Phylosophy of HCI: Experiencement 1, Gaps of inactivity.

As this week's "experiencement" I decided to make a week of rides to work fully internet free.
The decision was not random: my apartment is fairly open-plan, meaning that me and my girlfriend work, cook and watch TV in the same space, so this experiment would be impossible from home.
Also, as I leave work at the same time as many colleagues, we usually take the bus back home chatting, so I wouldn't be able to really disconnect, at least not from the people around me.

The first day I failed miserably, and I'll tell you how. At first I thought that if I just sat down and "did nothing", stayed away from my phone and did not access any online or offline content, I'd be isolated.

But I did not count on my Pebble.

The Pebble is a smartwatch, that is, it's a connected computation device disguised as a watch. Most of the times it's innocently telling me the time and the weather. But it also shows me the number of unread emails, text messages and missed phone calls.
That alone wouldn't be a problem, if it was all the Pebble did. But it also buzzes a very perceivable vibration every time I get a Facebook message, a new email, an incoming phone call, a calendar alert, a WhatsApp chat.
This failure made me realize something very interesting that I had not noticed before: it's been almost one month that my phone has been on mute, as I no longer need audible notifications of anything, as the Pebble successfully eliminated this need for me. I'm hyperconnected, but in a way that's unobtrusive to other people around me.

It made me feel good.

In the second day, I left my "watch" behind. It allowed me to completely isolate myself from the internet, but not from ambient noise. It felt interesting to be immersed in the background buzz. I don't know if it's because of my long diagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder, but I'm quite used to daydreaming. I disconnect with the environment all the time, always going to my weird little internal, magical place. But by not being pulled back by constant notifications allowed me to go deeper into this, let's say, meditation.

On the third day, I wore headphones. Not with music playing, but just as a sort of earplug. It felt interesting to be in this extra sensory isolation. I almost dosed off, but not quite.

I traveled for 40 minutes in complete meditatory silence.

I must report that it felt a lot longer than using my phone.

By the way, talking about headphones, silence and background noise, I bumped into this while reading up for this post: John Cage composed a piece of music called 4'33" where he "performs" four and a half minutes of silence. Not pure silence, but that silence full of the little noises of day to day life. It's a beautiful thing, although you might not agree it's music. There's also an app now for you to record your own performance of 4'33" and to listen to other people "performing" it. I don't have an iPhone, so I couldn't try it.

But I'd love to.

Reading Assignment 2: Affective Diary

Affective Diary is the process of collecting information through the use of a portable computer (such as a mobile phone) and an array of sensors (cameras, biometric sensors etc) in order to make a detailed registry of all daily activities of a study's participant.

It is intimately related to the phenomenon of the Quantified Self Movement, on which I'm writing my thesis, so I thought this might be a good method on which to base at least some of my autoethnographic exploration of the topic.

The Affective Diary is, in a sense, an evolution of the blogging movement, which itself is an evolution of the need to keep diaries. While a person writing a diary has to remember, select and write down the data they wish to keep (or share, when blogging), the Affective Diary collects all: passive video capture, mobile context (GPS and GSM location, nearby wireless networks), mobile activity (calls, messages, emails), biometrics (heart rate, galvanic skin response, temperature, motion) and active capture (conscious decisions to note down a certain passage or to capture a picture, etc). It should also allow the user to capture emotions, that the system can the correlate to the context: happiness, gloominess, even hunger.

 Just like a diary, the Affective Diary is a good tool for self-reflection, but just like the diary, it can suffer from the WORN effect - Write Once, Read Never. While a diary can show itself useless because the self-editing can lead to the information you're looking for in the future not being captured, the Affective Diary suffers from the same effect for the opposite reason: too much uncategorized information can lead to an unreadable and unprocessable mass of information. 

