About the Speakers:

Ron Wakkary and Audrey Desjardins will present on the recent work from the Everyday Design Studio at SIAT, SFU. As a group we investigate the changing nature of interaction design in response to everyday design and social practices such as home life, amateur experts, DIY, and sustainability. In particular, we research everyday creativity, design artifacts for research, and critical reasoning in design that leads to inquiries on new types of interaction design artifacts, materials, conceptual understandings, and methods. In the spirit of research through design, we aim to be reflective and generative, uncovering new and emergent practices of design and knowledge through the crafting of artifacts that help to shape both our understanding of design and its relations to technologies. In this talk, we will present on two papers we recently presented at CHI 2015, on a critical investigation of the genres and perspectives in HCI research on the home, and Aarhus 2015, on material speculations (see the abstracts below).

 

About the Talk: Investigating Genres and Perspectives in HCI Research on the Home:

----------

The home and domestic experiences have been studied from multiple points of view and disciplines, with an array of methodologies in the past twenty-five years in HCI. Given the attention to the home and the volume of research, what further areas of research might there be? Based on a critical analysis of 121 works on the topic, we present seven genres of domestic technology research in HCI: social routines in the home, ongoing domestic practices, the home as a testing ground, smart homes, contested values of a home, the home as a site for interpretation, and speculative visions of the home. We articulate dominant research perspectives in HCI, and we offer two complementary perspectives about how to investigate the domestic experience in future research: the material perspective and the first person perspective. 

Audrey Desjardins, Ron Wakkary, and William Odom. 2015. Investigating Genres and Perspectives in HCI Research on the Home. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3073-3082. 

 

Material Speculation: Actual Artifacts for Critical Inquiry

----------

Speculative and fictional approaches have long been implemented in human-computer interaction and design techniques through scenarios, prototypes, forecasting, and envisionments. Recently, speculative and critical design approaches have reflectively explored and questioned possible, and preferable futures in HCI research. We propose a complementary concept – material speculation – that utilizes actual and situated design artifacts in the everyday as a site of critical inquiry. We see the literary theory of possible worlds and the related concept of the counterfactual as informative to this work. We present five examples of interaction design artifacts that can be viewed as material speculations. We conclude with a discussion of characteristics of material speculations and their implications for future design-oriented research.

R Wakkary, W Odom, S Hauser, G Hertz, H Lin, Material Speculation: Actual Artifacts for Critical Inquiry, Aarhus Series on Human Centered Computing 1 (1), 12

Click here for video.