Ph.D. Defense: Situating Engagement: Ubiquitous Infrastructures for In-Situ Civic Engagement
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Ph.D. Defence at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University on May 7, 2013. Abstract: Mobile phones and other situated technologies offer new possibilities to engage us citizens in urban planning activities while on the go, on our daily routes and routines. Matthias Korn has studied how to support people in participating in planning discussions while out and about and in close proximity to the sites of discussion. Experience from a number of software and hardware prototypes deployed in the field has led him to argue that mobile technologies afford a better integration of civic engagement activities into our everyday lives by offering opportunities to participate when such topics are most relevant and most present to us. In doing so, Matthias Korn seeks to promote 'situated engagement', that is, to support civic engagement activities in those spatial contexts that are at stake in urban planning. Situated engagement complements existing forms of engagement such as polls, town hall meetings, or consensus conferences, because it connects discussions to the places of our daily life that are personally meaningful and relevant to us. The PhD degree was completed at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Participatory Information Technology (PIT), Aarhus University.
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Ph.D. Defense: Situating Engagement: Ubiquitous Infrastructures for In-Situ Civic Engagement
- 1. Defense MATTHIAS KORN AARHUS UNIVERSITY MAY 7, 2013 PhD SITUATING ENGAGEMENT: UBIQUITOUS INFRASTRUCTURES FOR IN-SITU CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
- 2. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 CONTRASTING USES OF MOBILE TECHNOLOGY Leisure & Entertainment Political Movements 2 / 18
- 3. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 MOTIVATION âşâŻUbiquity of mobile phones in everyday life (de Souza e Silva, 2006; de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012; Farman, 2012) âşâŻNew practices of locating things and people around us (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011; de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012) âşâŻUbiquitous computing as a potential shared access medium (Dourish & Bell, 2011; Weise et al., 2012) âşâŻNew forms of participation => Supporting local neighborhoods and communities 3 / 18
- 4. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 SITUATED ENGAGEMENT âşâŻTo engage people where they are âşâŻTo âsituateâ civic engagement in the local places of personal interest âşâŻAny action is always already situated, âcontingent on speciďŹc, unfolding circumstancesâ (Suchman, 1987/2007) => To situate engagement in the right contexts âşâŻTo better interweave participation with citizensâ everyday lived experience âşâŻDiďŹerent means to contribute in diďŹerent situations 4 / 18
- 5. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 AGENDA âşâŻMotivation âşâŻSituated Engagement âşâŻMethod âşâŻ2 Design Experiments âşâŻMethodological Challenges âşâŻIndividual Contributions âşâŻSumming Up âşâŻConclusion 5 / 18
- 6. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 METHOD Experimental, exploratory and designerly (Brandt & Binder, 2007) 1.⯠Research Through Design (Zimmerman, Forlizzi & Evenson, 2007; Zimmerman, Stolterman & Forlizzi, 2010) 2.⯠Participatory Design (Bjerknes, Ehn & Kyng, 1987; Greenbaum & Kyng, 1991; Simonsen & Robertson, 2013) 3.⯠Prototyping (Lim, Stolterman & Tenenberg, 2008; Bødker & GrønbĂŚk, 1991) 6 / 18 ..og forklarer borgerne hvordan de kan underbygge deres foreslag endnu bedre Kommunen har et problem.. PlanlĂŚggeren markerer alle byggegrundende pĂĽ et kort General Møller ser opslaget og fĂĽr en idĂŠ.. men Hanne har en anden idĂŠ.. Jeg kunne nu godt tĂŚnke mig at det blev brugt i den lokale park PlanlĂŚggeren gennemser nu alle foreslagene Hvad skal vi gøre med al den her grus?! Vi kan ikke bare smide den ud! Vi kunne godt bruge det grus i vores lejr!
- 7. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 DESIGN EXPERIMENTS 7 / 18
- 8. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 MOBILE DEMOCRACY 8 / 18
- 9. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 IN-SITU + EX-SITU REFLECTION AND ACTION 9 / 18
- 10. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 WALKSHOPS 10 / 18
- 11. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 CONTRIBUTIONS 1.âŻArgues for in-situ and ex-situ reďŹection and action 2.âŻExplores qualities of being there 3.âŻUnderstands place as a resource 4.âŻProposes the walkshop technique for hands-on co- exploration in the ďŹeld 11 / 18
- 12. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 MENING@PARK 12 / 18
- 13. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 MENING@PARK 13 / 18 Et forskningsprojekt ved For yderligere information kontakt Matthias Korn (mkorn@cs.au.dk) KrĂŚver âMening@Parkâ fra Android Market Scan denne QR kode med din smartphone til at deltage i diskussionen. Brug f.eks. Google Goggles, Barcoder Scanner eller QR Droid fra Android Market. ? Hvad er din mening om stedet? Hvad mener de andre? Nationalparkbesøgscenter i Kalø â et Mening@Park diskussionsemne
- 14. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 EXPLORATORY FIELD TRIALS âşâŻA model for methods studying ubicomp systems âşâŻHow to use sophisticated prototypes for further exploration in the ďŹeld? âşâŻExploratory ďŹeld trials for looking ahead rather than back 14 / 18 use situation involvement of the investigator participants time sophistication of the prototype realisticartiďŹcial lowhigh recruited compressed real-time functional attracted representative actual mocked up incomplete complete
- 15. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 CONTRIBUTIONS 1.âŻEvaluates and discusses the coupling between physical and digital spaces 2.âŻAnalyses means of access and representation 3.âŻQuestions appropriate forms of engagement 4.âŻReďŹects on exploratory ďŹeld trials as a part of rather than an assessment of an iterative design process 15 / 18
- 16. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 SUMMING UP âşâŻA plethora of diďŹerent means for citizens to engage with planning issues in a plethora of diďŹerent contexts and situations => A notion of a situated engagement infrastructure ⌠(Star & Ruhleder, 1996; Dourish & Bell, 2007) ⌠made up of mobile, stationary, ubiquitous, and remote systems => Allow citizens to act wherever and whenever it is meaningful and relevant to them 16 / 18
- 17. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 CONCLUSION âşâŻMethodological challenges when studying situated and interwoven practices of everyday life Situated Engagement: âşâŻIn-situ engagement at the site of interest as an initial trigger + place as a resource âşâŻProviding many diďŹerent means to contribute in many diďŹerent situations 17 / 18
- 18. MATTHIAS KORN AARHUS UNIVERSITY MAY 7, 2013 You!Thank SITUATING ENGAGEMENT: UBIQUITOUS INFRASTRUCTURES FOR IN-SITU CIVIC ENGAGEMENT 18
- 19. MATTHIAS KORN AARHUS UNIVERSITY MAY 7, 2013 DefensePhD BACKUP 19
