Leaving the wild: lessons from community technology handovers

As research increasingly turns to work 'in the wild' to design and evaluate technologies under real-world conditions, little consideration has been given to what happens when research ends. In many cases, users are heavily involved in the design process and encouraged to integrate the resulting technologies into their lives before they are withdrawn, while in some cases technologies are being left in place after research concludes. Often, little is done to assess the impact and legacy of these deployments. In this paper, we return to two examples in which we designed technologies with the involvement of communities and examine what steps were taken to ensure their long-term viability and what happened following the departure of researchers. From these examples, we provide guidelines for planning and executing technology handovers when conducting research with communities.

[1]  Gary Marsden,et al.  People are people, but technology is not technology , 2008, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

[2]  Mary Beth Rosson,et al.  Participatory design in community computing contexts: tales from the field , 2004, PDC 04.

[3]  Donald A. Norman,et al.  THE WAY I SEE ITSignifiers, not affordances , 2008, INTR.

[4]  R.I.A. Mercuri,et al.  Technology as Experience , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication.

[5]  Yvonne Rogers,et al.  Why It's Worth the Hassle: The Value of In-Situ Studies When Designing Ubicomp , 2007, UbiComp.

[6]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  The Aware Home: A Living Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing Research , 1999, CoBuild.

[7]  Keith Cheverst,et al.  Creating a rural community display with local engagement , 2010, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[8]  Yvonne Rogers,et al.  Interaction design gone wild: striving for wild theory , 2011, INTR.

[9]  Gillian R. Hayes.  The relationship of action research to human-computer interaction , 2011, TCHI.

[10]  June Lennie,et al.  A Way Forward: Sustainable ICTs And Regional Sustainability , 2005, J. Community Informatics.

[11]  Marcus Foth,et al.  Action Research and New Media - Concepts, Methods, and Cases , 2008, New media: policy and social research issues.

[12]  D. Eagle,et al.  Community informatics : shaping computer-mediated social relations , 2001 .

[13]  Lucy A. Suchman,et al.  Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (Learning in Doing: Social, , 1987 .

[14]  Stephen Lindsay,et al.  Family Hedge: Using principles of game design in a digital artifact , 2012 .

[15]  Allison Druin,et al.  Technology probes: inspiring design for and with families , 2003, CHI '03.

[16]  Tom Rodden,et al.  Domestic Routines and Design for the Home , 2004, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[17]  Scott R. Klemmer,et al.  Exiting the Cleanroom: On Ecological Validity and Ubiquitous Computing , 2008, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[18]  Paul Dourish,et al.  Where the action is , 2001 .

[19]  Tobie Kerridge,et al.  Anatomy of a failure: how we knew when our design went wrong, and what we learned from it , 2009, CHI.

[20]  Steve Benford,et al.  Ambiguity as a resource for design , 2003, CHI '03.

[21]  Keith Cheverst,et al.  Supporting Community Awareness with Interactive Displays , 2012, Computer.

[22]  Jan Stage,et al.  It's worth the hassle!: the added value of evaluating the usability of mobile systems in the field , 2006, NordiCHI '06.

[23]  Peter C. Wright,et al.  Viewpoint: empowering communities with situated voting devices , 2012, CHI.

[24]  Margot Brereton,et al.  Design from the everyday: continuously evolving, embedded exploratory prototypes , 2010, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[25]  John M. Carroll,et al.  The Blacksburg Electronic Village: A Study in Community Computing , 2003, Digital Cities.

[26]  Richard Ennals,et al.  Doing Action Research in Your Own Organisation , 2009 .

[27]  Steve Benford,et al.  Supporting ethnographic studies of ubiquitous computing in the wild , 2006, DIS '06.

[28]  Barry A. T. Brown,et al.  Into the wild: challenges and opportunities for field trial methods , 2011, CHI.

[29]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  Classroom 2000: An Experiment with the Instrumentation of a Living Educational Environment , 1999, IBM Syst. J..

[30]  Margot Brereton,et al.  A qualitative analysis of local community communications , 2006, OZCHI '06.

[31]  G. Hearn,et al.  Networked Individualism of Urban Residents: Discovering the communicative ecology in inner-city apartment buildings , 2007 .