It is also intimately related to sousveillance, the inverse of surveillance (sous meaning under while sur means over in French), the act of capturing video and audio of your environment (as well as other pieces of information). Sousveillance was a term coined by Steve Mann, who also invented Natural User Interfaces, High Dynamic Range photography, scratch input and many other HCI strategies.

In a sense,  the Quantified Self Movement, Affective Diaries and Sousveillance are different ways to look at the same phenomenon for different reasons: you sousveil to fight surveillance or to collect evidence (as in alibi sousveillance, where you generate evidence that no wrongdoing has taken place, like when installing a camera to your dashboard); you quantify to know more about your health and to understand the effects of your physical activities on your own body and you make an affective diary to keep track of your activities.

The Affective Diary was, not so long ago, a pipe-dream, impracticable because of the high price of the equipment involved and the extra weight. Nowadays it's much easier to make a comprehensive log with the stuff we already carry around and new products such as the fitbit and Google Glass are only expanding the capacity to collect more and more information about yourself and the environment, 24/7.

What remains constant is the researcher's capacity to analyse that data. The risk of the WORN effect is very big, the mass of information too impenetrable to process completely. Better tools and analysis strategies must be developed to make sense of all the information gathered through such methods, running the risk of turning all that collection moot.

References

Mann S, (2014). "Veillance: Beyond Surveillance, Dataveillance, Uberveillance, and the Hypocrisy of One-Sided Watching", Chapter 2, pp 32-45 in "Uberveillance and the Social Implications of Microchip Implants: Emerging Technologies", Michael MG and Michael K, editors, Information Science Reference

Machajdik, J, Hanbury, A, Garz, a, Sablatnig, R, (2011) "Affective computing for wearable diary and lifelogging systems: An overview" in "Proceedings of the ÖAGM / AAPR Workshop", Graz, Austria.

Ståhl, A, Höök, K, (2008). "Reflecting on the design process of the Affective Diary". In "Proceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: building bridges" (NordiCHI '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA,

Operation War Diary - Case Exercise

Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe, author of the seminal Wired article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing", was an attempt to explain the trend among internet companies in the first half of the 2000 decade of tapping into their own public for content. in a 2008 article for Convergence, Daren Brabhan of the University of Utah defined it as "an online, distributed problem-solving and production model".

Many different definitions exist, but in a nutshell, any initiative, network or service where content or other facet of the product(s) is/are created by the general public can be defined as a type of crowdsourcing. Many of these include gaming components (badges, scores, etc) to generate incentives to users.



Some examples:

Foursquare

A location-based social networking where users "check-in" to venues. The gamified interface drives users to input information on their favorite places, generating a comprehensive database of the best places in town that can be filtered by interest.

Reddit
A news and entertainment website where users generate the content, comment and also vote news stories up and down, effectively replacing all parts of the editorial team.

Quirky
A website where users create new products that the company later manufactures and sells. Users suggest products, vote for features and even choose the name, price and tag lines for the ones that finally go on sale.

Wikipedia

One of the most accessed websites in the world, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia created and maintained by it's own users, who edit articles, verify sources and self-regulate the behavior of their own colleagues.

Operation War Diary brings this approach to cataloging and categorizing the diaries of several British military units in the First World War. These diaries are part of the National Archives catalog and are being digitized as part of the 100th anniversary of the Great War.

Users get access to these digitized diaries and, in turn, tag the pages indicating what parts of the pages refer to which days, every time a person is mentioned (first name, last name, rank and reason for being mentioned), any time a given place is mentioned, to what category a given entry belongs etc. This information will enable the researchers at the National Archives to better index and analyse the content of all the diaries being digitized.

In Wikipedia, where user-generated content is directly available to other users and affects the experience. For this reason, there's need for moderation (reviewing, content control and reversion of modifications) to control the quality of the generated content. In Operation War Diary, the quality of the content is obtained through redundancy: as many different users will tag the same pages, the level of confidence on any given piece of content can be measured by how many users agree or disagree on it. This way, the more users collaborate, the more trustworthy the final content is.

