Below is the introduction to my dissertation. The full dissertation (pdf) is available from the UCL Interaction Centre website.

Motivation
Connectedness, the subjective experience of interpersonal closeness (Lee & Robbins, 2000), is a fundamental need for human well-being (Smith & Mackie, 2007; Townsend & McWhirter, 2005 ¹. The need can be especially salient in relation to partners and close family members (Lindley, 2011; Neustaedter, Harrison & Sellen, 2013). Since connectedness is closely related to physical presence (Dey & De Guzman, 2006; Rettie, 2003), maintaining it over geographical distance can be a challenge. In an exploratory study of communication patterns of close family members living apart with health conditions like Alzheimer to provide a safe space and give them the connection they need, find the best home care assistance here https://homecareassistance.com/blog/how-to-tackle-the-behavior-problems-that-can-accompany-alzheimers-disease. We found indications of connectedness dipping between regular communications, resulting in feelings of anxiety and loss (Stawarz et al., 2012).

The Information Age and ubiquitous computing has brought a host of supplementary technologies to support interpersonal communication over distance, and great tips from https://www.salesforce.com/products/guide/lead-gen/customer-journeys/ to help all businesses. Voice calls, video calls, email, SMS, instant messaging, social network sites, and smart phone games offer a range of possibilities for staying in touch with our loved ones. Yet it seems they don’t meet our need for connectedness.

Kuwabara et al. (2002) offer a possible explanation for this. They argue that current communication technologies are content-oriented, focused on precisely transmitting explicit content. However, in co-located relationships, implicit mood and presence cues help evoke and sustain a sense of connectedness (Kuwabara et al., 2002).

Studies exploring communication of mood cues (e.g. Boehner et al., 2007; Fagerberg, Ståhl & Höök, 2004) offer interesting possibilities for rich connectedness-oriented communication. However, indications suggest a simple representation of a loved one’s presence can in some instances be enough to create a sense of connectedness. In an ethnographic study of instant messaging use, Nardi, Whittaker, and Bradner (2000, p. 79) found participants occasionally monitored the contact list for online presence to “maintain a sense of connection”. When you have the proper machines to work on your garden the work becomes easier, fortunately the professionals from Revitaa pro reviews have the reviews of the best health and weight loss programs. .

Research question
This study explores the experience of connectedness felt by individuals geographically separated from their partner, when adding automatically communicated remote presence information to an existing communication pattern.

We take a design-oriented research approach (Fallman, 2003), and explore the phenomenon through a dyadic remote presence indicator prototype – a tangible version of the online presence icon known from instant messaging systems – linking two physical locations. In particular, we seek to understand what qualities of the prototype support an evocation of connectedness.

The aim of the study is to generate insights, which can be used generatively when using the design strategy of remote presence awareness to design connectedness-oriented technology.

Read the full dissertation (pdf)

¹Connectedness in this dissertation refers to interpersonal connectedness, directed at one individual, as opposed to social connectedness (Lee & Robbins, 2000), which is defined as connectedness to ones social world in total, and the more existential feeling of connectedness to the world at large, discussed by Ratcliffe (2008).

References:

