Last week I had the privilege (thank you Daniela!) of attending CHI2010, a conference on human factors in computing systems in Atlanta, as a Student Volunteer. It was an amazing and insightful experience! I especially enjoyed being an SV as it provided an immediate community and allowed me to start building a network of fellow researchers from across the globe. The first morning left me feeling rather confused about my place at CHI- I ended up in a number of very technical paper presentations, each one speaking at length about the statistical significance of their research. But then I discovered alt.chi + a community of researchers promoting HCI for all and new/interpretive methodology. Fun stuff! I suddenly felt very much at home and soon realized that CHI has something for everyone. The remaining 3 days proved exhilirating- I met attendee after attendee working on compelling research. It was so refreshing to move beyond the Dundee sphere; it definitely tested and advanced my own thoughts on design ethnography. I attended a particularly captivating alt.chi discussion titled, “Can we all stand under our umbrella? The arts and design research in HCI” led by Gilbert Cockton, Shaowen Bardzell (author of this year’s award winning paper “Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design”), Blythe Mark and Jeffrey Bardzell (all of whom you should check out!) I also had the pleasure of attending 2 excellent courses: 1. Steve Portigal’s course titled “So We’ve Done All This Research Now What?”, which proved very illuminating. Portigal broke down his process into comprehensible and distinct stages and even showed us excerpts of his field notes! We essentially went through all of the stages in the course. What Portigal does is very much in line with what we do in our design ethnography program- enough rigor to provide a “thick description” and inspire design while still considering industry’s monetary and time constraints. For example, he emphasized the need for quality fieldnotes and the separation of descriptive/interpretive notes but also noted that his ‘coding’ doesn’t always resemble traditional academic coding. He’s more interested in the themes and the provocative bits. Also! get this- Portigal Consulting sends their audio and video to a transcription service. Ah, the joys! Portigal spoke about a lot of good stuff, but I especially liked his idea of breaking strategies into either a Support or Challenge model- He presented an example question- How can we improve the experience of students who smoke? A support strategy embraces the finding: provide them with a protected environment whereas a challenge strategy challenges the finding and attempts to change the behavior: eliminate smoking. Portigal also suggests getting clients involved in the work as early as possible, so that they can start thinking about the ideas and build up ‘muscle memory/neural pathways’ which make integrating and embracing the new concepts easier. Repeated exposure to the ideas is key! 2. Daniela Busse and Eli Blevis‘ two part course titled “Research & Design for Sustainability” (in the broader sense of social, environmental, organizational etc sustainability) highlighted just how complex the issue of sustainability is and achieved a high level of discussion on the topic. I was thrilled to have such inspirational and informative instructors and course mates. The course is hard to sum up because we covered a lot of ground and were discussing for a large portion of the time. But some key take-aways: 1) The HCI community only started publishing papers on HCI + sustainability recently (around 2006/7), but more and more papers are coming out each year, including a fantastic award winning paper this year- “Mapping the Landscape of Sustainable HCI“, which maps the research thus far into distinct categories. 2) Eli Blevis’ research, including his award winning paper “Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention & Disposal, Renewal & Reuse” (one of the first papers on sustainability in relation to HCI), in which he presents a rubric for “understanding the material effects of particular interaction design” and “several principles to guide SID” (pg 1) is not to be missed! Furthermore, the research on ‘live performance’, which my team conducted this last semester, identified a desire for ‘off-time’ (time not spent checking emails, etc), which I thought related so well to sustainable HCI. Here are some notes from our discussion summing up those thoughts: I see ‘respecting off-time’ as relating to the idea of considering the non-use time as well as the use time of a product. My question is- Can deliberately providing users with non-use time/designing non-use time enhance use time? Thoughts? (Paul Dourish and Christine Satchell’s paper “Beyond The User: Use And Non-Use in HCI“ (2009), in which they write, “Here, we focus on not using computers – ways not to use them, aspects of not using them, what not using them might mean, and what we might learn by examining non-use as seriously as we examine use” (page 1) gets at some of this) Speaking of Paul Dourish- I am a big fan of his current student Lilly Irani who presented some great papers at CHI2010, including: “Postcolonial Computing: A Lens on Design and Development” and “There’s Methodology in the Madness: Toward Critical HCI Ethnography”. Keep an eye out for her work! And last but definitely not least! I invited Daniela Busse, SAP user experience and sustainability extraordinaire, to come and eat lunch with us SVs as a CHI rockstar. Daniela, an external evaluator of our course, is the reason I could attend CHI (she nominated me to be an SV). CHI rockstar lunches allow SVs to get to know industry folk on a more personal level. What a great idea! Phew! I know that was long and believe me- that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what was discussed and presented at CHI. I haven’t even touched on Genevieve Bell’s fantastic plenary speech highlighting the gap in HCI research on technology + religion, sex and sports, or any of the amazing technical advancements presented at the conference. Here’s to hoping all of us design ethnographers get the opportunity to attend CHI sometime in the future!