- 20. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 20 88 Public Deliberation in Municipal Planning: Supporting Action and Reflection with Mobile Technology Morten Bohøj Alexandra Institute Aarhus, Denmark bohoej@cs.au.dk Nikolaj G. Borchorst, Susanne Bødker, Matthias Korn Department of Computer Science Aarhus University {ngandrup, bodker, mkorn}@cs.au.dk Pär-Ola Zander Department of Communication and Psychology Aalborg University poz@hum.aau.dk ABSTRACT This paper reports on an exploratory participatory design process aimed at supporting citizen deliberation in municipal planning. It presents the main outcomes of this process in terms of selected prototypes and an approach to the use setting. We support and discuss different ways for citizens to act and reflect on proposed plans: in-situ, while physically close to the planning object, and ex-situ, when citizens are remote from this. The support of in-situ and ex- situ participation allows citizens to engage in continuous reflection-in and on-action as a collaborative activity with other citizens, hereby inspiring citizens to increase their democratic engagement. Keywords Communities and e-governance, map-based discussion, geospatial annotation, public deliberation, reflection and action, situatedness, participatory design. INTRODUCTION âPeter is out on his weekly run in the forest when his mobile phone starts buzzing in his pocket. He takes it out and sees that it is a notification from the Mobile Democracy application. The notification tells Peter that there is a proposed change in the municipal plan nearby. He clicks on the notification to find a description of the plans to build a new wastewater plant at his current location. Peter does not think much of it, but clicks the âshow meâ button. Pointing the phone at the designated building ground as if to take a picture, Peter sees a 3D model on top of what the camera is actually registering. Peter walks around the site looking at the model from different angles. It almost looks like the building is already there and it is much bigger than he had imagined. It gets him thinking. Annoyed, he switches to the discussion tab and sees that three other people have already commented. He switches to the image tab and takes a picture. He adds the comment âThis beautiful forest would be ruined with a wastewater plant.â The topic is automatically bookmarked, so he continues his run. Later that evening he checks Mobile Democracy again, this time using his desktop computer. He looks at his bookmarks to find the wastewater plant discussion. He sees that more citizens have commented and a municipal planner has argued that a new wastewater plant is needed, because the old one is no longer sufficient. Peter realizes that he has some potential allies among the other commentators. He decides to write a more elaborate discussion comment, listing disadvantages of placing the plant there and arguing for better locations. After a couple of days, he is contacted by another citizen and they decide to team up and write a more elaborate proposal for the planning debate.â The above scenario describes the use of two interconnected prototypes developed in a case exploring public delibera- tion in municipal planning through mobile, location-aware technology. In this paper, we focus on the development of the two prototypes within the specific design case at hand. It soon became apparent that what was needed in order for citizens to fathom the implications of the municipal plan â an abstract and often opaque bureaucratic object â was more than just putting information out there for people to find. Research has shown that merely increasing the avail- able amount of information about public policy does not lead to increased democratic engagement [21]. Information and communication technologies have played an important role in governmentsâ attempts to support civic engagement by providing information in more pertinent ways than simply making it publicly available. Web-technology and community participation has been addressed, e.g., by Schuler [18] in what he calls civic intelligence: âInformation and communication technology has the potential to alter civic intelligence in ways that go far beyond the informational content of any particular message that is transmitted or received. This observation applies to any efforts at encouraging civic intelligence. It is in fact the central tenet of the design philosophy that would undergird civic intelligence.â ([18], p. 62) In their characterization of e-participation software in Ital- ian municipalities, De Cindio and Peraboni [10] argue that the shared discussion space of citizens and municipal servants (e.g. municipal planners) should be understood as consisting of three elements: a community space, which raises trust between participants; a deliberation space, which supports the creation of shared positions and con- sorted efforts among citizens; and an information space, which supports the sharing of information. The proposed discussion spaces illustrate that there is more to civic en- Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). C&Tâ11, 29 June â 2 July 2011, QUT, Brisbane, Australia. ACM 978-1-4503-0824-3 INCLUDED PUBLICATIONS From Workshops to Walkshops: Evaluating Mobile Location-based Applications in Realistic Settings Matthias Korn Aarhus University mkorn@cs.au.dk Pär-Ola Zander Aarhus University poz@cs.au.dk ABSTRACT Many open questions on how to best observe the mobile user experience remain â at the stage of design time as well as use time. In this paper, we are focusing on the stage of design time and describe our experiences from evaluating a mobile application for citizen involvement in municipal land use planning. Due to the problems and issues identified after conducting several user workshops in our exemplary case process, we propose âwalkshopsâ as a complement to traditional workshops and prototype field studies specifically to evaluate mobile location-based applications (and similar context-aware systems). We report some problems with workshops and outline how a walkshop may be carried out. The first trials of the new method are promising and have generated valuable feedback, insights and discussions about using the mobile application within the intended contexts. INTRODUCTION How to evaluate the mobile user experience both at design time and use time poses many open questions. Specifically, conducting user evaluation with mobile location-based applications is difficult as most evaluation methods are not contextual and/or not suited for systems used in outdoor contexts. With this paper, we focus on a new technique for design-time evaluation of mobile location-based applications. Our purpose is twofold: 1) to illustrate situations where workshops, well suited for stationary computing, raise problems in a mobile context and 2) to show how this can be in part alleviated by, what we coined as âwalkshopsâ, given the right staging. Methods for evaluating systems directly in the context of use exist. For example in prototype field studies the software is deployed and the use of the system over time somehow monitored or observed from a distance. They can be strong in their ecological validity, but in themselves they provide no access to how users think about the use. Workshops address what field studies lack. The concept of âworkshopâ as an evaluation activity has become an umbrella concept for a range of method prescriptions and activities involving groups of users who meet, where perhaps the participatory design workshop is the most well known type. Under the label of âworkshopâ we find a number of evaluation activities that vary in how they are conducted, what they evaluate, and perhaps also their epistemological underpinnings. Workshops are, however, generally used in order to stimulate a discussion between users where the outcome is used in the next step of design. In the rest of the paper, we let the term refer to methods we have used throughout the project including future workshops, pluralistic