December 3, 2019: Final Presentations

On our last day of class, students presented on their pilot projects and shared what they learned.

Donna: Exploring the “e” side of e-textiles

• Donna framed her project as research through/for design: to enhance current design tools for those working on sustainability in apparel.
• What materials are used to create e-textiles and how might they impact recyclability of clothing in the future? How might designers consider sustainable design practices? The focus was on e-textiles, or embedding technology in textiles, like Jacquard by Google.
• In a lab on campus, Donna tested materials by making a simple circuit using conductive tape, wool fabric, lithium coin, and an LED light.
• Among her conclusions was that we need to engage more actors in the prototyping to ensure the full lifecycle is considered.

Aadya: Towards Multimodal Interactions

• Aadya wanted to address ocular-centrism in daily interactions with digital interactions through a series of small studies for each sense. She focused on touch during her presentation.
• How can interactions with everyday technology be designed to effectively engage the senses beyond vision to create balanced, immersive and inclusive experiences?
• Touch is layered, social, and emotional. To explore this, Aadya and her group made a haptic prototype with four cells of solenoid actuators powered by an Arduino. They tested the prototype to see how people would react to just haptic sensations versus haptic and audio sensations.
• We have a long way to go before we can abstract haptic sensation (touch) and still communicate in the same way that we have with visual information. For example, participants said that they don’t expect to feel a heartbeat sensation on their arm.

Corine: Qualitative Measures of Wellness through Metaphor

• What role does recording qualitative measures of health play in wellness?
• Qualitative health journaling can contribute to better health outcomes.
• Corine started by doing an auto-ethnographic study of an unproductive week. She mapped the events of the week to see connections between a lack of self-care earlier in the week lead to burnout later in the week. Using this exercise, she created a vocabulary of nautical metaphors to describe how she felt.
• Next, she asked fellow masters students to report on their wellness by describing it using her metaphors. Students reported feeling in a fog, in the weeds, weighed down, on a tightrope, and so on. They shared that visualization allowed them to identify their feelings more quickly, and were ready to discuss how they were feeling after seeing visualizations.
• Corine concluded that there are limits of metaphors as a form of expression, and they are not universal. Going forward, she would like to help people create their own metaphors.

Cat: Visualizing from the Rhizome

• If data visualization creates ways of knowing, what happens when we make them from an alternative ways of knowing, ones that center the body?
• Cat’s project involved visualizing in-person community conversations. Designing for this context requires consideration for emotion, nuance, and embodied knowledge.
• One principle she applied is to use ecological metaphor to embrace other ways of knowing. Cat used the roots of old growth Eastern Hemlock trees to represent embodied data.
• Another principle was to show the interrelatedness of data. She used a visual form for portraying behavior, like cellular automata.
• The final principle was tot think of visualizations as temporary instances of what we know. She took this and applied it by showing uncertainty through the use of generative systems.
• Her conclusion: what if we moved from a question of what is data to a question of how is data? Next steps include visualizing data-feel.

Erica: Designing for Place

• Erica’s project consisted of a literature review on place, a place matrix on orientations to place, a place labyrinth, and a survey.
• Her matrix has four cells: on-place, with-place, of-place, and for-place.
• The labyrinth has four stages with exercises. There are clues that lead to passwords to access each exercise. The exercises consist of offerings or invitations. By the time you exit the labyrinth, you create a manifesto for yourself that includes some ethics of how we design about place now and in the future.
• Erica also conducted a survey among her digital nomad communities. The topic of the survey was how we find our ‘places.’ One insight from this research was that people were very interested in rooting, in designing for the places they inhabit.
• Her conclusion: this investigation has lead her to migration theory, travel, and digital nomadism as a fruitful set of entrance points into her study of place.

Jay: Exploring Gestures in Scale

• Most interactions we have with technology are confined to the hand. Jay explored different types of gestures and found that three types emerged: informative gestures, communicative gestures, and gestures shaped by technology or physical affordances.
• He used the body-storming method for his study. He asked participants to try different gestures and then to see which gestures would feel appropriate for interacting with smart home devices.
• He learned that when more body parts are engaged in gestures, the person expects a bigger change to be reflected in the feedback. When people swipe with the whole arm or entire upper body, they expect a greater change on the screen or in the space. Smaller gestures are expected to control things more precisely.
• There are common mental models for directions, though there are very different mental models of controlling gestures by participants.
• Public & Private: People care about how they appear to others, since gestures are social. Whether a user is controlling something that is noticeable to others or not is correlated to the scale of the gesture.
• Jay’s conclusion involved four principles to use in designing gestures: scale, direction, public/private, and scope.

Ema: Meataphors: Metaphors for Meat Consumption

• How might we expose existing metaphors to challenge them and create new metaphors behind meat to drive pro-social behavior change?
• To answer this question, Ema conducted a series of hour-long workshops with small groups of participants. First, participants reflected and deconstructed on expressions about meat consumption. Next, they described the values and meaning of the expression, and created an ad to communicate the expression. Then, they exposed the system by creating a mind map of the meat system. Finally, participants created a new story, made similes from their top words, and created an ad to reflect that story.
• Examples included “winner winner chicken dinner” to “together for all” and “people over profit,” and “beef up” to “meat is a bully: know the hands that fed you.”
• Going forward, Ema is interested in exploring how people might begin living with their new metaphors, and in conducting this workshop in non-Western contexts.

Hillary: Developing Racial Fluency for Collaborative Design Work

An excerpt of Hillary’s framework

• In the U.S., race shapes the experiences of all of us, but we learn not to talk about it. If we don’t understand these issues, design solutions can be narrow and short-term.
• Hillary used multicultural psychology; education, equity, and design thinking (equityXdesign); and participatory design and equity to ground her study.
• Her study built a framework of principles for progressing from awareness to knowledge to skills to action, each grounded in research and theory. For example, awareness includes political awareness, self-awareness, and reflection.
• Her next steps include finding examples of when or why knowledge of racism is important, and writing about the details of harms and opportunities as a facilitator.

Ulu: Building a culturally-informed visual language for technology

• Ulu works for a software engineering institute on campus, and has realized in the course of her work that there is not currently a good visual language for describing technology and technological research. In her project, she set about exploring this from a culturally informed perspective.
• She thought a lot about how the current set of imagery describing technology came to be this way. Experts default to talking to other experts, not to stakeholders. The more abstract an idea is, the harder it is to visualize.
• She first talked to experts about what’s important to them in their work. She asked them to frame it through the lens of talking to a Lyft or Uber driver. Next, she analyzed the conversations to identify the human concepts that moved beyond the concept of technology. She presented those concepts to people from non-Western contexts to find out what they would imagine.
• For example, one researcher spoke about protection in the context of cyber crimes. Ulu found that the idea of protection was most often tied to country. When she spoke to people from Mexico about this idea, they visualized images of shields.
• Going forward, Ulu would like to extend the study to additional participants from other contexts so that she can begin to develop a more informed visual language.

And that’s a wrap!