A few days after attending the first HighWire workshop on Physicality this HighWiree took off to go to the Pervasive conference. This is one of the premier ubiquitous computing conferences and on the first day ran a series of workshops. I attended “Energy Awareness and Conservation through Pervasive Applications.” This is a very specific domain and the likely HighWire project resulting from the Physicality workshop will not be in the area of energy awareness, efficiency or tackling fundamental problems like algorithm efficiency. The common ground of these workshops for me being the mobile and ubiquitous computing they hoped to exploit.

Despite the different areas of work, the aims of both workshops were similar, to define a research agenda for those involved. The approach taken by each workshop was very different and both generated plenty of ideas and inspiration.

The Physicality workshop introduction set the fun and playful mood to be carried through the project. Creating craft representations of facets of ones personality broke the ice rather than the now tired introduction of name and short background bio.

Introductions at Perasive were the more formal name, where from and interests. Prof. Giulio Jacucci, the organiser and presenter did try to make this a little more exciting with a favourite food or fun fact.

After the introductions at Pervasive the rest of the morning was taken with presentations of accepted papers to be published in a special edition of PsychNology. Jon Bird of the Open University presented the Change Project more specifically “The Pulse of Tidy Street.” Followed a project describing how devices can interact with Smart Meters using web technologies, fascinating for me as close to how I imagined my PhD would be perhaps a year ago. The last presentation by Duncan Wilson on the engineering firm Arup’s approach to sustainable cities.

The Highwire workshop included a presentation from Tinker to set the scene and give participants an idea of where this partner company is situated.

Post-its were used at the Highwire workshop to put ideas on boards on three typical areas that need to be addressed in any physical computing installation. That’s the methods of data capture and potential sources, imaginary, wacky and impossible included. The means of processing and transforming and means of output or interaction with the data.

At Pervasive the ever present post-it was also utilised but a more general comment on anything approach which were then condensed into three themes by a few volunteers. After lunch we broke-up into three groups to tackle one of these emergent themes. I set out to a local cafe with James Scott, Jörn Loviscach and Matthias Betz armed with a pen and a couple of pieces of A3 paper. Initially we tried to find common ground but quickly each person lead off into their own area. This proves how broad this particular area is and finding an agreed overall research imperative and set of questions may be impossible. Governance plays as much a part as technological research challenges.

The Physicality workshop kept people on topic after lunch with an exercise in making something and part way through proceedings swapping the topic the team had to discuss.

Both workshops were concluded with a presentation from these groups. Looking back on both of these proves designing a workshop is as much an exercise in managing levels of disagreement and with them different agendas as generating that buzz around a particular theme.

Last week we hosted the first Ideas Factory workshop at HighWire. Some of my colleagues have already written about what happened on the day and some of the outcomes that we had. I also want to reflect on our experience, but I would like to look back to the planning aspects of the workshop and what we have learned from it.

We were given a week to organise the workshop and the advice from our tutor was to think of the planning of the workshop in terms of experience and interaction design. In practical terms, it meant the emphasis of our planning was on the activities that people would be engaging in during the day, how the activities could be linked to each other and also the atmosphere and mood that would persuade and motivate people to be involved and take part.

We started by trying to decide what we wanted to achieve from the day as well as what each participant could take away that would inspire them to engage in our project. As we were still in the early stages of the research, having a clear idea of outcomes were difficult and perhaps, counter-productive. The project is in a divergent phase where we were trying to identify themes, areas and context of the research as well as define the research questions we will be answering through our project. Our objectives with the workshop were to gain insight and ideas, introduce the project to an audience of possible collaborators and start establishing working relationships for the next stages of the project. Also, we wanted it to be a day when we and our guests had some fun.

What followed was an exercise in how far we could stretch our imagination. We discussed and imagined what the liked the activities to be. When ideas first appeared they were vague, but as we discussed we were able to develop a very detailed picture of the event and including even how things should be positioned in the room so activities would flow from one to the other. We didn’t focus on content and we hoped that the ideas that would emerge would be unexpected, and in order for that to happen we had to imagine how to create situations that allowed for new modes of thinking and new connections to be made. I was surprised by how the experience design approach allowed us to get to the minimal details in planning how the day was going to develop. The difference from my previous experiences in organising events was on focusing on the interactions and activities rather than on the resources (such as materials, time and location). Of course we had to think of the resources eventually, but making the decisions of what we needed was simple once we had a vision and a feel of what the workshop was about.

Much of the thinking that we employed in the planning of the workshop reminded me of the article ‘Incomplete by Design or Designing for Incompleteness’ (Garud, Jain, & Tuertscher, 2008). It is a way of designing that breaks with the problem-solving approach that has been associated with design for a long time. What we designed was not a finished product or a solution. It was something that only ‘took shape’ and only existed while people are interacting with it. What we designed was a way for people to interact. At times I felt like we were creating a theatre performance, were we gathered the actors, provided them props and scenery, but not a script. The juicy bit we were interested on was what the participants would make of it.