walkthroughs and group discussions between users and designers facilitated by various design artifacts. There may be differences between stationary use in a workshop and stationary use in practice in the field study. However, these differences are more severe in a mobile context, since mobile computing usually affords multi- tasking, and the physical conditions vary widely. Let us turn to walking as a methodological alternative that decreases these differences. Different walking approaches, where users would move about in the context of the application domain testing a system to be evaluated, have been used before, but a focus on walking as a stimulating activity has never been made explicit or analyzed systematically in any methodology to the best of our knowledge. For example, transect walks [4,5], a method from participatory rural appraisal (PAR), are used for understanding the local context (e.g. natural resources, landscape, land use etc.) by walking together with local informants through an area of interest (e.g. a rural village). In civil engineering and architecture, one researcher even spent an entire year walking the streets of Lisbon and Barcelona in order to understand the architecture of these places [8]. Ochoa highlights that âthe physical walk allows the mental walk, stimulating the thought and making possible the contact of the body, as element of measure, with the spaceâ [8]. Yet, both of these methods are aimed at understanding the environment and not the mediating technology. Summing up, field studies do not provide the strength of workshops â to capture details in a userâs sense-making and other cognitive processes. Workshops around a table do so, but sacrifice context. Walkshops enable the study of context paired with the micro-processes of sense-making. We apply walking (i.e. as in going for a walk) both as a tool for thinking and a tool for closer relation to the use context. The forthcoming sections of the paper concretize this argument by examples from our research project. It describes how we developed that walking may stimulate reflection and that an increase of ecological validity can be gained by observing sense-making processes during walkshops. Finally it provides some lessons to be learnt. 8 From Workshops to Walkshops: Evaluating Mobile Location-based Applications in Realistic Settings 29 Talking it Further: From Feelings and Memories to Civic Discussions In and About Places Matthias Korn Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University Aabogade 34, 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark mkorn@cs.au.dk Jon Back Mobile Life @ Stockholm University DSV, Forum 100, 164 40 Kista, Sweden jon@mobilelifecentre.org ABSTRACT Civic engagement systems to date frequently focus on purely rational aspects of deliberation void of emotions. In order to empower youth in a largely immigrant and lower- income neighborhood, we designed a location-based storytelling and story experiencing system for web-enabled mobile phones. The system is based on a novel concept of pervasive play where stories emerge and develop on several dimensions â most notably for our design a geographical one. This system functions as a research instrument in this paper. Through a qualitative analysis of the comments made through the system, we find (1) memories, feelings, and attitudes to be prime means of expression for youth, (2) the expression of such personal emotions leading to civic discussions, and (3) such discussions expanding over geographic areas in the neighborhood. Consequently, we argue for an approach to locative civic engagement systems that takes a vantage point in youthâs emotions rather than a very rational and dry approach to deliberation. Author Keywords Civic engagement, youth, mobile phones, collaborative and locative storytelling, pervasive play, emotions. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION âWhile walking past the schoolyard I remembered how we used to play here when I was young. It makes me sad to see how gray and boring it seems today. I decided to share my thoughts and started up Iâm Your Body on my phone. I took some time to formulate my comment and wrote it into the system. Just a couple of days later I came by again, remembered my old comment, and decided to check it. There was a new re- ply, and from the map it seemed to be from another school in the neighboring suburb. The feelings were similar: âWe also have a kind of boring schoolyard. But we have a nice tree in the middle of it, where I used to climb when I was younger.â I answered the comment. âMaybe we need a tree as well, or some other kind of nature thing. It would make the place so much nicer for the kids playing here now.â Maybe my com- ment will lead to change in the future, who knows.â In this fictitious scenario the location-aware mobile phone application Iâm Your Body (IYB) is used to share thoughts and feelings in and about a place. In the IYB project, we ex- plore the use of collaborative storytelling and story experi- encing as a political and artistic instrument. Our aim is to empower the inhabitants, especially youth, of a largely immigrant and lower-income area in Stockholm, Sweden by increasing their social capital [21]. As part of a larger par- ticipatory arts project, the mobile application lets partici- pants collect their stories, present them to others, and experience the stories of others. We report on findings from the IYB system for the first time in this paper. The goal of IYB is to design a leisure-oriented experience tied to a specific place and related to its cultural and politi- cal meaning. Thus, one way to describe IYB is as a loca- tion-based cultural experience. As Benford et al. [6] in their work on cultural applications, games, and performance, we use the singular word âexperienceâ to refer to such staged installations that encourage participants to engage. Although the implemented system is generic, it was specifi- cally designed to be used in a particular area. This area, Järva (a part of Stockholm), is politically challenging. Large cultural divides and different agendas among inhabi- tants, commercial forces, and politicians create tensions. Thus, it is crucial that the experience creates close ties to the physical area in which it is staged. We broadly subscribe to the traditions of action research, participatory design, and in the wild studies in our research and design process. As IYB is implemented, tested, and used on location, in real use contexts, and with real users, the reality of the situation means we have to take an active part in the community to be able to design for it; i.e., there already is an existing community that we add on to. Our partners in the project act according to their artistic and political backgrounds. And so do we as researchers and designers who want to be a part of that community change. In this active role, we consequently take a participatory action research approach in the steps of Lewin [1]. The Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. NordiCHI '12, October 14-17, 2012, Copenhagen, Denmark. Copyright Š 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1482-4/12/10...$15.00. 