• Boehner, K., DePaula, R., Dourish, P., & Sengers, P. (2007). How emotion is
  made and measured. International journal of human-computer studies,
  65(4), 275–291.
• Dey, A. K., & De Guzman, E. S. (2006). From awareness to connectedness: the
  design and deployment of presence displays. In Proceedings of the 2006
  international conference on human factors in computing systems, 899–
  908. ACM.
• Fagerberg, P., Ståhl, A., & Höök, K. (2004). eMoto: emotionally engaging
  interaction. Personal and ubiquitous computing, 8(1), 377–381. Springer
• Fallman, D. (2003) Design-oriented Human-Computer Interaction. In
  Proceedings of the 2003 conference on human factors in computing
  systems, 225–232. ACM.
• Kuwabara, K., Watannabe, T., Ohguro, T., Itoh, Y., & Maeda, Y. (2002).
  Connectedness oriented communication: fostering a sense of
  connectedness to augment social relationships. In Proceedings of the
  2002 Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT ’02), 186–193.
  IEEE Computer Society.
• Lee, R. M., & Robbins, S. B. (2000). Understanding social connectedness in
  college women and men. Journal of counselling psychology, 45, 338–
  345.
• Lindley, S. E. (2011). Shades of lightweight: supporting cross-generational
  communication through home messaging. Universal Access in the
  Information Society, Online First, Springer.
• Nardi, B. A., Whittaker, S., & Bradner, E. (2000). Interaction and outeraction:
  instant messaging in action. In Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference
  on Computer supported cooperative work, 79–88. ACM.
• Neustaedter, C., Harrison, St, & Sellen, A. (2013). Connecting families: an
  introduction. In Neustaedter, C., Harrison, St, & Sellen, A. Connecting
  families: the impact of new communication technologies on domestic life.
  Springer.
• Ratcliffe, M. (2008). Feelings of being: phenomenology, psychiatry and the
  sense of reality. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
• Rettie, R. (2003). Connectedness, awareness and social presence. Paper
  presented at the 6th International Presence Workshop, Aalborg
  University, Aalborg, Denmark.
• Smith, E. R. & Mackie, D. M. (2007). Social psychology, 3rd ed. Psychology
  Press.
• Stawarz, K., Garde, J., McLoughlin, C., Nicolaides, R., & Walters, J. (2012).
  Silka: a domestic technology to mediate the threshold between
  connection and solitude. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual
  conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Extended
  Abstracts, 1309–1314. ACM.
• Townsend, K. C., & McWhirter, B. T. (2005). Connectedness: a review of the
  literature with implications for counseling, assessment, and research.
  Journal of counseling & development, 83, 191–201.

As part of the project I’ve developed a prototype. The prototype consists of two cigar boxes connected via the internet. Each cigar box contains a motion detector and an LED light source. When one motion detector detects proximal motion, the LED in the other cigar box lights up and vice versa — think the green online status icon from Skype, but instead of indicating online presence the LED signals someone is present near the other cigar box.

Lit LED on cigar box showing someone is near the paired cigar box in your loved one’s home

Taking part in the study would entail you — and either your partner or your parent(s) who you’re not living with — living with the prototype for 4 weeks. The prototype is plugged directly into your router via ethernet and USB cables. If it’s better placed elsewhere in the home I can lend you an Apple Airport Express which can be plugged into a socket and join the WiFi network and the prototype can be plugged into that instead.

I would interview you — and the person(s) using the paired cigar box — before and after the four weeks. The first interview would be about current communication patterns and the second interview about your experience of living with the prototype.

For practical reasons I’m hoping to be able to find people who both live within reach of London. However, if you live in London and frequently travel to the other location it might work out anyway. If you take part you would have my eternal gratitude, and a token £25 voucher for amazon to show my appreciation. And well, if you don’t have time for this experiment, chances are you’re doing your thing, you know, getting in shape, but don’t forget to use high boosting supplements in your diet to look super hot!

Please do get in touch if you’d like to hear more.

Thanks!

The course finished with a 2-week practical User-Centered Design project, followed by a 2000 word essay including a 1000-word reflection on the course as a whole.

Below is my reflection on the course, which I hope will be useful for people considering applying.

Reflection: fattening the top of the T(-shape)[1]

My professional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) journey began more than ten years prior to my academic one, when I started as web designer in 1998 after an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering. A main motivator in my career has always been continual learning, and through a combination of reflective practice (Schön, 1983) and knowledge spread informally in the web design community (Zimmerman et al., 2004) I had plenty of learning opportunities in what was a new field to me.

As the field of web design began to mature, a parallel urge for a more formal learning experience began to emerge in me. However, as a T-shaped web designer with expertise in the area of visual design, I had reservations about a degree in HCI which I perceived to be too focused on ‘classical usability’ (Blandford, 2012) and have a reductionist view of design. On the other hand, a design degree did not appeal either.

