Design for families (or homes)

Rikard Harr

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Outline

• What make homes interesting for HCI• What make homes difficult to study?

• 3 ways of studying domestic use of IT

• Participatory design and the papers• Between the dazzle• LINC, Inkable Digital Family Calendar

• Concluding remarks/Student comments

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What make homes interesting for HCI

four different industries which are now viewing the home as the next site for technological development: telecommunications industry, information industry, computer industry and entertainment - many of these working in close collaboration. (Venkatesh 1995)

• The home is becoming increasingly computerized– E.g. Cell Phones, PCs, wireless networks, Smart TVs, Media

Centers, interconnected platforms, devices and services

• A large part of all computer use takes place in homes

• Different reasons for technology use than at work• More diverse user groups• Users expect true ubiquity• New challenge for researchers

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And what makes it difficult to study• A challenge just to get access

– Even the briefest ethnographic study of organisational life - perhaps best characterised by Hughes et al.’s quick and dirty ethnography [13] - tends to involve several days of continuous fieldworker presence within the workplace, a degree of intrusion likely to be considered at best undesirable and at worst wholly unacceptable if replicated within a domestic environment. (O’Brian and Rodden 1997, p. 252)

• Sensitivity for intrusion– Importance of privacy

• Three approaches1. Ethnographic studies2. Lab houses3. Participatory approaches

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1. Ethnographic studies in homes

• Relatively few examples• Lull (1991), research assistants lodged in the host

households• O’Brian and Rodden (1997) focus on interactive

system designs for domestic environments• Rouncefield et al. (2000) wanted to create general

design principles and writes:– The explicit aim of the studies was to develop an

understanding of the detailed everyday activities in the home with the emphasis placed upon the provision of a 'thick description' of daily life within the home

• Often light versions of ethnography (e.g. O’Brian and Rodden 1997)– Our intention in the studies undertaken for this project was,

of course, to remain as faithful as possible to the fundamental principles of ethnographic research… (p. 252)

– A fieldworker conducted series of three evening visits a week to ten families

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1. Ethnographic studies in homes

• Blythe and Monk (2002) studied domestic technology

• Focus on gender division of domestic labor and gendered product design

• Studied three households• In-depth interviews with seven family members• Used the Technology Biography for generating

critical and creative responses to questions of home technology development

• TB included: – a technology tour of participants homes– last times questions about participants latest technology

usage – a personal history interview of participants technologies and

routines – a guided speculation on possible future technologies, and – three wishes for products that participants would like to see.

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2. Lab houses (awarehome.gatech.edu)• The Aware Home Research Initiative (AHRI)• Focus on:

– Health and Well-being – Digital Media and Entertainment– Sustainability

• Ambition: investigating how new technologies can impact the lives of people at home

• Two identical floors, featuring: a kitchen, dining room, living room, 3 bedrooms, 2 full bathrooms, and a laundry room

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Lab houses, continued

• The lab house serves the needs of the researchers in many ways, such as:– for research projects where elements of the home are not

easily recreated in the lab– as a place for testing out installation of research projects in

a home setting prior to deploying to research participant homes

– as a controlled home environment for studies, where technology is not yet ready for installation in participants homes and a home environment would make the difference.

– to educate students and provide an interesting environment for their class project ideas

– as a single location to share our multi-disciplinary research with others

– as an informal location for gathering with a group.

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3. Participatory approaches

• Involves the user in the process, outside their homes

• PD includes all stakeholders in the design process• Captures the cultural, emotional, spiritual and

practical needs of users• Interaction techniques developed through user-participation

enable household members – rather than designers – to configure and reconfigure interactive devices and services to meet local needs (Rodden et al. 2004, p. 71)

• Origin in Scandinavia (1970)• Political dimension, user empowerment and

democratisation• Degree of participation varies, the US and

European school

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The two papers

• Between the dazzle… (Rodden et al. 2004)– Want to help users to manage the introduction and

arrangement of new interactive services and devices in the home

• LINC-ing the Family… (Neustaedter and Brush, 2006)– Want to help families in coordinating everyday life– Focus on technological support for family

coordination

• Both are influenced by participatory design• Both targets the domestic use of IT

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The procedure: Between the Dazzle• Consulting previous ethnographic studies• People continuously exploit and reconfigure

Space-plan and Stuff• Ecological character of domestic technology use • Placement, technology is situated at functional

sites• Assembly, technologies are interlinked

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The procedure: Between the Dazzle• The Component model:• A physical jigsaw editor• Devices can be combined in different ways by

users• Familiar, easy, not loaded with existing

interpretations• Construction of arrangements• Hard to design upon

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The procedure: Between the Dazzle• Aims: evaluate the jigsaw-approach, capture what

devices might fit into homes and how– 6 Paper-based mock-up evaluations with 8 participants– Several jigsaw pieces made available and combined– Video recording and analysis

Reflections• Users take an active part in the design

– Users want to interleave old and new technology– Homes are interleaved with outer activities

• The importance of using low-fidelity prototypes• The benefits of grounding current research in

previous

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LINC, Inkable Digital Family Calendar• Focus on family coordination• Develop the LINC calender• Background:

– Family life involves myriads of activities– Activities extends beyond the home– Activities must be coordinated, or else…

• Shortcomings of existing calendars:– Paper calendars aren’t available outside of home and are

not easily synchronized– Existing digital calenders excludes family coordination

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Ambition

• Design a calender that match existing domestic routines

• Unite the flexibility of paper calenders with the ability to make it digital in a later step

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Development of LINC

• Outline design principles based on previous work, a family calender:– Should be designed as a simple awareness appliance– Must be flexible in order to support a variety of domestic

routines– Should provide tools for coordination– Should support contextual locations

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Participatory design process

• Selection of respondents– Searched for a diverse group– Age 31-45 (11), 46-60 (9) etc.– No secondary users were involved

• Low-fidelity prototyping design sessions– Interviews on current calender use with 10 users– Performing a series of coordination and awareness tasks– A researcher acted as computer– Video recording and note taking– Concluded by discussion and recommended changes– Refining the design

• Medium-fidelity prototyping design sessions– Same procedure as above, but different prototype

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Key findings of current use

• Various calender types were used, often in combination

• Calenders are placed in high traffic locations• Calenders only leave their location in case of

substantial planning• People check their calenders once or twice a day• Participants were possessive of ”their” calenders• What is scheduled differ, recurrent posts, start

and end times, location, names or initials, colour use

• Events sometimes come in through email, requiring ”copy and paste”

• Separate sheets of paper, sticky notes

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Paper prototype

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Digital prototype

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Concluding remarks

• It is important to study domestic use of IT– Increasingly important

• It is however difficult– People might not want us there

• Three approaches for studying IT at home– Ethnography– Lab houses– Participatory approaches

• The papers and participatory design• Questions? Comments?