Where Jay sees himself in HCI

For this week’s blog I interviewed Jay Rainey to understand his interests in the field of HCI and what he finds challenging. Jay studied computer science and worked in software engineering of packages used for scientific research. He also worked as a research assistant and developed software for behavioral change related to food and alcohol.

He considers the use of ubicomp and embedded systems in our daily lives to be the most interesting part of HCI. He finds it interesting because it can have a broad impact. He also finds participatory design for behavioral change. He also pointed out that the whole point of ubicomp is to have design a system that is invisible to the uses therefore it is tough to do so with a participatory design approach.

Jay found that the most challenging and confusing part of HCI to be the overlap of interdisciplinary fields with the field of HCI. This makes it challenging to balance the technical side with other methodologies. He questions when should the line be drawn between designing for one community to make a significant impact and designing for generalizability, scalability and reusability of a technology.

His emerging research interest lies in designing technologies for aging populations, as it is a large sub-population of our population with specific needs that need to be addressed. He is interested in finding ways to bring the elderly together and bridge their skills and knowledge with other people within the society. He is also interested in exploring the role of voice in these technologies. He would like to learn more about cross-cultural designs that allow the elderly to learn about other cultures.

Based on the interview I recommend the following two papers :

1) Oard, D. W. (2003, April). Multilingual access to large spoken archives. InProceedings of the tenth conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics-Volume 1 (pp. 1-2). Association for Computational Linguistics.

2) Colonius, I., Budde, S., & Annicchiarico, R. (2010, August). Participatory design for challenging user groups: a case study. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (pp. 339-340). ACM.

I think that Jay should meet Barbara Beskind, a pioneer in designing innovations for the elderly. She currently works in IDEO, an international design and consulting firm founded in Palo Alto, California. The following BBC article has interviewed her http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/19/377702882/at-90-shes-designing-tech-for-aging-boomers

I am interested in reading the following article in the future:

1) Racadio, R., Rose, E. J., & Kolko, B. E. (2014, October). Research at the margin: participatory design and community based participatory research. InProceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Industry Cases, Workshop Descriptions, Doctoral Consortium papers, and Keynote abstracts-Volume 2 (pp. 49-52). ACM.

One Response to "Where Jay sees himself in HCI"

Jay Rainey says:

November 23, 2015 at 7:56 pm

Hi Reem,

I found both papers you suggested to be very interesting, practical in their areas of interest, though they are quite short and lacking details. I have written a short review of each below for others who may be interested in these papers.

1) Oard, D. W. (2003, April). Multilingual access to large spoken archives. InProceedings of the tenth conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics-Volume 1 (pp. 1-2). Association for Computational Linguistics.

This paper provides an insight into archiving large datasets of multilingual oral histories from across 57 countries. The primary goal of this paper is to explore and develop solutions to automatically index contents currently in the archives, to support searching and exploration across the dataset. I will continue to explore speech processing for my personal project by continuing conversations with Colin [cite], our resident audio expert!

2) Colonius, I., Budde, S., & Annicchiarico, R. (2010, August). Participatory design for challenging user groups: a case study. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (pp. 339-340). ACM.

This paper designs a system for older participants who are suffering from cognitive deficits. An interactive design approach is taken with a prototyping phase to engage end-users to ensure the system meets their needs. It was interesting to see how domain experts interacted and designed for unfamiliar areas, and how they incorporated end-users into the design process.

I think that Jay should meet Barbara Beskind, a pioneer in designing innovations for the elderly.

Talking with her and hearing her opinion on design would be fascinating, although I think meeting her will be quite difficult. I read the article you suggested and listened to her radio interview too – a fascinating person. It is interesting that she uses her life experience and knowledge of her peers (older generation) to focus the design to their needs. This illustrates that collaboration with domain experts is rewarding for the designer, and the artifact produced.

Last week you reflected on interviewing me and created four “next step actions” that would benefit me in future research. Having reflected on these proposed actions, I have set out plans to meet two over the next two weeks, and the other two during my MRes project, and buildup to it, which I will discuss in detail for each below.

Talk to Clara about the use of voice in projects.

You noted that it would be worthwhile discussing my personal project idea with Clara as she (and others in the lab) has experience with voice acquisition and research in that area. I agree that this was an excellent suggestion, however, I will pursue this informally with Clara (the next time I see her) as it is a pet-project, which I have not formulated or thought about deeply.

Talk with Dave Chatting about designing for specific users and the generalizability of methodologies and processes.

This was my favorite suggestion, and I really appreciated the family rituals 2.0 booklet you gave me. I think the design space Dave is working in to be fascinating as the artifacts produced have a direct impact on family life, and solve relatable problems, much like our Digital Civic research.

As for your suggestion, I will chat with Dave about the methods and processes that were used when designing the systems I was interested in.

Shadow someone doing participatory design and read participatory methodologies.

This suggestion encompasses several actions, and I have decided to focus on improving my understanding of participatory methodologies as you suggested. To do this, I will read three papers over the next two weeks that focus on participatory methods (any suggestions welcome, otherwise I will explore this avenue myself).

For my MRes project, I will involve participants in workshops to explore their needs and gain perspective for the design process. Before that, I will be involved in other participatory activities to prepare myself for such workshops.

Meeting elderly, elder councils, and visit care homes.

Although this action is several in one, it can be generalized to “meet participants and better understand their needs”. Having discussed my future MRes project with John, it is likely that will work with these groups in the future. Setting up meetings with them now over the next two weeks, without a clear purpose would be difficult, so I will put this action off to the future.

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