration and develop support for collaboration 'on the ground'. The study leads to design proposals for orchestration interfaces for mobile experiences that augment situational awareness and surreptitious monitoring among mobile participants and support troubleshooting in situations where participants are disconnected or are unable to access positioning systems such as GPS.

This paper explores the embodied interactional ways in which people naturally collaborate around and share collections of photographs. We employ ethnographic studies of paper-based photograph use to consider requirements for distributed collaboration around digital photographs. Distributed sharing is currently limited to the 'passing on' of photographs to others, by email, webpages, or mobile phones. To move beyond this, a fundamental challenge for photoware consists of developing support for the practical achievement of sharing 'at a distance'. Specifically, this entails augmenting the natural production of accounts or 'photo-talk' to support the distributed achievement of sharing.

The incorporation of ethnomethodology in professional systems development has prompted the call for the approach to move from design critique to design practice and the invention of the future. This has resulted in the development of a variety of mixing pot hybrids that have had marginal impact upon product-based development, whose needs the approach has been configured to meet. This paper suggests that a concern to fit ethnomethodology into product-based development life cycles is a primary source of the difficulties encountered in moving ethnomethodology from design critique to design practice. In practice, ethnomethodology is largely employed in research rather than product development settings. Recognition of the real-world uses of ethnomethodology in design practice opens up the possibility of devising a hybrid methodology that actively supports the invention of the future. Accordingly, this paper articulates a distinct socio-technical model that provides an iterative structure for the constructive involvement of ethnomethodology in processes of technological innovation, the results of which may subsequently be subject to the rationalities and constraints of product development.

We describe two games in which online participants collaborated with mobile participants on the city streets. In the first, the players were online and professional performers were on the streets. The second reversed this relationship. Analysis of these experiences yields new insights into the nature of context. We show how context is more socially than technically constructed. We show how players exploited (and resolved conflicts between) multiple indications of context including GPS, GPS error, audio talk, ambient audio, timing, local knowledge and trust. We recommend not overly relying on GPS, extensively using audio, and extending interfaces to represent GPS error.

This paper describes ethnomethodologically informed ethnography (EM) as a methodology for information science research, illustrating the approach with the results of a study in a university library. We elucidate major differences between the practical orientation of EM and theoretical orientation of other ethnographic approaches in information science research. We address ways in which EM may be used to inform systems design and consider the issues that arise in coordinating the results of this research with the needs of information systems designers. We outline our approach to the “ethnographically informed” development of information systems in addressing some of the major problems of interdisciplinary work between system designers and EM researchers.