189 Looking ahead â How field trials can work in iterative and exploratory design of ubicomp systems Matthias Korn, Susanne Bødker Department of Computer Science Aarhus University, Denmark {mkorn, bodker}@cs.au.dk ABSTRACT We investigate in which forms field trials are a workable model as part of an exploratory design process for sporadic, mobile, non-work settings. A major concern of evaluating ubicomp systems is to study how practices and context of use emerge and develop over time when new technology is introduced. To introduce a sophisticated version of our own prototype in the course of an iterative design process, we conducted a public field trial of the systemâa new platform for mobile democratic discussions in municipal planningâ that we distributed via the Android Market. However, it turned out to be surprisingly difficult to evaluate our design in a setting that stretches over time, place, and without a preselected set of users. Analyzing our difficulties, we develop a general model for methods studying ubicomp systems. On the basis of this model, we characterize an openly interactive approach to field trials in order to look ahead rather than back. Author Keywords Ubiquitous computing, methods, field trials, exploration, iterative design. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. General Terms Design INTRODUCTION The history of field trials is almost as long as the history of HCI methodology itself. While the classic cognitivist approach to HCI was primarily coming from a human factors tradition, Bannon [1] in his paper âfrom human factors to human actorsâ argued for the need to understand technology situated in realistic use situations and the need to work with users in design. At the same time, Grudin [10] pointed to the added challenges of designing groupware instead of single user technologies. Among his methodolo- gical concerns are the issues of critical mass, and that designersâ intuition is even more flawed than usual when addressing collaborative technologies. Both of these authors and many more saw prototyping a possible means of better understanding the future use situationâfor users as well as designers. Bardram [2], however, points to new difficulties regarding prototyping of specific sets of applications (CSCW in his case) due to more complicated use settings. Common to these early experiences with the deployment of prototypes in realistic use settings is that the deployment happened within rather well-established use situations and even more well- established communities of practice. With the new millennium came a new wave of techno- logical and methodological challenges [5]: The technology became increasingly mobile, use situations moved from work to the rest of human lives, and the idea that techno- logies were designed and deployed as systems one at a time no longer functioned as a basis for design. Grudin [11] addressed some of these new challenges of ubi- comp, in particular that applications are no longer about the âhere and nowâ, meaning that use situations stretch into eve- rywhere and forever. This has consequences for the meth- ods with which we analyze and design ubiquitous technolo- gies, because many of the methods deployed hence far were addressing situations where people act, perhaps together, within quite well-understood settings, time spans, and loca- tions. Ubiquitous technologies are often designed for use situations that are not well understood and in the making. Bødker and Christiansen [6] suggested using prototyping to explore which questions to ask in such emergent settings. Iterative design and prototyping has dominated our research. Accordingly, we see all designs as part of an iterative design process, where the prototypes, for a period, hold on to design decisions [21] and are vehicles for com- munication in the project and for usersâ hands-on experi- ence [7]. Prototypes accordingly are intermediate outcomes that in various forms capture what we know about the product, the use situation, and the design process. Some of these prototypes are versions of the final product that are in various ways fully functional, while others at the other extreme are experimental and throw-away prototypes formed in materials and software that has little to do with a final product (e.g. mock-ups or paper prototypes). Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. UbiCompâ 12, Sep 5 â Sep 8, 2012, Pittsburgh, USA. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1224-0/12/09...$15.00. 43 Making Sense of Green Boxes: A Study on Peopleâs Understanding of Augmented Buildings on Mobile Phones Matthias Korn, Mikkel Baun KjĂŚrgaard Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University Aabogade 34, 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark {mkorn, mikkelbk}@cs.au.dk ABSTRACT Mobile augmented reality (MAR) is a promising tool for ur- ban planning as it allows a wide audience to experience fu- ture changes to the cityscape ďŹrsthand through their smart phones. With a study on how people make sense of visu- alizations of planned buildings within a real (outdoor) envi- ronment, we identify user requirements for such augmenta- tions using a bespoke prototype system with sparsely visual- ized buildings. We employ an in-the-wild study that involves encountering virtual buildings through the prototype system on a 45-minute walk in a planning area. Based on in-depth, qualitative data, we found that distinct qualities of augmented objects are important to provide among other things and that people relate virtual objects to existing structures in the real world. Our ďŹndings are generally applicable beyond urban planning whenever augmentations seek to imitate or repre- sent real objects. Author Keywords Mobile augmented reality; participatory urban planning; virtual buildings; sense-making. ACM ClassiďŹcation Keywords H.5.1 Information Interfaces: Multimedia Information SystemsâArtiďŹcial, augmented, and virtual realities. General Terms Human Factors; Design; Experimentation. INTRODUCTION The advent of the smart phone generation of mobile phones is bringing augmented reality (AR) to the masses. With their sensors, camera, and high processing power, smart phones present the most widely distributed and well equipped plat- form for AR. Much work has already been done in mobile augmented reality (MAR) systems [4] and AR in the archi- tecture domain [1, 9]. Additionally, numerous commercial AR applications for smart phones exist (Wikitude and Layar are two of the earliest and most prominent examples).1 1 See www.wikitude.com and www.layar.com. Unpublished paper draft. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). Do not cite, do not circulate. Figure 1. Screenshot of the ARCity system showing the outline of a planned building through the camera of the phone. A domain where a wide-spread adoption of MAR sys- tems could help is participatory urban planning. Although, changes to the cityscape are usually announced in the press and other outlets by the municipality, citizens are still often unaware of them or the implications they may pose. Archi- tectural drawings and textual descriptions are often unapt or insufďŹcient in communicating these plans to interested resi- dents, who may not always be able to read and understand them. Furthermore, they are often published for the city as a whole rather than being ďŹltered according to the areas a cit- izen may be interested in (e.g., close to home or work). Ar- chitectural models can neither appropriately communicate the actual impact new buildings might have within lively and real rather than stylized surroundings. We envision that a MAR approach to urban planning may improve the awareness and understandability of municipal plans by visualizing planned buildings anchored in reality and aligned with the actual cur- rent surrounding cityscape in real-time. For this purpose, we are building the ARCity system (see Figure 1). We employ AR building visualization in order to engage more people to experience and participate in ur- ban planning of their own everyday living environment. We use a fairly basic approach for building visualization for it to perform well on general-purpose smart phones. We rely solely on already built-in GPS and inertial sensors for regis- tration and trackingâi.e., only on the capabilities already in the phone. This enables augmented buildings in every per- sonâs pocket without any required calibration or preparation of the site as would usually be the case with other AR tech- niques such as feature-tracking and model-based approaches. We seek to enable citizens to just point their phone at any future building site and see what is planned to be built there. 1