A couple of papers (Bødker, 2006; Harrison et al., 2007) and a book (Jordan, 2000) later, I was convinced my perception of HCI was too narrow, and was thrilled when I was accepted for this course. In this part of the essay I will reflect on how the course has shaped my thought processes and added new dimensions to my professional career as an interaction designer.

Splitting the taught part over two years meant my only module for the first term was Ergonomics for Design (EfD). As well as being a gentle way of returning to studying after a 15-year gap, it also served as a natural ‘bridge’ to HCI from my undergraduate degree. The emphasis on the user was immediately evident to me, but what will have the biggest impact on my professional work is the early structured approach to analysing the wider context of use that the Hexagon model (Benedyk et al., 2009) provides. I used it for both the EfD coursework and the Design Experience (DE) 1 module, and it helped broaden my thinking from the user level, with its physical, cognitive, and sensory concerns, to include wider contextual and even temporal factors, when considering the problem space. Contrasting this with my experience from the DE2 module described above, where I did not do an initial Hexagon analysis, it is clear to me that the structured approach sets a much more solid base on which to inform subsequent research.

If I was under any illusions that I was a ‘user-centred designer’ before starting the course, the two-week DE1 project highlighted to me that this was not the case! For a start, I had yet to define for myself what process a UCD project would follow. This meant a lot of reading around various approaches to UCD, such as the ‘ergonomic approach’ (Pheasant & Haslegrave, 2005) taught in EfD, the International standard for human-centered design (British Standards Institution, 2010), and ‘Goal-Directed Design’ (Cooper et al., 2007).

It wasn’t until the Design Practice (DP) module the following year, that I finally worked out how to conceptualise UCD. Viewing it not as a process, but as interdependent research, design, and evaluation activities, all guided by the three UCD principles mentioned earlier (Rogers et al., 2011) was the framework I needed to structure and support all the new knowledge I was acquiring throughout the course.

However, I was still struggling with one issue in the design activity, which I also alluded to in the introduction to this part of the essay: the art versus science dichotomy of design in HCI. A paper by Fällman (2003) from the DP module, discussing a third pragmatic view of design, helped me see this was a somewhat false dichotomy. Viewing design as a situated activity (Suchman, 1987), constructive as well as reflective, also allowed me to better appreciate the role seemingly different UCD techniques, such as task analysis and scenarios, play in generating design ideas. It is exactly these kinds of fundamental conceptual structures I had hoped to be able to create, and use to organise my knowledge, when I decided to take the degree.

My second term was all about the user when I did the two modules Applied Cognitive Science (ACS) and Affective Interaction (AfI) together. What really stands out for me from this term is the realisation of how cognition and emotion interact in fundamental ways. In fact, we can add the physical factor from EfD to complete a triad of user related concerns that need to concur to create rich embodied interaction experiences. It was only after this term I understood the significance of the suggested paradigm shift in HCI I referred to earlier.

What and how we evaluate in a UCD project is developing as well, as I realised in the subsequent User-Centered Evaluation Methods (UEM) module. I found the debate about whether UEMs should be evaluated on their thoroughness, ie. the proportion of problems found, which as pointed out by Blandford et al. (2008) is a fallacy anyway, or on their downstream utility, ie. their contribution to improving a design (Wixon, 2003) particularly enlightening. The coursework’s focus on a behavioural change website provided an opportunity to reflect on how combining different methods can help improve a system’s fitness for purpose like Peptide Therapy Scottsdale as well as identifying traditional usability problems. But seriously fitness is something thats extremely important to humans and machines, the health of your body is the most important thing that you could ask for at the end of the day thats whats worth it not something random and uncessary but you health is the #1 priority.

Just like the the ACS/AfI combination gave me an overview of the development of HCI as a whole, the Interfaces & Interactivity (I&I) module in my last term gave me a similar perspective on my area of specialisation. The theoretical background I acquired on different interfaces has provided me the context to better understand the implications of new developments in this field. The experience of writing my two exam essays on adaptive interfaces, and voice-driven interfaces, confirmed this. In fact, one of the main concepts of my group’s solution for the DE2 project described above, participation through viewing content, stems from a deep understanding of adaptive interfaces and its concept of ‘natural occurring actions’ (Jameson, 2008).

