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UCF EEL 6788 - Technology Probes

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ABSTRACTKeywordsINTRODUCTIONBACKGROUNDDEFINITIONDISTINGUISHING FEATURESIMPLEMENTATIONMESSAGE PROBEHardware and SoftwareDesignProbe Deployment – U.S. FamilyProbe Deployment – Swedish FamilyConclusionsVIDEOPROBEHardware and SoftwareDesignProbe Deployment – French FamiliesEMERGING DESIGNSFamily CoordinationFamily PlayfulnessCONCLUSIONSACKNOWLEDGMENTSREFERENCESFt. Lauderdale, Florida, USA • April 5-10, 2003 Paper/Short Talks: Domesticated Design Technology Probes: Inspiring Design for and with Families Hilary Hutchinson1, Wendy Mackay2, Bosse Westerlund3, 1 Benjamin B. Bederson, Allison Druin, Catherine Plaisant, 2 Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Stéphane Conversy, Helen Evans, Heiko Hansen, Nicolas Roussel, 3 Björn Eiderbäck, Sinna Lindquist, Yngve Sundblad 1HCIL, UMIACS, CS University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 USA [email protected] 2LRI, INRIA Futurs Université de Paris-Sud 91405 Orsay Cedex, France [email protected] 3CID, NADA Kungl Tekniska Högskolan SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden [email protected] ABSTRACT We describe a new method for use in the process of co-designing technologies with users called technology probes. Technology probes are simple, flexible, adaptable technologies with three interdisciplinary goals: the social science goal of understanding the needs and desires of users in a real-world setting, the engineering goal of field-testing the technology, and the design goal of inspiring users and researchers to think about new technologies. We present the results of designing and deploying two technology probes, the messageProbe and the videoProbe, with diverse families in France, Sweden, and the U.S. We conclude with our plans for creating new technologies for and with families based on our experiences. Keywords Computer Mediated Communication, Home, Ethnography, Participatory Design and Cooperative Design INTRODUCTION In his book, Bowling Alone [22], Robert Putnam laments the loss of “social capital”– the interconnections we have with our family, friends, and neighbors – in American society. People participate in civic affairs less frequently, hardly know their neighbors, and socialize less often with friends. The HomeNet study at Carnegie Mellon [16, 17] indicates that computers and the Internet can contribute to this problem by isolating people from family and friends and increasing their daily stress levels. However, this study also suggests that when used for communication, computers and the Internet can play a positive role in keeping people connected – email, instant messaging, and family web sites are just a few of the ways the Internet helps keep people in contact. As a result of these conflicting outcomes, people continue to question the value of computer technology even as it permeates their daily lives more and more [25]. Given this skepticism, it is important to continue to explore if and how technology can be used to support communication with and awareness of the people we care about. In the last several years, there has been an increased interest in both academia and industry in designing technologies for homes and families (e.g. [9, 15, 19, 20]). Such design offers a number of interesting challenges. A huge diversity of ages, abilities, interests, motivations, and technologies must be accommodated. People are much more concerned about the aesthetics of technology artifacts in their home than at work [27], their values may influence their use of technology [26], and playful entertainment rather than efficiency or practicality may be the goal [6]. As part of the European Union-funded interLiving [13] project, we are working together with diverse families from Sweden, France, and the U.S. to design and understand the potential for new technologies that support communication among diverse, distributed, multi-generational families. Using a variety of established research methods from participatory design, CSCW, and ethnography, as well newer methods involving cultural probes [7] and our own technology probes, we have learned about the needs and desires of the families, introduced them to new types of technology, and supported them in becoming partners in the design of new technologies. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work forpersonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies arenot made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copiesbear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, orrepublish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specificpermission and/or a fee. CHI 2003, April 5–10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. Copyright 2003 ACM 1-58113-630-7/03/0004…$5.00. Volume No. 5, Issue No. 1 17Paper/Short Talks: Domesticated Design CHI 2003: NEW HORIZONS BACKGROUND One of the key objectives of the interLiving project is to experiment with different design methodologies. Each of the authors’ organizations has long-standing experience in participatory design [24], which remains the core strategy for the project. However, we each have different experiences and perspectives. Families, and the individuals within them, represent a new user group for all of us. interLiving provides us with the opportunity to examine our differences, draw from our collective backgrounds, and integrate the most effective approaches. One of our challenges is to develop new participatory design strategies in which family members can actively participate in the design of new technology. A typical HCI approach would be to interview the families, create a design, develop the technology and then test it to see what the families like or do not like. However, we would like to come up with methods that enable families to more directly inspire and shape the technologies that are developed. Our hypothesis is that this will lead to designs that will work better in the long run because they address families’ needs and/or desires better. We do not expect the family members to become designers, but we do want them to be active partners in the design process. If we only use the typical HCI strategy described above, we believe it might discourage active participation by users, as the design concept is already well established by the time the users see it. Their suggestions are likely to relate to details about the user interface and will not be fundamental contributions to the


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UCF EEL 6788 - Technology Probes

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