- 21. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 RESEARCH OBJECTIVES Conceptual Research Objectives: I.⯠To explore (and conceptualize) the design of technology- mediated civic engagement opportunities in participatory land use planning that are better integrated into peopleâs everyday lived experience. II.⯠To explore (and conceptualize) how such engagement activities can be made more pervasive (i.e., enabling engagement everywhere and through various means) and co-located with the referred-to places, i.e., the places that are personally meaningful and matter to citizens. Methodological Research Objective: III.⯠To enrich our available methods and techniques that enable us to capture practices involving mobile behavior and allow for exploration of the ďŹeld with sophisticated prototypes in the wild. 21
- 22. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 UBICOMP METHODS use situation involvement of the investigator participants time sophistication of the prototype realisticartiďŹcial lowhigh recruited compressed real-time functional attracted representative actual mocked up incomplete complete 22
- 23. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 DESIGN EXPERIMENTS vkqp"ctqwpf"ukvwcvgf"gpicigogpv"fgxgnqrgf"cpf"gxqnxgf0 Vjg"gzrgtkogpvu 3 K jcxg"eqog"vq"ecnn"vjgo"fgukip"gzrgtkogpvu"kpuvgcf"qh"ecugu"kp"vjg"xgkp"qh"gzrgtkogpvcn fgukip"tgugctej"cu"dtqwijv"hqtyctf"d{ Dtcpfv"cpf"Dkpfgt *4229+0 D{"ecnnkpi"vjgo"gzrgtkogpvu. K fq"pqv"uwiiguv"vjcv"o{"yqtm"yqwnf"rtqxkfg"wpgswkxqecn"{gu1pq/cpuygtu"vq"engct"ewv. pcttqyn{ fgĂpgf"tgugctej"swguvkqpu0 Tcvjgt. K ycpv"vq"gorjcuk|g"vjg"gzrnqtcvqt{"cpf"gorktkecn"ejctcevgt qh"o{"uvwfkgu. yjkej"K jcxg"eqpfwegf"kp"ugvvkpiu"yjkej"ygtg"vgorqtcnn{. urcvkcnn{. cpf"uqekcnn{ ygnn"eqpĂpgf0 Gzrgtkogpv Gorktkecn"Hqewu Ogvjqfu Oqdkng"Fgoqetce{ eq/fgukip"rtqeguu gzvgpukxg"rctvkekrcvqt{"fgukip"rtqeguu CT Ekv{ Ăgnf"wug cpcn{vkecn"ycnmujqru OgpkpiBRctm eq/fgukip"rtqeguu1 Ăgnf"wug gzrnqtcvqt{"Ăgnf"vtkcn. kpvgtxkgyu. yqtmujqru. gzrnqtcvqt{"ycnmujqru KĂo"[qwt"Dqf{ cevwcn"wucig Ăgnf"vtkcn. cpcn{uku"qh"wucig"fcvc. tgĂ gevkqp"qp"fgukip Vcdng 603 Qxgtxkgy"qh"vjg"kpfkxkfwcn"fgukip"gzrgtkogpvu"cpf"vjgkt"ugvwr0 67 23
- 24. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 ACCESS AND REPRESENTATIONEjcrvgt"6 Fgukip"Gzrgtk ceeguu tgrtgugpvcvkqp cevkqp *htqo"rnceg"vq"vqrke+ *htqo"vqrke"vq"rnceg+ ST eqfg"ukipu vqrke"nqecvkqp etgcvkpi"c"vqrke pqvkĂecvkqpu kp"vqrke"vkvng citgg1fkucitgg ocr kp"vqrke"fguetkrvkqp eqoogpvkpi"*kpen0 oqqf+ nkuvu rjqvqu wrnqcfkpi"c"rjqvq ujctkpi1tgeqoogpfkpi CT xkgy ujctkpi"c"vqrke o{"nqecvkqp hcxqtkvkpi"c"vqrke g 605 Nkuv"qh"*korngogpvgf+"fgukip"kfgcu"tgncvkpi"vq"vjg"curgevu"qh"ceeguu. tg kqp. cpf"cevkqp"tgurgevkxgn{0 24
- 25. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 CONTRIBUTIONS88 Ejcrvgt"7 Eqpegrvwcn"Eqpvtkdwvkqpu Gzrgtkogpv Eqpvtkdwvkqp"Vjgogu Kphtcuvtwevwtcn"Rgturgevkxg Oqdkng Fgoqetce{ kp/ukvw"cpf"gz/ukvw"tgĂ gevkqp"cpf cevkqp= swcnkvkgu"qh dgkpi"vjgtg cffkvkqpcn"fgumvqr"kpvgthceg"hqt ĂtgoqvgĂ"ceeguu CT Ekv{ dgvvgt"kortguukqp"qh"rncpu"kp/ukvw= rnceg"ogfkcvkqp xkuwcn"eqorqpgpv"hqt"rnceg ogfkcvkqp OgpkpiBRctm nkpmu"dgvyggp"rj{ukecn"cpf"fkikvcn urcegu= ceeguu"cpf"tgrtgugpvcvkqp= crrtqrtkcvg"hqtou"qh"gpicigogpv rj{ukecn"ctvkhcevu"kp"vjg"gpxktqpogpv cu"nkpmu"vq"vjg"fkikvcn"kphtcuvtwevwtg KĂo"[qwt"Dqf{ uvqt{vgnnkpi. rnc{hwnpguu. cpf goqvkqpu"hqt"ekxke"gpicigogpv= uvqtkgu"fgxgnqrkpi"igqitcrjkecnn{ ctvkuvke"cpf"rnc{hwn"gzrtguukqp vjtqwij"rj{ukecn"ctvkhcevu *uewnrvwtgu+"cpf"rgthqtocpegu *vjgcvgt"rnc{+ Vcdng 703 Eqpvtkdwvkqp"vjgogu"qh"vjg"kpfkxkfwcn"fgukip"gzrgtkogpvu"kpenwfgf"kp"vjku fkuugtvcvkqp"cpf"vjgkt"rgturgevkxg"qp"kphtcuvtwevwtg0 25
- 26. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 RELATED WORK mobile WebMapMedia (Pudas) Urban Mediator GeoAnnotator Mobile Democracy (desktop) VoiceYourView* Mobile Democracy (mobile) augmented deliberation* Tell a Story (Pudas) Locast Civic Media StoryPlace.me DigiGraff situated displays media architecture Before I Die participatory sensing (Kuznetsov & Paulos, 2010) AR City Mening@Park I'm Your Body I Wish This Was couplingbetweenphysicalanddigitalrealm (*) In these two approaches, citizens are situated in a different physical and/or virtual context than is referred to. MR Tent stationary ubiquitous ex-situ / remote Mening@Park (QR code signs) I'm Your Body (sculptures) weak strong { } { } 26
- 27. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 IâM YOUR BODY 92 Ejcrvgt"7 Eqpegrvwcn"Eqpvtkdwvkqpu Ě **cv"c"rwdnke"rctm"fqypvqyp++ ĂNqqmkpi"wr"cv"Mctn"vjg"ZKK cpf"vjkpm"qh"jqy"kv wugf"vq"dg. fwtkpi"vjku"rgtuqpĂu"vkog0 Ecppqv jgnr"vjkpmkpi"jqy"K yqwnf"nqqm"nkmg"cu"c"uvcvwg0Ă ]hgocng_ Ă **kp"vjg"uwdwtd. dgjkpf"vjg"ocnn++ ĂQj"jqy"hwp0 Wphqtvwpcvgn{. vjgtg"ctg"pq uvcvwgu"jgtg0Ă ]ocng_ , **kp"vjg"uwdwtd. tgukfgpvkcn"ctgc++ ĂK citgg. vjgtg"ctg"pq"uvcvwgu"jgtg"gkvjgt0 Tgcnn{"ucf"vjcv"vjgtg"ctg"pq"uvcvwgu"cpf qvjgt " hkpg " vjkpiu " yjkej " ejggt " wr " vjg uvtggvu " gxgt{yjgtg#Ă ]hgocng. qtkikpcn rquvgt. tgugpf"ykvj"v{rqu"eqttgevgf_ , **kp"vjg"uwdwtd. dgjkpf"vjg"ocnn++ ĂPq. K fq"pqv"ugg"cp{"uvcvwgu"jgtg"lwuv ujqrrkpi"kpuvcnncvkqpuĂ"]ocng_ Hkiwtg 703 Gzcorng"vjtgcf"cpf"eqttgurqpfkpi"ocr"qh"vjg"gpvtkgu"ujqykpi"vjg"igq/ itcrjke"urtgcfkpi"uvctvkpi"ykvj"c"eqoogpv"htqo"c"rwdnke"rctm"fqypvqyp"*dqvvqo tkijv+"cpf"vjg"gpuwkpi"eqpxgtucvkqp"kp"vjg"uwdwtd0 *Vjg"eqoogpv"kp"vjg"nqygt"nghv"jcu 27
- 28. AARHUS UNIVERSITY SITUATING ENGAGEMENT â PH.D. DEFENSE MATTHIAS KORN MAY 7, 2013 PHOTO ATTRIBUTIONS âşâŻSlide 2 (left): Foursquare User Chris Z. at CafĂŠ Le Coq, Aarhus http://4sq.com/17zsbLw âşâŻSlide 12: Nils Jepsen / CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons http://bit.ly/10SsVbK âşâŻSlide 13 (bottom left): Nationalpark Mols Bjerge http://bit.ly/19ytjeZ âşâŻSlide 14 (bottom left): Ebelfestival http://ebelfestival.dk/ âşâŻOther photos by Nikolaj Gandrup Borchorst, Mikkel Baun KjĂŚrgaard and Matthias Korn 28
Editor's Notes
- Welcome everyone! Thanks for coming to my defense! Thank the opponents for their time.My thesis has the title âŚ. I promise it will become clear very soon what I mean with each of these components.looking at the use of mobile and ubiquitous technology to enable participation âon the spotâ, that is, situated in citizensâ local neighborhoodsfield: civic participation in land use planning mediated by technology
- There are big contrasts in how mobile technology is used today.On the one hand, we use it for leisure and entertainment, for the mundane things of everyday life â like showing off to our friends on 4sq the fancy restaurants or interesting events that we go to.On the other side, mobile technology has also been used as an important tool to communicate and report from local events on the ground, in near-real time and beyond the traditional media outlets in uprisings like, here, the Arab Spring.I want to break some middle ground between these, where people can engage proactively [instead of reactively] in issues relevant to them.