Completing the taught part of the MSc programme has fattened the horizontal bar of my T-shape significantly. Contrasting my DE1 experience with DE2, it is clear how much I have progressed as an interaction designer. In DE2 I was confident choosing and combining techniques from all UCD activities to best support the project, rather than following a predefined process. Combine this with a much deeper knowledge base on which to ground my future reflective practice, and I have achieved everything I hoped the structured learning approach would provide.

[1082 words]

The fact that you can put the BBC player’s volume right up to 11 still makes me smile every time.¹

The tweet immediately caught my eyes as a perfect example of many of the things I’ve been reading about lately concerning emotion and design.

There’s a lot more to this ‘gimmick’ than the ‘buzz’ created around the brand (and the backlinks) when users discuss this feature.

In his book Designing Pleasurable Products: An Introduction to the New Human Factors Patrick Jordan proposes a hierarchy of consumer needs, based on the idea of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that contains three layers. Starting with Functionality (at the most basic level the product needs the functionality to help the user reach her goal) through Usability (help the user reach her goal easily) and ending in Pleasure.

Building on the idea of a hierarchy of needs Jordan argues that once we’ve gotten used to usable products we’ll soon want something more. “…products that are not merely tools but ‘living objects’ that people can relate to; products that bring not only functional benefits but also emotional ones.”

Essentially, what BBC have managed to create (albeit small) is what Jordan would call a pleasurable interaction². And on top of that it seems a safe (and easy) bet for BBC to make. No need to justify the ‘feature’ with an NPV and the politics of getting it through a product council. Just make it go to 11. Users who get the reference get a pleasurable moment of interaction and for users who don’t there’s no negative impact.

There’s an increasing interest in the HCI community in the correlation between emotion and perceived usability, sometimes referred to as emotional usability³. It’s possible that the positive emotions evoked in the user will actually make her forgive shortcomings in the product⁴. I think the iPhone is a perfect example of this. An old blog post on the Creating Passionate Users blog entitled iPhone and the Dog Ears User Experience Model gives a couple of examples of how the designers of the iPhone have managed to infuse emotion into the product.

Other justifications aside, if we as Interaction Designers can make a user smile everytime she uses a product, that’s a hell of a goal to reach for. One BHAG to rule them all.

Usability-based approaches ¹ to product design tend to view people as users, while products are seen as tools with which these users complete tasks. Because of this usability approaches to user requirements specifications can be limited, tending to emphasize the practical aspects of interacting with products, while paying little attention to emotional or hedonic aspects of interaction.

This builds on Jane Fulton’s idea that simply eliminating deficiencies in products is no longer enough to satisfy users. Products must elicit positive emotions when experienced, both psychologically and physiologically, thus forming a powerful emotional attachment between the user and the product (Fulton 1993).

These ideas have led to the rise of a new design approach known as Experience Design ². The following quote from the Experience Design Agency Philips Design describes this approach well:

To design an experience, we need to look at the forest, not the trees. For example, to enhance the ritual of waking up in the morning, we need to look at the phenomenon as a whole and come up with something completely new rather than just make a new kind of alarm clock.
http://mime.cs.nott.ac.uk/experiential/index.html

In other words, we’re not only designing a new more efficient more effective product, we’re trying to design an experience (with the help of the product). To succeed we need a holistic understanding of the user, their behaviours, attitudes and values, and the context in which the product is used.

In his book About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design Alan Cooper argues how quantitative research and data on its own is inadequate when trying to gain insights into human behaviour. Most people are incapable of accurately assessing their own behaviours, especially when they are removed from the context of their activities. Because we can not articulate our own experiences after they happen ³, the only way for designers to gather accurate data to use in the design process is to go out and observe and participate in activities of everyday life in the natural environment. Only so can we try to understand people, not just as consumers, but as social beings with desires, wishes, needs and wants. Some articulated and some unrecognised (Salvador et al 1999).

