Reading Reflections

Andersen, K., & Wilde, D. (2012). Circles and Props – Making Unknown Technology. Interactions, 19(3), 60. Doi: 10.1145/2168931.2168944

This article has been based around an experiment called ‘The OWL Project’ whereby 12 participants of different ages have been brought into a room and asked to produce anything using ‘a selection of tools and various neatly organised recycled materials’. The participants don’t know what they are going to make in advance so it very much focuses on ‘thinking with your hands’.

In my opinion, I think that the idea is very unique and allows the participants to be creative in producing anything that they like providing the researchers with new ideas on how technology could be used in the future. Additionally, it appears to be a psychological experiment because the writers continuously discuss what the participants may be thinking which may be useful for developers when creating new products. However, I don’t think that it is that relevant to us because usually we would need to have an idea of what we want to create beforehand. The writers could have gone into more detail at the end to expand on their findings and final conclusions about the project which I felt was skimmed over. I think that the article is structured well with several headings but it is sometimes difficult to read due to technical language.

Gaver, B., & Bowers, J. (2012). Annotated portfolios. Interactions, 19(4), 40. doi:10.1145/2212877.2212889

The article describes how a team of designers spent time creating objects for people less exposed to technology, such as elderly people in a care home and nuns living in a convent. They designed these products for research in order to find out how people would react to them. It is interesting to see that visualisation was an important factor in the design of the products to give people an interface to look at whether it is photographs on the photostroller or news feed information on the prayer companion. Therefore, this highlights the importance of HCI when designing new products and that it should be appropriate for the target audience.

Personally, I sometimes found the article repetitive and difficult to read due to the over-complicated language style, for example, ‘myriad’, ‘semantic drift’, ‘salient', etc. Despite this, I felt that the section labelled ‘The Logic of Annotated Portfolios’ was particularly useful and relevant to us because it discusses the different factors that all designers need to consider before designing any new product. Furthermore, the idea of ‘annotated portfolios’ can be relevant to us as we need to consider how our annotations can mean different things to different people depending on the required audience.

Dörk, M., Bennett, P., & Davies, R. (2013). Taking our sweet time to search. … CHI 2013 Workshop on Changing Perspectives of Time …. Retrieved from http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&btnG=Search&q=intitle:Taking+Our+Sweet+Time+to+Search#1

The authors of this article suggest the idea that we should slow down and take more time
to carry out research. Nowadays, searching for something can be done in seconds but it
is all based on rankings. What I believe the authors are trying to say is that not everything
has an instant answer and that through using search engines like Google not all the
information will be relevant. We should perhaps take a step back and reflect on what it is
that we want to search for as well as our findings.

In my opinion, I think that the journal project could be an interesting idea whereby people
can track the path of their search and share it with others which could make it easier to
carry out tasks like writing a book. On the other hand, I think that although a different
approach to the subject of searching, I don’t necessarily agree with it because people
want to find information quickly and the authors don’t give much evidence of the types
of people who this may be more beneficial to. Overall, I think that the article is readable
and structured well with sub-headings. The abstract is really clear and gives a good
overview of what the article is about, and although the conclusion is short, they are simply
posing the question of whether we should take more time to search.

Laschke, M., Hassenzahl, M., & Brechmann, J. (2013). Overcoming Procrastination with ReMind. Proc. DPPI 2013, 77–85. doi:10.1145/2513506.2513515

This article presents a new approach to overcoming procrastination through the development of ReMind which is “a tangible, wall-mounted calendar/to-do-list-like object” allowing users to plot goals. As a tangible object, this therefore suggests that solutions don’t always have to be based on digital technology as the writer says that digital calendars and smartphone apps can help you keep a to-do-list but “they lack an understanding of procrastination”. The designers carry out a case study on an individual over the course of fifteen days to see how well ReMind would help her overcome her procrastination. I thought that it was interesting to find out exactly how it works and the way that the authors documented it was well-laid out and easy to read. Although I really like the concept, I personally don't think that ReMind is aesthetically pleasing on the wall but it poses a unique solution to tackle the prevalent issue of procrastination. Therefore, this article was really relevant to us as everyone procrastinates in life so this study offers an insight to ways that we could deal with it. The experiment was successful but they would need to carry out further studies to gain a better idea of whether it will work for other people with a more severe level of procrastination. Overall, in my opinion I think that the article is well-structured with clear sub-headings and it is readable.

Richardson, A. (1998). New Media , New Craft ? Electronic Art and Animation Calalogue, 157–159.

In this article, Richardson creates an argument to discuss whether programming should be seen as a craft and compares the similarities and differences between what is viewed as traditional craft and digital craft. Firstly, the author entices the reader to consider what ‘craft’ actually means because often people will automatically think about traditional forms of craft whereby materials can be touched and sculpted to create something. Personally, I agree with his conclusion that programming should be seen as a craft because like the traditional perspective, you have to be in a creative mind-set to be able to produce something from nothing. Furthermore, although code can be copied and distributed multiple times; people still change and sculpt it the way that they want it to run, thus each copied version becomes unique. It is important that you understand the material that you want to work with and its capabilities just like programmers would need to understand the coding language that they want to use. Overall, I think that at times the article can be difficult to read as it is written very formally but I like the fact that it is less theoretical than some of the other articles that I've read making it easier to identify key points.

Haque, U. (2007). Distinguishing concepts: Lexicons of interactive art and architecture. Architectural Design, 77(4), 24–31. doi:10.1002/ad.484

Osman Haque discusses in his article about how the original meanings of words have been lost over time, for example, he mentions the words: interactive, open source, the user, and public and private. He compares both the original and contemporary meanings to find interesting ways of looking at the words. However, it could be argued that this is not exclusive to technology/interactive art because many words in our language are changing their meaning yet in my opinion he makes it seem like it is. I think that it isn't always clear where the author is going and what he's trying to get at which is probably due to the complex language. Overall, I didn't find the article particularly interesting because it was difficult to read at times and personally I don't think the images link with what he's writing about very well.

David G. Hendry and Batya Friedman The Information School
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-2840

This article is about a design course which was run for ten weeks with students meeting up once a week for three hours. The main point of the article is that the writers are trying to show that students can come from completely different backgrounds but they all might have an interest in an aspect of design and want to develop more knowledge and skills to use it within their work. Therefore, they want to demonstrate that a design perspective course works in developing students' understanding on design. The Park Construction Kit and Manage My Meds activities sound interesting and I like the fact that they took a real-life problem and came up with a solution for Manage My Meds. Parts of the article are relevant to us because they tell the students that the focus is on the process and not the product which we have come to realise when documenting all of our work. Additionally, they emphasise the importance of reading design articles and then reflecting on them and picking out relevant parts to help with future projects which we now understand the importance of doing too. On the other hand, I think that the article sometimes goes into too much detail making it very long and at times it can be difficult to read due to complex language. However, the article is well-structured with clear sub-headings and tables.