- Why is this important and interesting now?These [SLIDE]four major points motivate my work. They are recent technological developments in combination with emerging and evolving use practices.[Mobile phones + LBS + Ubicomp:]First off, ⌠Ubiquity of mobile phones (just like these) in everyday lifeGeneral purpose computers, constantly connected devicesWe donât connect to the internet anymore, we carry it around with us at all times â according to de Souza e Silva 2006, they are creating hybrid spaces made up of physical and digital components, where virtual communities migrate to physical spaces because of the use of mobile technologies as interfaces.And not only are we always connected to the internet, but even more so to other people â the mobile phone is a *social device* as wellFor many of us they are deeply integrated into our daily routes and routines, integrated into our everyday life (e.g., to organize our day, to stay in touch with friends and colleagues, to find our way, or to go out at night)De Souza e Silva and Frith also demonstrate how mobile phones function as an interface to our environment, to the people and spaces around us. When we check FB or plugin our ear buds on the bus, we use mobile phones to filter, control and manage our relationship with the environment, to selectively interact with it, to avoid interacting with strangers.Mobile phones are also locatable, they are with us, we are locatable â we use them to locate things and people around us (#2)Yelp, Foursquare, Wikipedia mobile â a plethora of digital information is attached to individual locations.Gordon & de Souza e Silva (2011) have coined the term ânetwork localitiesâ to describe the sites and practices, where mobile connected devices and location-based information become part of our engagement with spaceMobile phonesare not only enmeshed with our social environment, but increasingly also with our physical environment.One could say to sum this up: The internet is more about here than about there. Itâs more about us than about some unknown other. Itâs highly personalized and located, in addition to being mobile.BUT: mobile phones are personal devices that we have to own in order to fully utilize themWith ubiquitous computing (3rd point) the technology is moving into the very fabric of the spaces we inhabit (eg. the air condition that learns our habits and starts automatically, the intelligent street light that adapts to the situation such as current traffic, or the trash cans that track our trash)Ubicomp provides different means to engage with networked issues embedded in the environmentin contrast to the personal and personalized mobile phones, I see the potential for ubicomp as a shared medium with more equitable accessIn sum, previous technologies (email or the telephone) have broken down barriers of geography, now the relationship of technology with physical locations in peopleâs lives strengthens â [in several ways: mobile, location-based, ubicomp][Participation:]Lastly, participation emerges in, from, and about new areas of society: hacker culture, DIY movements, activism, grassroots initiativeWe are going beyond participation on the web (e.g., in blogs or on Wikipedia) â instead, these services are also going mobile, going locativeThey offer new ways through which we can participate in the world â as could be observed in the Arab Spring or the London riotsThere is arguably a new participatory culture on the go, when Twitter, FB, YouTube and other services play a role in communicating current events to a worldwide audienceAlso in the civic engagement domain examples exist: commercial services like SeeClickFix and FixMyStreet, for example, allow one-way reporting of broken street lights, potholes and other such issues via a mobile appMy central argument is that we donât yet realize these new opportunities so much to engage with our local neighborhood, our community.My aim is to explore the design space of supporting *local* neighborhoods and *local* communities in getting their voices heard. For this purpose, I believe that a strong relation to the locality as such is of central importance to create local meaningfulness and relevance for citizens.
- Now, with *my concept* of situated engagement I want to make use of these new opportunities, make use of applying mobile, applying ubiquitous and applying location-based tech to the field of civic engagement â in the *light* of these new practices of participation and locating things and people around us.I want to allow citizens to contribute to land use planning discussions in their neighborhood, embedded in their immediate living environment.The kind of SitEng that I propose is a form of civic engagement that is situated in and thus has strong ties to these places.The goal is to engage people *where* they are and *when* it matters.LucySuchman has already, in her seminal book âPlans and Situated Actionâ, made clear that any action is always already situated. She says âsituated actions are always, and irremediably, contingent on specific, unfolding circumstancesâWith her concept as the foundation, I, however, want to adopt an angle that is wider than her situational contingency suggests. I would say that civic engagement is not situated in the *particular, possibly beneficial* circumstance where the place, the actors, and the discussion itself come together.So, my aim is: to situate engagement in the *right* contexts â mobile and embedded in the local neighborhoods, embedded in the places of interest.I seek to enable citizens to contribute to civic discussions in close proximity to the objects of interest â that is, at times and places where it might be personally meaningful and relevant to them.My hypothesis here is, if the place and its transformations are meaningful for citizens, they may be interested in and benefit from initially engaging with the discussions in the moment, on the spot. (before they can reflect on and engage more deeply with them later, elsewhere)I seek to better interweave participation on issues in citizensâ immediate living environment with their everyday lived experienceLet me give you an example from my empirical work in the NP Mols Mountains (which is not far from here): People living in the park for generations have strong relationships to many of the places from their youth. When you talk to them, they will always tell you stories and memories from how things used to be â fx. How a heritage path used to go different way when he was young, or how grandfather used to work on the field. These memories come to mind when they are physically *at* these places. They are a very valuable resource in discussions about the cultural heritage of the park.So, my contribution lies in re-imagining the role of place in participatory land use planning, where place is both a resource for deliberation *and* the topic of civic discussion.Lastly, I want to argue that everyday life is messy, too messy to have a one-size-fits-all approach. Hence, it is necessary to provide many different means through which citizens can contribute to planning discussions in many different situations â what is necessary is an infrastructure approach in the sense of Star and Ruhleder, a heterogeneous infrastructure providing different entry points to civic engagement. I will come back to this particular aspect in the end.
- For the remainder of the talk âŚMethod challenges + difficultiesAnd the individual contributions of these 2 experimentsSum up and frame the experiments forming the basis of my PhD work
- Letâs look at my method foundations to give you an overview of how I work.Generally, the method I employ can be described as:Experimental: I conducted 4 design experimentsExploratory: I probe and challenge current use practices and help formulate hypotheses for how future technology may develop such practices furtherDesignerly: I do so through designerly thinking and design activitiesIâm influenced by 3 streams of method thought:research through design as a basic understanding of *how research can be informed by design*Developed by Zimmerman et al.a holistic approach of designerly thinking and design activities where I integrate true knowledge (theories from urban literature in HCI and from communication and media studies) with how knowledge (the technical opportunities of mobile and ubiquitous interfaces) and is grounded in real knowledge (my empirical confrontation with the field and people through PD)desire to design the right thing (as opposed to designing commercially viable things) by formulating a preferred state of the world and designing towards itparticipatory design as a *fundamental value orientation* (even more so for civic engagement)A strong tradition here at Aarhusthat means, involving and empowering citizens (among other stakeholders) in the design of technologies for their own living environment (ie., that is to empower those directly affected by the developments)Rich toolbox of methods: it utilizes a number of design artifacts such as scenarios, storyboard, mock-ups, and prototypes to engage with the different stakeholders during, e.g., PD workshops iterative prototyping as the *specific approach to designing artifacts for exploration*As I see it, all designs are part of an iterative design process where the prototypes, for a period, hold on to design decisions, are vehicles for communication in the project, and serve usersâ hands-on experience. As Lim et al. state, and I quote âPrototypes are filters that traverse a design space, and are manifestations of design ideas that concretize and externalize conceptual ideas.âThrough participatory design, they are brought into the world and used to co-explore relationships between people, technology, and the respective domain. I use prototyping as a tool to explore the design space together with users.
- Let me tell you a little bit about two connected design experiments that work toward the main arguments I want to make today.And let me also tell you a little bit about the related methodological challenges and difficulties that I experienced throughout the course of my PhD and that I reflected on and, in part, also circumvented.