Once we see how something exists, how it is embedded in a context of relationships and associations, we begin to understand it. A table might be an eating surface, or it might be a social center of the home. A refrigerator may be a message center for a family in Westminster, Colorado, but it is only a cooling device on a Navajo reservation…

Below I have described three different approaches to qualitative field research ⁴.

• Design Ethnography

  The kind of participation with and observation of people in context described above is known as ethnography. Ethnography has its roots in the academic fields of social and cultural anthropology, but in the 1980s and early 1990s it started to be adopted by design firms (Wasson, 2000). It has since developed into its own domain known as Design Ethnography with its own set of tools, theories and methods ⁵.

  The three main techniques of design ethnography are observation, interview and video analysis (Bloomberg et al, 1993).

  AIGA, the American professional organization for design and Cheskin, a consumer insights consultancy, have produced a wonderful primer on the role ethnography plays in design.

• Contextual inquiry

  Contextual inquiry is a structured approach to collecting data about work practices by observing and interviewing users on location while they actually work. It is the data gathering part of a larger human-centered software design process known as Contextual Design developed by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt and described in their book Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems.

  The technique is based on a master-apprentice model where the user talks about what they are doing while working and the interviewer/observer interrupts to ask questions as they go along. People have a tendency to summarise in these situations so the interviewer/observer will keep the conversation concrete by asking specific questions and ask the user to explain further if the conversation becomes abstract. The interview will typically be a full day.

  Because contextual inquiry is fundamentally task focused it can be beneficial to combine the inquiry with ethnography. In their paper Using Ethnography In Contextual Design (Simonsen et al, 1997) the authors give “a concrete example of how an understanding developed by using ethnography may challenge an immediate understanding developed mainly through meetings, interviews, and document analysis.”

• Ethnographic interviews

  Alan Cooper has developed another human-centered software design methodology known as Goal Directed Design. As opposed to contextual inquiry the idea is to first identify what goals motivate people to use the product and only then what basic tasks will help people accomplish those goals.

  The data-gathering part of the process focuses on what he describes as ethnographic interviews. These interviews are short (as short as one hour) and will take place ‘in the field’. The interviewer will try and avoid discussing specific design solutions and technologies. A good technique is to encourage storytelling and ask the user to tell specific stories about their experiences with a product.

In a blog post in late 2009 entitled “Technology First, Needs Last” the cognitive scientist and User-Centered Design evangelist Don Norman wrote that companies are better off making incremental improvements to existing products than trying to be innovative and use ethnographic methods as described above to “achieve major conceptual breakthroughs”. It is certainly a provocative post going against the current ‘trend’ for innovation, but if you read carefully he is actually not arguing against field studies as a way to inform design, he’s just arguing that they are unlikely to lead to conceptual innovation. However, the post is an interesting starting point for a debate about the value of qualitative field research and where design resources should be focused. James Kalbach, a User Experience Consultant, wrote a considered response that is also worth a read.

In my next post I’ll describe three tools and methods that can be used to turn the data and insights gathered from the field research into a form that is useful in the design phase of the interaction design life cycle.

I’ll begin with the Interaction Design Lifecycle Model as described by Preece et al., 2002 in the book Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. The model incorporates three principles of user-centered design and four activities of interaction design.

The principles of user-centered design

These principles were developed by John D. Gould and Clayton Lewis and described in the 1985 research paper Designing for Usability: Key Principles and What Designers Think [pdf]

1. Early focus on users and tasks

2. Empirical measurement

3. Iterative design

The basic activities of interaction design

Preece et al. describe a basic model for the interaction design process that includes four activities as shown below. A number of academics and well known design agencies have created similar models. Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J., and Evenson, S., of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, presented a model in their paper “Taxonomy for Extracting Design Knowledge from Research Conducted During Design Cases.” [pdf] that included the six phases Define, Discover, Synthesize, Construct, Refine and Reflect. The design agencies IDEO (Observation, Brainstorming, Prototyping, Implementation) and frog design (Discover, Design, Deliver) use similar models. The model is also very similar to the international standard ISO 13407 Human-centered design processes for interactive systems.

