An interview with Dan Richardson

This week, a knowledge triangle was formed between myself, Reem Talhouk and Dan Richardson to share our experiences with HCI, and emerging research interests.

I interviewed Dan to discuss and explore these avenues of interest. Prior to pursing Digital Civics, Dan worked as a Research Assistant developing technologies for Open Lab, such as Skin Selfie, which is a cross-platform mobile application to track the progress of user’s skin conditions.

Dan was intrigued by the ideas around ubiquitous computing and embedded devices, and the impact these technologies have in a participants’ life that are not ordinarily associate with our technology, such as distributed learning. His primary interest is bridging the gap between communities’ attitudes and motivations towards learning and education through the use of technologies. His motivation for research was the large-scale impact his research of alternative technological-driven educational models can have, and how these can change the way individuals are motivated to learn.

Dan expressed an interest in the projects he has read within current HCI literature, although he identified that many papers did not explain the entire lifecycle of the project: “from inception to mass adaptation”, which he would be interested in exploring first-hand, including the challenges that arise at each stage.

Focusing on Dan’s educational interests and hands-on approach to projects I have identified two papers that would benefit him in his research:

1. “Motivation as a Lens to Understand Online learners: Towards Data-Driven Design with the OLEI Scale” , which attempts to understand users behaviour in MOOCs.
2. “Más Tecnología, Más Cambio? Investigating an Educational Technology Project in Rural Peru”, which is hands-on with industrial influence (lead author).

Outside of Open Lab, Dan should speak with René Kizilcec (lead author of first paper, and co-founder of Lytics) of Stanford University, whose focus is on participants motivations in various forms of education.

This week, I have identified two papers that are of interest to me, rather than one as the authors are within Open Lab:

1. Vines, J., Pritchard, G., Wright, P., Olivier, P., and Brittain, K. “An Age-Old Problem: Examining the Discourses of Ageing in HCI and Strategies for Future Research” . Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 22, 1 (2015).
2. Lindsay, S., Jackson, D., Schofield, G. and Olivier, P. “Engaging older people using participatory design”. In Proc. CHI ’12, ACM Press (2012), 119-1208.