Colin Dodds: Glancing at the Iceberg called HCI

This week we worked in learning triangles reflecting on all the reading and our learnings so far. I interviewed my CDT peer Colin Dodds on his experience of the HCI module and how the discussions are relating to his personal research interests.

To describe him in one sentence: He is a former Music and Audio Engineering lecturer from Scotland who would like to start a riot and who actually saved a puppy’s life last weekend. As I should find out during our conversation, he also has a strong interest in technology appropriation and thinking about technology on a level of lived democratizing cooperative processes.

 

Research Interests and Motivation

Colin says he is very new to the subject of HCI and he found a lot of the reading quite challenging to start with. However, he sees it as an opportunity to explore a new field and appreciates how the literature has opened up his view on design.

“If HCI is like the iceberg metaphor, for me I can just see the top and then, the more I read and the more I understand, the more I am exposed to the rest of it. But I am aware that I am just glancing at the top of the subject so far.”

Before the course he had some preconceptions of HCI research as being limited to technological details and direct interface issues (eg. having users clicking somewhere and see what happens). The reading has helped him gaining a far more holistic conception of technology usage. HCI’s third-wave turn to the wild and the pervasiveness, also includes seeing the “user” now more as a person who can autonomously decide if and how to appropriate a given technological design. For Colin this implies a political capacity of HCI and with it also a responsibility for designers to think more about how their artefacts will and could be used:

“Every time we introduce technologies we maybe think about one specific use instead of looking at how it might be used by the people. Will it be for good or for bad? And that might have an impact on why we actually choose to release a technology or not. […] So I think that evaluating the technologies or trying to pre-evaluating is a really interesting topic.”

As stated before, Colin’s background is in teaching audio engineering. It might be therefore that he is struggling a bit seeing the relevance for research on tangibles. In his experience, existing interfaces such as GUIs, mouse and keyboard are good enough to work with and make most people happy. He also gave a concrete example referring to products which came on the market when audio engineering moved from the old big mixing tables on to the computer. These products tried to replicate the old tangible mixing interfaces with knobs and controllers in order to provide an interface which the engineers were used to. However, these never got much used.

While Colin uses the initial time of the CDT as a time of exploration and tries to keep open for any ideas and new topics, he has some project ideas in the context of amateur audio-mixing. The traditional long trial-and-error learning process which relies on feedback from an expert teacher resembles a classic interface problem which Colin would like to improve by providing a web platform for supportive communities of practice. Future reading on support networks and technology appropriation would therefore be relevant for him. But also the political implications of design in terms of explicitly perceiving design as an interventionist act could be interesting for him.

My Paper Recommendations for Colin

1. Barbara Grimpe, Mark Hartswood, and Marina Jirotka. 2014. Towards a closer dialogue between policy and practice. Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems – CHI ’14: 2965–2974. http://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557364
2. Glenda Amayo Caldwell and Marcus Foth. 2014. DIY Media Architecture: Open and Participatory Approaches to Community Engagement. MAB ’14 Proceedings of the 2nd Media Architecture Biennale Conference: World Cities, 1–10.
   http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2682884.2682893

Chat Recommendation

I think Colin could benefit from a chat with Ben Swift, a computer science research fellow at the Australian National University, who has been working a lot with music and live coding within the HCI field. Two of his publications were titled “Engagement networks in social music-making” and “Becoming-sound: affect and assemblage in improvisational digital music making”.