- MobDem â the experiments are named after the systems that have been developed â MobDem contains a mobile app that lets citizens contribute to planning discussions on the spot, at the location of interest (eg. at the proposed building site of a new public library).The app contains a map where you can see the issues around you.Lists, favorites, and filters for personalization where you see only issues that you are potentially interested in.You can create new issues or contribute to existing ones, e.g., by expressing your agreement (thumbs up/down), by commenting or taking a photoIn this experiment we worked together with municipal planners, citizen interest groups, and individual citizens â in workshops and other activities in an extensive participatory design process over many iterations and with a large number of prototypes in various materials (an impression of which we have seen on the method slide)
- The clou (and central contribution) of this experiment is a combination of a mobile in-situ interface (that we have seen on the previous slide) with an ex-situ or remote interface on the web [RIGHT] â that means, the one on the mobile phone is meant to be used in the moment, on the spot, and the other one is sought to be used from within a desktop browser, perhaps at home or work in a more relaxed setting.In a paper at C&T 2009, we have conceptualized this in two steps. First, byprovidingan initial trigger by way of in-situ actions through the mobile phone motivated by the spatio-temporal relevance of the planning object. Based on that trigger, a second ex-situ space for reflection and action supports reflective, comprehensive discussions in the form of a browser-based desktop application visited remotely. Through our design process we found this remote component to be necessary to complement the mobile interface.We base this conceptualization on SchĂśnâs reflection-in- and on-action, where we argue (in the simplest form) that reflection-in-action is more dominant in-situ, while reflection-on-action is more dominant ex-situ.In-situ, I explored in the following ways:Through the mobile app itself that allows you to discover and contribute on the spotAR functionality [UPPER LEFT] that allows you to discover and visualizes planned buildings in your neighborhood on the phoneFor better impression of plans in-situ rather than abstract and for the city as a whole, as they are normally communicated, e.g., through drawings, models, and in the newspaperAllows citizen to assess the actual impact of future buildings on-siteMood feature [LOWER LEFT] to allow people to (optionally) also express their mood when making a comment (emoticon + mood statement)Allows for better expressing momentary emotions perhaps leading to self-reflection (later on).May help others reading or reacting to your comment in order to contextualize it, to see it in perspective.All this functionality in the mobile prototype is geared towards two points, or two further contributions of the experiment. (1) It is geared towards engaging citizens in the moment where they might experience a higher personal relevance of the topics (that is, it explores qualities of actually being there, being on site) and (2) it is gearedtowards capturing and communicating some aspects of the specific locale and the situation for later and for others (that is, it understands place as a resource in the civic discussion process).For Ex-situ / Remote we have:Desktop/web interface with about the same functionality, but much more screen real estate and better multi-tasking capabilities. This allows people to draw in further information sources (like, e.g., legislation or Wikipedia) and provides a better overview of the discussions. â This is very important in order to foster participation not only on a superficial level.In the mobile interface, all issues are automatically favorited and saved when you engage with them in any way: thumbs up/down them, comment on them, photo, etc. or manual favoriting â so that you can access them and follow up on the web interface.In sum, where we consider the physical environment (i.e., the local situation) as the primary resource for the mobile prototype, the realm of information and knowledge, e.g., on the web, is the primary resource for the desktop prototype. It allows for deeper engagement with topics (where desired) in a more relaxed and retreated setting.
- The methodological challenges in the experiment!To explore the possibilities of mobile technology in this domain, we couldnât just sit in our workshops and brainstorm about it. We inherently had to go out to *experience* the environment and discuss how technology could mediate it.New mobile settings so deeply integrated and intertwined with day-to-day life demand new or adapted sets of methods and techniques, because previous methods were tailored for conventional settings in the home or at work, which are in several ways more limited making them easier to study in this respect.In a WS paper at NordiCHI 2010, I developed the walkshop technique as a supplement to PD workshops. Itâs a technique for hands-on experience and co-exploration of situated technologies (such as mobile LBS or ubiquitous tech) out in the field, in more realistic use settings, leaving the workshoproom behind.I take participants out for a walk where they can interact with the rich environment â directly and through the to-be-explored technical system that may seek to mediate some of this interaction with the environment.The map here on the [LEFT] is a walkshop that we did with municipal planners early on in the MobDem case. (30-min walk with a number of points of interest that they could interact with and where, at some of them, the app would trigger some events)Walking, here, somewhat functions as a thinking tool â an informal and flexible setting, stimulating reflection, invigorating conversations and exploration.Right after the walk with the planners crazy ideas came up in a future workshop segment: âinteractive 3D hologramsâ + âflying UFOs sending live pictures from the skyâ â the âinteractive 3D hologramsâ directly led to the implementation of the AR functionality, and the latter, the âflying UFOs sending live pictures from the skyâ, basically predated drones/quadro-copters with attached cameras. Additionally, the planners also had the idea of organizing walks just like these with citizens.The planners are the pictures on the far [RIGHT]. Obviously they had a lot of fun.I alsodid several other walkshops in different variations for different purposes â for example with citizens [HERE], or when evaluating our AR system [HERE]the citizens (also using the AR function) really thought they were getting much better information by being there and experiencing the AR view, they even wanted to send a photo of it to friends to share their experiences and the new insights they gathered through this new perspective in order to talk about it.the dedicated AR walkshop took place in the winter. It was cold (gloves; luckily there was no touch input required on the AR app) and it was windy making audio recording the walkshops very difficult. But particularly these walkshops helped a lot in understanding how people make sense of these visualizations and how they can put them to use (for example, to determine the buildingsâ impact, their broader influence on the appearance of the street)So, in general we had really good conversations and reflections during and after the walk. The walkshops helped participants to get a good understanding of the system within a short time frame from actually using it *hands-on* and, hence, reflecting on its potentials and tensions.
- In sum, this design experiment, MobDem, makes the following contributions.Being there, instead of mere immersion, e.g., in a game or in a virtual world, virtual reality,
- The second design experiment I want to tell you about, takes place in a slightly more challenging setting when it comes to the introduction of new technology: National Park Mols Mountains (that I mentioned earlier) â the park is not a pure nature reserve (many people live and work in the area, it has several cities and townships, plus it also has agriculture), but it is still an area where natural and cultural heritage are central elements.We worked here with the national park administration to study and add-on to their existing and ongoing civic participation process about the forming of the park â itâs a fairly new park, formally only a few years old. The aim was to deepen and transfer the insights from MobDem. M@P is a continuation of MobDem. I have used an improved version of the system and adapted it to the setting and the new focus of the study.This central new focus of the experiment has been on better *integrating* the system with the place and the existing practices of the people in the park, which is important particularly here due to the sensitive nature of the setting.===Source:- Wikipedia
- Mening@Park specifically explores the *coupling* between physical and digital spaces. How topics could be anchored in the physical world and how they can be tied to the usersâ experiences in the park. Most down to earth, this is to ask how topics can be accessed, and how places are represented in the system.[UP HERE] on the left, you will recognize some of the screenshots. Again, the app allows its users, while out and about, to explore topics around the park through, for example, the usual maps and lists. The third screenshot [UP HERE] shows a discussion thread of a topic from the deployment period of the system.One way I explored this coupling between digital and physical realms is, first, throughlocation-specific QR codes [RIGHT] that lead to a specific topic and that I deployed at popular locations around the park [PHOTO] (scan ď get to topic about the location). Second, I explored this coupling through location-based notifications [BOTTOM RIGHT] that would trigger when a user is in the vicinity of a topic she has previously shown some interest in or otherwise matches her interest profile (so, whenever a topic gets updated or a new topic of interest gets created). And,third, through the possibility of printing out physical posters or leaflets with dossiers of existing discussions in the system to be hung up at the local grocery store to connect to the local offline community (this is something that citizens had an interest in and suggested).These are all ways how you can get access to a topic while roaming about in the park. But how the places of interest are represented in the app is equally important. Means to achieve a meaningful representation are, e.g., the AR functionality that I presented earlier, photos of the place, place names or descriptions in the topic and of course maps â for example, the push-pin to see the topic in the context of the surrounding area and other topics close-by.However, throughout our intervention in the park we became sensitive to the question *if topics are indeed* always about one single location? If they can be reduced in that way.The answer is that in many cases topics are much more complicated than this: They may relate to several places and more importantly also to how they are connected and which relationships they form with other places. Take the topic [HERE] in the middle, for example: the visitor center of the NP (1. many different locations are possible for such a center (created several topics), and 2. more important than the spot on the map is what is around it and how it relates to the park as a whole (roads, entrance, heart of the activity, motorways)) [[just to hint at it: there is another design experiment in my thesis which looks at exactly this: how individual topics can expand geographically, that is how each entry or comment to a topic has its own location attached rather than being limited to the original one. â if interested, read my last paper, the one at NordiCHI last year.]]