References

Brabham, D.C. Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14(1), February 2008.

Howe, Jeff. The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Wired., 2006.

Deterding, S. et alli. "From game design elements to gamefulness: Defining "gamification"". Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference. pp. 9–15, 2011

Oomen, J., and Aroyo, L. "Crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage domain: opportunities and challenges." In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, pp. 138-149. ACM, 2011.

Pingback

http://ifi7167socialcomputing.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/first-assignment/

Evaluating the User Experience Reading 1: Virpi Roto’s User Experience Building Blocks

In this review, I analyse Virpi Roto’s User Experience Building Blocks, a paper written in 2006 on the need to better define User Experience as a means to be able to evaluate UX (as opposed to simply evaluate usability, as this is a limited approach that does not address user experience as a whole).

The text begins by exploring established definitions of User Experience, such as Norman’s and Jordan’s goals. By drawing parallels between those two and Nokia’s own definition, he comes up with certain levels of experience: behavioral (functionality, usability), visceral (pleasure) and reflective (pride). Personally, I feel quite vindicated because, as an Industrial Design student, I felt there was too much value being put on the reflective aspects of  modern design (image, beauty, the need to belong) as opposed to the Bauhaus ideals of functionality dictating design (which I also feel is a limited view of things). A tripod of behaviour, reflection and pleasure makes so much more sense to me as the domain where a balance must be stricken.

The author moves on to attempt to identify the building blocks of experience, all the components that influence the subjective feel that experience is. By exploring different authors, he lists components that exist in different levels of abstraction, such as Hassenzahl & Tractinsky user’s internal state (experiences and expectations), system and context and, in a much lower level, Arhippainen & Tähti’s user, social factors, cultural factors, context of use and product. From Forlizzi, he extracts the reference period, as UX can be analysed as a long, multi-temporal attitude which can, itself, be broken in much smaller perceptions and sensations.

Using Hassenzahl & Tractinsky high level of abstraction as a scaffolding, the author, through empirical evidence collected during his analysis of mobile browsers, derives his own building blocks of User Experience, as follows:

• System is everything with which the user interacts, products, objects, services, people and the infrastructure. It avoids the reductionist pitfall of equating usability with user experience by, instead of evaluating a single product, making it part of a whole that builds the experience, hence system.

• Context is built of external systems and objects that, although not part of the system, affect the User Experience. It begins in the physical context (humidity, temperature, luminosity etc.) to social context (expectations, culture), temporal context (period dedicated to the Experience) and task context (what part the system has in the greater whole of achieving a goal for the user).

• The User itself is the last block, as its expectations and personal experience (which affect and are affected by the social context) will affect the User Experience itself. Its mood has great effect on the final Experience as well, because s/he might have lowered patience (affecting the perceived temporal context). Last but not least, he moves away from the user’s internal state to list user’s physical factors, both temporary and permanent, as affecting the Experience (i.e. the user can have only one free hand at the time, or only possess one hand, or none).

Bibliography

• Arhippainen, L., Tähti, M. 2003, Empirical Evaluation of User Experience in Two Adaptive Mobile Application Prototypes. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia, Norrköping, Sweden.

• Hassenzahl, M., Tractinsky, N. 2006, User Experience – a Research Agenda. Behaviour and Information Technology, Vol. 25, No. 2, March-April 2006, pp. 91-97

• Forlizzi, J., Ford, S. 2000, The Building Blocks of Experience: An Early Framework for Interaction Designers. Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2000). New York City, USA

• Jordan, P.E. 2000, Designing Pleasurable Products. Taylor & Francis, USA.

• Norman, D. 2004, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Basic Books.
• Roto, V. (2006, October). User experience building blocks. In proceedings of 2nd COST294-MAUSE Workshop–Towards a Unified View (Oslo, Norway, 2006) (pp. 124-128).