I went to a presentation today given by Bill Gaver at the IT centre at Melbourne University. From the email brief describing the presentation:

As digital devices pervade our everyday lives, the scope of issues addressed by Human-Computer Interaction is growing and changing. We need to understand people’s attitudes and emotions as well as their needs and goals; we need to consider how to make technology delightful and desirable as well as useful and usable; and we need to investigate how technology can help us explore and reflect as well as solve problems and perform tasks. Design and the arts suggest new approaches for HCI that can address these issues, complementing more traditional, science and engineering-based approaches. In this talk, I describe new paradigms for HCI with examples of innovative information appliances and ubiquitous computing systems we have built.

It was great to be able to follow up Terence Rosenberg’s earlier reference to Gaver’s work with ‘cultural probes’. These two are colleagues at in the design department at Goldsmiths. Gaver is involved with the equator IRC initiative.

Gaver provided in the presentation a insight into the process behind the ‘cultural probes’. Following, is my own notes of the talk. The important underlying concept that Gaver covered in the introduction is the pursuit of ambiguity in interaction design. I note the reference to these books in relation to ambiguity again provided by Rosenberg.

1. The design team produces a kit of tasks that are designed to engage individuals within varying communities. Adverts are placed to invite participants. Some care goes into the kit items, like for example the use of high quality crafted materials that make the tasks intriguing and of interest. Alongside, introducing these kits into the chosen community ‘design documentaries’ are also carried out as part of gathering ideas mainly from an ethnographic perspective. An example shown was the video documentation of eastern european strawberry pickers, including both observations and interviews.

2. The next phase is ’sketches’, the generation of design ideas. These seem to loosely involve taking disconnected ideas from the probes, in other words the connection between the probes and the design is not direct or literal. In fact often other ideas seemed to be thrown into the mix like influences from artists for example, but the starting point in the example discussed seemed to come from a probe outcome.

3. Next, a design prototype is developed as part of exploring the chosen sketch. In the first example shown a terabyte of aerial imagery recorded from a low flying airplane is made available to the viewer through a porthole in the top of a table. This prototype involved a lot of computerised gadgetry packed into the body of the table.

4. The final phase involved taking the table back out to community where the original ideas came from - letting in this instance, individuals of a household engage with the table over time. An objective is to allow plenty of time for the user to ‘play’ with the prototype. The engagement is again documented through a number of different processes involving differing people from varied fields. A ethnographic note taker, a video documentary-maker. The HCI design is also made ambiguous in this prototype, where the use of the table is not made clear with the aim to see what may occur. In the mapping table for the user to navigate through the aerial footage, the table top is set up like a bevelled nautical compass. Weighted objects have to be placed on the table to move over the landscape. The participant shown in the video documentation used rocks of varying sizes and weights, along with reference maps to navigate the footage. Over time this person developed some subtle interaction techniques of their own as part of engaging with the prototype.

In conclusion, a practice-led design process that employs a very open, poetic approach as part of producing user-generated interaction design outcomes.