- So, in a paper at Ubicomp last year, we have developed this model for methods studying ubicomp systems. It consists of five dimensions: the realism of use situation, the level of involvement of the investigator, the way participants are recruited or attracted, how time and activity is dealt with, and the sophistication of the prototype. The dimensions reflect the choices that one has when conducting ubicomp studies. For different purposes one may want to move back and forth on a number of these dimensions to adapt the study to the specific goals. In our understanding it is not useful to strive only towards one side of the model consistently, such as for example towards the right side, the ânaturalisticâ side. Instead, it may be more fruitful to consider each of these dimensions on their own.Let me give you an example, because the way we actually came to this model is based on reflections of a field trial of the M@P app in the NP.Our question was: How do we go about studying this setting? What do you do when you have a sophisticated prototype that you want to confront with the field? On the last dimension [DOWN HERE] we are towards the right.Our answer (the typical one) was to deploy the prototype in a field trial (via the, then called, Android Market), which took place during a busy period in the park â a week-long local folk and harvest fair (busy both generally and in relation to the participation process, where our study was deeply embedded in). The field trial was combined with various interventions, such as observations, interviews, and walkshops.So, I did passive observations and partly shadowed people at this popular location in the park [RIGHT], where there was also a QR code sign and quite a number of people came by. â not much really came out of standing there without interacting with the people.I was also observing and doing impromptu demos and pitches about our app at the festival site itself, at the tent here on the [LEFT]. â There was more activity and people were a bit more open, but engaging with technology was not the thing they wanted to do in this setting. It helped a bit when I just approached them and put a QR code sign under their noses, somewhat, as a ticket to talk.The deployment of the system itself was also not much better: we had 27 registered users who installed the app (which is ok for the short period), but with 29 comments on 16 topics (of which 15 we created, only 1 is user-created) there were also not much discussion going on.Instead of leaning to one side only in this specific study, we found it more useful, in reflecting on these experiences, to highly interact with participants rather than leaving them on their own (because these were the moments when we could learn the most); to compress time by making things happen in order to provoke more insightful reflections by participants; and, perhaps, to recruit some participants in a first phase to create some critical mass for the system.So, while field trials in ubicomp are typically understood and conducted as being an evaluation of a system that you have developed, we were rather interested in using them more in terms of further exploration of the design space with the prototype that we had, we wanted to look ahead rather than back. We wanted the field trial to be a part of the iterative design process rather than an assessment of it. Because in such settings use situations are often not well understood and use practices are really only in the making.
- To reiterate, this specific design experiment, Mening@Park, contributes in the following four ways. The third contribution of this design experiment, I donât have time to go into detail today. It essentially asks what are appropriate forms of engagement, what are the ways people can express themselves through these systems. In this experiment it became obvious that itâs *not* primarily proposals and objects or other formalized and rational forms of contributions to the deliberation process. Rather it has more to do with personal stories and memories, with affect and emotion associated with different places. These are the ways citizens often express themselves in.[[Of course, the remaining 2 design experiments have contributions of their own.]]
- To sum up, I (briefly) want to show you how *all* of my design experiments are linked together, how I have framed them.In MobDem I had the mobile interface, and the desktop/web interface that allows participation in different settings; I also had the AR functionality that provided another means, a visual and direct component to engage with planning issues; lastly, in M@P, I had physical artifacts in the environment that provided access to topics from within the physical setting (the QR code signs, printouts, in another experiment we had sculptures).All these elements that I provide, *and more*, I argue are necessary. We need to provide *many different means* through which citizens can contribute to planning discussions in *many different situations.* We need a heterogeneous infrastructure providing different entry points to civic engagement activities. Because, as I have said in the beginning, everyday life is too messy to have a one-size-fits-all approach. This is what I want to address with a notion of a situated engagement infrastructure.Here, I use a wider notion of infrastructure. In line with Dourish and Bell (2007), I take the term to encompass all socio-technical structures that lie beneath applications and the interactions they support. Star and Ruhleder define a number of properties for infrastructures. One of them is embeddedness: a situated engagement infrastructure is âsunk intoâ (as they call it), is inside of other structures, social arrangements and technologies. â It is a part of the larger practice of civic engagement with all its institutions, processes, activities, and traditional instruments. It supports it.A fully fledged situated engagement infrastructure is complemented by other approaches from related work â next to personal mobile devices, remote interfaces, and physical artifacts in the environment that I have presented, it can also include stationary and semi-stationary elements tied to a specific place such as for example situated displays; as well as more ubiquitous approaches that provide shared access such as participatory environmental sensors or low-tech approaches such as stickers and other installations for citizens to voice their concerns out there; and lastly and most importantly it also includes traditional participation instruments (like town hall meetings, hearings, etc.).Such an infrastructure allows citizens to act *wherever* and *whenever* it is meaningful and relevant to them in relation to particular topics and places of their interest.
- So, finally: there are three messages that I want you to take away from this talkFirst, methodologically, studying mobile and situated practices that are deeply interwoven with everyday life is difficult. I have provided some ideas in the form of the walkshop technique as well as some reflections on my own methods with the discussion of how field trials should be understood in ubicomp.Conceptually, I see situated engagement as beneficial under the following two conditions:in-situ, in-the-moment engagement at the site of interest provides an initial trigger for deeper reflection later on â that is, it creates awareness and meaningfulness in the moment by understanding place as a resource in civic discussionsThe infrastructure notion: it is necessary to provide many different means through which citizens can contribute to land use planning discussions in many different situations â a heterogeneous infrastructure for the messiness of everyday life â all of my experiments have pointed to this and have contributed individual elements to such an infrastructure, related work in technology-mediated engagement further expands itThrough my design experiments, not all of which I have shown today, I have come to a richer understanding of a concept of situated engagement and what the crucial elements are we need to design for.
- Thank you for you attention!
- My dissertation is a collection of papers + an extensive summary.It includes 5 publications that span over 4 design experiments. 3 full conference papers, 1 peer-reviewed workshop paper, and a 5-page note pending re-submission.
- A model of five dimensions for methods studying ubiquitous computing systems.
- Overview of the individual design experiments and their setup.
- List of (implemented) design ideas relating to the aspects of access, representation, and action respectively.
- Contribution themes of the individual design experiments included in this dissertation and their perspective on infrastructure.
- Conceptual overview of related work (systems in italics are mine).
- Example thread and corresponding map of the entries showing the geographic spreading starting with a comment from a public park downtown (bottom right) and the ensuing conversation in the suburb. (The comment in the lower left has been resend by the user with typos corrected. It is a duplicate of the one next to it. The original mistyped comment has been omitted in the thread for readability.)