1. Identifying needs and establishing requirements for the user experience

2. Developing alternative designs that meet those requirements

3. Building interactive versions of the designs

4. Evaluating what is being built throughout the process and the user experience it offers

In the report from the “HCI 2020″ forum organised by Microsoft Research, they suggest splitting the first activity in the life cycle into two and promote the conceptual analysis normally part of the first activity to its own. The goal is to ensure a focus on human values and ascertain what kinds of enduring value the user will get from using the system.

This kind of analysis then does not just take into account people’s interactions with computer technology, but looks at their interactions with the everyday world more broadly: in the environment, with everyday objects, with other people, as well with the hi-tech elements of their world.

One of the areas I plan to focus on during my degree is the role of emotions in interaction design. How to ensure the pleasurability (joy of use) goals receive the same attention as the standard usability goals (efficient, effective, engaging, error tolerant and easy to learn) in a design project. I believe the increased focus on human values in the design life cycle can be a big step towards that.

As I work my way through the reading list I’ll create new posts and expand on each of the UCD principles and ID activities above.

In an ideal world I would not have to spend any time thinking about backing up my data. Everything would be stored online ‘in the cloud’ and accesible for me from anywhere on any device that supported the data format. I would trust the companies storing the data not to lose it. I believe it will not be many years until this ideal scenario is reality, but in the meantime I need an easy and automated backup strategy. Easy in terms of time and complexity to set up and automated in terms of low to zero maintenance.

Scenario

I have a MacBook Pro (MBP) which I use as my only machine for work and play. I carry it to and from my office every day. I have wifi at home with a Drobo disk array attached to my router. At work I have an external harddrive which is always plugged in when I’m at my desk. The external harddrive is formatted in two partitions. One at the size of my MBP harddrive and one that takes up the remaining space.

Solution

My solution is a three-fold backup strategy

• Incremental back-ups

  When my MBP is connected to my external harddrive at work Apple Time Machine automatically makes incremental backups every hour to one of the partitions. When the partition is full Time Machine will overwrite the oldest content first. If I ever delete a file by accident I can quickly go into Time Machine and restore the latest version. Any content I might create at home will automatically be updated in Time Machine the next time I’m at work.

• Full system recovery back-up

  SuperDuper! is set to make a bootable backup of my system every day at 3pm (or when I’m next connected) to the other partition on my external harddrive at work. Since it is possible to do a full system restore from TimeMachine this step is to some degree redundant and actually only serves to have a bootable backup (which TimeMachine is not). If my MBP crashed I could grab another one, plug in the external hard drive and boot.

• Archived data back-up

  All my archived data (photos, music, documents from previous jobs etc) are stored on my Drobo at home. The Drobo is a disk array that protects against disk failure. The data on the Drobo is backed up to CrashPlan Central which is an online backup solution. If the Drobo is stolen or my house burns down I’ll be able to download all my archived data from CrashPlan Central. There are many alternatives to CrashPlan Central, such as Mozy and Carbonite, but at the time of writing CrashPlan Central was the only one accepting backups from a network attached drive (NAS) at an affordable price.

All this is automated and runs in the background without me having to initiate anything. No DVDs to burn and store and no wasted time copying data to an external harddrive to store at a friends house. When bandwidth become faster (my capped upload speed means the initial upload to CrashPlan Central is going to take weeks) I can see a situation where I get rid of the external harddrive and the Drobo and solely use an online service that runs in the background and backs up everything in real time.

My friend and former eBay colleague Azita Qadri is working with start-ups to find them high calibre part-time candidates. In 2007 she set up the company Eat Your Cake to help professional mothers balance their career and family by job-sharing. She has later specialised in part-time roles in start-ups. I did the logo development and branding for Eat Your Cake and designed and built the website. It is still one of the projects I’m most proud of.

Learn more about Eat Your Cake and how they can help you find a part-time role or job-share.

Download The Guardian “Flexible Working” supplement [pdf] from 20 January 2010