Final Report Summary - THIRDWAVEHCI (Third Wave HCI: Methods, Domains and Concepts)
The Third Wave HCI project provided a setting for the Interaction Research Studio to create five new and innovative computational devices, to use batch production to deliver them to scores of participants, and to capture rich, polyphonic descriptions of their use in the form of narratives and films. In the course of pursuing these achievements, the project produced novel methods, knowledge and impact that are already influencing HCI and other fields. Most recently, the Studio completed a field trial of its custom-made Datacatcher devices with over 100 participants from the Greater London area. The devices show an endless stream of messages about the area they are in, ranging from NHS health statistics to lifestyle assumptions made by credit agencies, giving access to the kinds of data usually accessible only to companies and governments and bringing to life the socio-political realities of Britain.
The Datacatcher study is the culmination of the Third Wave HCI project, which built on the recognition that, as computation becomes a dimension of everyday life, people’s use of technologies increasingly needs to be understood as situated in their individual lives, values, histories and social circumstances. It understands that computation is not merely functional, but has aesthetic, emotional and cultural dimensions as well. And it recognises that people no longer use computers only or even primarily to solve problems or achieve goals, suggesting instead that computation be understood as supporting people to experience and engage the world in new ways.
The Studio set out to develop Third Wave HCI by using the approach to open the ways technologies address environmental and larger social issues, as an example of how a ‘playful’ style of interaction can address serious concerns. In addition, it extended its practice to produce and deployment of scores of its research products, to allow large-scale trials assessing the multiple engagements people have with designs purposely built to be open-ended and variably interpretable. Finally, it undertook a programme of conceptual work that extended from introducing ‘orienting concepts’ for designs to articulating how research through design differs from scientific approaches.
The Datacatchers were amongst a series of research devices developed within the project, sometimes with additional funding from other sources. The devices embody the Studio’s evolving perspective on how Third Wave design can address environmental, and ultimately, societal, issues:
- Indoor Weatherstations sense and display ambient light, temperature and wind, balancing utilitarian and aesthetic engagement with the home’s microclimate. The studio produced 66 in total and studied them for up to a year in 20 volunteer households, finding that many learned to appreciate the temporal and spatial rhythms of the constructed domestic environment with their help.
- Tidy Street volunteers were given energy feedback at a community rather than individual level. The neighbourhood’s electricity use was aggregated, with a graffiti artist using chalk paint to graph the results daily, directly on the street itself. Electricity demand amongst participants decreased during the trial, which drew attention both locally and from national and international media.
- Weatherstation Community was partly inspired by Tidy Street’s focus on community energy use. The Weatherstations were augmented with wifi hardware, allowing them to share their data with all the participants as online visualizations. Follow-up interviews indicated that this encouraged comparison to others’ readings and reflections about local ones.
- Energy Babble is an automated talk radio about energy issues. Devices play synthesized speech, jingles and sound effects constructed from content scraped from the web, creating a conversation to which users can contribute using an inbuilt microphone or SMS. Developed for a set of UK community groups pursuing local energy conservation, 28 of the devices were deployed to community volunteers, prompting intense discussions environmental, policy, and related issues.
Of the countless lessons we learned in the course of this research, perhaps the most fundamental have to do with our objectives. First, our research devices demonstrated over and again that a third-wave approach provides a powerful means for opening up issues of recognized importance to new consideration. Second, our conceptual work introduced a number of new orienting concepts, and equally importantly articulated how design-led research complements scientific investigations and how designs produced in this way may operate in the world. Finally, our foray into batch production/deployment demonstrated both the undoubted challenges, but also the enormous benefits, that come with large-scale design and field studies of this sort.
Engagement with the public, as well as academic audiences, has been key throughout the project. For instance, in order to study the Datacatchers without summarizing over the hundreds of individual engagements it occasioned, the Studio commissioned 60 short documentary films that capture people’s reactions -- these are available for public viewing at https://vimeo.com/channels/datacatcher. Moreover, the Studio’s research devices have been seen by over a million people in major exhibitions across the world.
The Datacatcher study is the culmination of the Third Wave HCI project, which built on the recognition that, as computation becomes a dimension of everyday life, people’s use of technologies increasingly needs to be understood as situated in their individual lives, values, histories and social circumstances. It understands that computation is not merely functional, but has aesthetic, emotional and cultural dimensions as well. And it recognises that people no longer use computers only or even primarily to solve problems or achieve goals, suggesting instead that computation be understood as supporting people to experience and engage the world in new ways.
The Studio set out to develop Third Wave HCI by using the approach to open the ways technologies address environmental and larger social issues, as an example of how a ‘playful’ style of interaction can address serious concerns. In addition, it extended its practice to produce and deployment of scores of its research products, to allow large-scale trials assessing the multiple engagements people have with designs purposely built to be open-ended and variably interpretable. Finally, it undertook a programme of conceptual work that extended from introducing ‘orienting concepts’ for designs to articulating how research through design differs from scientific approaches.
The Datacatchers were amongst a series of research devices developed within the project, sometimes with additional funding from other sources. The devices embody the Studio’s evolving perspective on how Third Wave design can address environmental, and ultimately, societal, issues:
- Indoor Weatherstations sense and display ambient light, temperature and wind, balancing utilitarian and aesthetic engagement with the home’s microclimate. The studio produced 66 in total and studied them for up to a year in 20 volunteer households, finding that many learned to appreciate the temporal and spatial rhythms of the constructed domestic environment with their help.
- Tidy Street volunteers were given energy feedback at a community rather than individual level. The neighbourhood’s electricity use was aggregated, with a graffiti artist using chalk paint to graph the results daily, directly on the street itself. Electricity demand amongst participants decreased during the trial, which drew attention both locally and from national and international media.
- Weatherstation Community was partly inspired by Tidy Street’s focus on community energy use. The Weatherstations were augmented with wifi hardware, allowing them to share their data with all the participants as online visualizations. Follow-up interviews indicated that this encouraged comparison to others’ readings and reflections about local ones.
- Energy Babble is an automated talk radio about energy issues. Devices play synthesized speech, jingles and sound effects constructed from content scraped from the web, creating a conversation to which users can contribute using an inbuilt microphone or SMS. Developed for a set of UK community groups pursuing local energy conservation, 28 of the devices were deployed to community volunteers, prompting intense discussions environmental, policy, and related issues.
Of the countless lessons we learned in the course of this research, perhaps the most fundamental have to do with our objectives. First, our research devices demonstrated over and again that a third-wave approach provides a powerful means for opening up issues of recognized importance to new consideration. Second, our conceptual work introduced a number of new orienting concepts, and equally importantly articulated how design-led research complements scientific investigations and how designs produced in this way may operate in the world. Finally, our foray into batch production/deployment demonstrated both the undoubted challenges, but also the enormous benefits, that come with large-scale design and field studies of this sort.
Engagement with the public, as well as academic audiences, has been key throughout the project. For instance, in order to study the Datacatchers without summarizing over the hundreds of individual engagements it occasioned, the Studio commissioned 60 short documentary films that capture people’s reactions -- these are available for public viewing at https://vimeo.com/channels/datacatcher. Moreover, the Studio’s research devices have been seen by over a million people in major exhibitions across the world.