In hindsight, tackling the workshop as an experience design project meant to design the structure of the activities and the system that need to be in place for people to get the most out of the day, but not the outcomes. That was the biggest challenge of this event: finding the right balance of control. As a research project we wanted to find out things that we didn’t already know. The risk of planning the activities too closely was that we could end up designing the results. It was important to be in control of the situation as they evolved during the day, planning every minute and interaction and keeping track of time but not to control the participants. By allowing freedom to participants to get the best outcomes for our project, we were able to harvest unexpected new ideas that we will now see develop in the next stages of our research project.

Garud, R., Jain, S., & Tuertscher, P. (2008). Incomplete by Design and Desiging for Incompleteness. Organizational Studies , 351-371.

HighWire recently held an Ideas Workshop with Alex Deschamps-Sonsino CEO of Tinker London. The workshop was the first of a coming series of workshops related to an emerging HighWire project involving Richard Wood, Graham Dean, Natasha Carolan & Marcia Smith. This project is focused on (broadly speaking) physical computing, interaction design, physicalisation of data and emotive and persuasive design.

The day was pitched as an ideas factory, to encourage idea generation, exploration of the domains of interest and networking between the relevant disciplines. Given our ongoing dedication to playfulness the day was designed to entertain and inspire each participant. With guests including Folly CEO Taylor Nuttall, Imagination Lancaster and the Computing and Management schools in Lancaster we started the day by creating teams through drawing keys out of bowl at random, a starting point which set up a playful and provocative atmosphere.

Yesterday marked the first of a series of workshops being run by the team here at HighWire and despite some early morning apprehension and what could generally be aligned to last minute “jitters” the day was a resounding success. From our end at least. The aim of the day, which is now much clearer in hindsight, was to explore how academics, students and industrial partners viewed and interacted with their data. In a word, physicality. For this workshop we split the subject into three sections: Data, Transformation and Physicality.

In the context of this workshop, Data is the raw information in the “loop”. It is a name, a bus route or the length your hair has grown since you last had it cut. It can both define and be defined by a physical embodiment. Imagine it in the context of Twitter and Data would be the “Tweet”.

For us, in geek speak, Transformation is the “middleware”. It’s the bit in between Physicality and Data that enables interaction between the two. It is the Arduino’s, the API’s, the PHP script and the “Code Monkey” bashing feverishly away at the keyboard to make it all work. Take Twitter again and the Transformation would be Twitter itself. For us, Physicality is about Data being physically represented in a sometimes playful and emotive manner. There are many great example of physical objects being controlled, adjusted or made interactive by using them in conjunction with data. A notable couple would be Tinker’s “Rewind” project and Mathieu Lehanneur’s “Therapeutic Objects”. Once again using the example of Twitter, Physicality could be a man, woman, or even a machine (I often have a tendency to default to technology), physically writing out each Tweet.

In each of these areas we then asked the participants to identify things that they were either doing, wanted to do or perhaps thought were impossible. This was done with trusted Post-It notes and appropriately titled boards.Next we asked the participants, over lunch (we’ve learnt that it is treacherous ground to ask academics anything on empty stomachs), to identify ideas posted on the boards that they felt particularly fell into one of five key areas. Those areas were: “Count Me In” – enabling us to identify potential points of collaboration and/or expertise. “Impossible” – looking for inspiration, we wanted to find the areas that the participants believed were impossible. After all, we do like a challenge. “Done to Death” – Where did the participants believe their was a sense of “overkill”, that the technology or society had moved on or that there were simply more exciting things to be doing. “Reference” – Where participants had prior knowledge of idea and thoughts we wanted them to share references that we could then follow up and Finally we wanted the participants to annotate anything that they believed was “Bright and Exciting”, that one is fairly self explanatory really. After lunch a series of activities designed to entice creativity and divergent, “unstagnated” thinking aimed to build on the playfulness of the day and potentially inspire us with a project direction we had not thought of. But that is another blog post all together.

So that brings me full circle, back to the title of this post – Physicality and the “Done to Death” Pile. At the end of the workshop we began to muse over what we had discussed, discovered and played with during the day. The “Done to Death”’s, a “pile” we had used during the workshop to help us remove the mundane, overused buzzwords from the list of potential key areas. One in which we had payed little attention or interest to, it was highlighted as an unexpected area of interest. So, here they are, listed below:

NB: It is important to note that the following list is subjective and only really based on interest levels

Data

• Search
• Social Networks
• Heart Beat

Transformation

• Google
• Walls for Graffiti

Physicality

• RFID
• GPS Tracking
• Wearable Sensors
• Sensor Tech
• Fridge that shouts at you
• Computer Vision
• Robots

Although, granted, each of the above points have interesting aspects or offshoots well worth exploring, the collective consensus of the workshop group, ruled them out. For me, this highlights the difference between academia and the commercial world and perhaps where they fail to communicate sufficiently. What commercial enterprises find interesting or perhaps a solution to a problem, may already be “old hat” in academic institutes. This is precisely where HighWire is supposed to fit in. Breaking down the ivory towers of academia and dispersing what we learn into industry and doing it quickly. To quote one academic at the workshop, “just get something out there”.