Click this if you Dan!
This week’s blog post is about my research interests in HCI. Tough one actually because by the time of this writing I still haven’t figured out completely what I am going to do for my MRes project. However, through the set of readings that we have done so far along with the exchange of knowledge activities we do in John’s class, I guess HCI is starting to be more clear to me and to be honest so far, I have been quite interested in the ubiquitous computing aspect of it and the weiser’s vision around it the most.
As for my research interest, coming from a computer science background and music as well, I am inspired to try and combine both of my knowledge into an MRes project and hopefully expanding it to phd one.
I believe that music and technology has been explored in many different areas but not quite often the HCI, thus I find it a great opportunity to go deeper into this field an investigate what can be done. To be a bit more specific, I would like to see how music and technology could be combine to improve the quality and experience of music education in music collages and specifically the Lebanese one where I have been studying for a long time and have experienced it ins and outs.
I picked “CAITLIN: A Musical Program Auralisation Tool to Assist Novice Programmers with Debugging” by Paul Vickers and James Alty [1] for this week’s reading because It sheds the light on an important area in HCI which is the sound element.
Dan Welsh
As I was asked to find more about Dan’s research interests, so we had a small chat during Gabber about each other’s interests. I am going to share with you what I grasped from Dan’s talk…
Dan’s interest within HCI revolves around the ethical and consensual side that is associated with pervasive technology. In fact, consent in technology is a big thing yet it is more often to be ignored and most of the time due to its poor design like for example in computer software, the terms and conditions are almost all of the time never read by users and it is not their fault to be honest, but to the bad way of doing it I believe.
A couple of months ago, a group of people in Norway, had a campaign where they spent more than thirty hours reading out loud the terms and conditions for a set of apps, indicating how it could be an impossible task to do and how people tend to give their consensus to apps anyway to avoid the nearly impossible task.[2]
Therefore, as Dan puts it that, consent in technology is a big thing yet being ignored, so we should be designing for that. Moreover, he is looking into this for his project about dementia and how to get users consensus in a natural unobtrusive way. He mentioned something interesting during his Gabber about using some form of a tangible interface which can manage user’s consensus and I am really looking forward to seeing it in action.
I chose “Safe walking technology for people with dementia: what do they want?” by Kristine Holbø et al.[3] for Dan as it is about using technology to help people with dementia by looking into how do people with dementia want safe walking technology to be from their perspective and thus they created a set of participatory design workshops in order to figure out the best configurations that fits their needs. Moreover, the author mentions how such interventions could be looked at from a pervasive perspective the potential for disempowerment and objectification of care receivers, but he also argues that giving people tools which help them help themselves is in fact a source of empowerment.
References
[1]. Vickers, Paul and Alty, James (1996) CAITLIN: A Musical Program Auralisation Tool to Assist Novice Programmers with Debugging. In: ICAD ’96 Third International Conference on Auditory Display, 4-6 November 1996, Palo Alto, CA. Research Link: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/11279/
[3]. Kristine Holbø, Silje Bøthun, and Yngve Dahl. 2013. Safe walking technology for people with dementia: what do they want?. In Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Article 21 , 8 pages. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2513383.2513434
Leave a Reply Cancel reply