Contents

Welcome

Papers and Notes

A Study of the Challenges Related to
DIY Assistive Technology in the Context of Children with Disabilities

Making Wellbeing: A Process of User-Centered Design

Musical Meshworks from Networked Performance to Cultures of Exchange

Volvelles, Domes and Wristbands: Embedding Digital Fabrication within a

Visitors Trajectory of Engagement

PosterVote: Expanding the Action Repertoire for Local Political Activism

Cinejack: Using Live Music to Control Narrative Visuals

Time Telescope: Engagement with Heritage through Participatory Design

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Admixed Portrait: Reflections on Being Online as a New Parent

11

Pictorials

Workshops and Workshop Contributions

HCI: Human-Computer Improvisation

12

Speculation by Improvisation

13

Intimate Care: Exploring eTextiles for Teaching Female Pelvic Fitness

14

A Quantified Past: Remembering with Personal Informatics

15

Provocations and Works-in-Progress

Welcome
The Digital Interaction Group is a School of Computing
Science research group based in Culture Lab, Newcastle
Universitys centre for cross-disciplinary research in
interaction design, ubiquitous computing and digital
media. This year members of our group are making
a number of contributions to DIS 2014, the ACM
Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, through
papers, notes, pictorials, workshops and provocations &
works in progress.
This year we are also recruiting the first cohort of
students for our new EPSRC Centre for Doctoral
Training in Digital Civics; an initiative which will fund at
least 55 PhD students over the next 9 years. This will
be a cross-disciplinary centre for design-led research,
and design-led research training, that explores how
digital technologies can support community-driven
commissioning, development and delivery of public
health, social care, education and local democracy.
If you are interested in the new centre or any of our
work then please dont hesitate to get in touch.

Patrick Olivier

Pete Wright

p.l.olivier@ncl.ac.uk

p.c.wright@ncl.ac.uk

Paper

A Study of the Challenges Related to

DIY Assistive Technology in the Context of
Children with Disabilities

Hook J, Verbaan S, Durrant A, Olivier P, Wright P

Jon Hook

Abigail Durrant

The term Do It Yourself Assistive Technology (DIY-AT) refers to the

creation and adaptation of AT by nonprofessionals, including people
with disabilities and their families, friends and caregivers. Previous
research has argued that the development of technologies and services
that enable people to make their own DIY-AT will lead to the rapid and
low cost development of assistive devices that are tailored to meet the
complex needs of individuals with disabilities. We present the results of
a qualitative study exploring challenges related to the process of making
DIY-AT for children with disabilities. A series of eleven semi-structured
interviews with a broad range of stakeholders involved in the current use,
provision and adaptation of AT for children with disabilities revealed a
number of challenges relating to the prevalence and scope of ongoing
DIY-AT practice, barriers to participation, and the challenges faced by
makers and users of DIY-AT.
jonathan.hook@ncl.ac.uk

Paper

Making Wellbeing: A Process of

User-Centered Design
Marshall K Thieme A, Wallace J, Vines J, Wood G, Balaam M

We consider the role of making in current HCI design practices and how
it may affect the wellbeing of those who participate in these processes.
Through exploration of psychological concepts of wellbeing and their
connection to making experiences, we suggest that making can facilitate
and support both hedonic and eudemonic facets of wellbeing. We
illustrate this in the context of three case studies that engaged people
in creative making activities as part of user-centered design processes.
Based on our experiences, we argue that researchers ought to be mindful
of the potential impact our design processes have on our participants
and provide considerations for those designing for and with participants
where wellbeing is a concern.
k.marshall4@ncl.ac.uk

Kevin Marshall

Anja Thieme

Jayne Wallace

John Vines

Gavin Wood

Madeline
Balaam

Paper

Musical Meshworks from Networked

Performance to Cultures of Exchange
Freeth B, Bowers J, Hogg B

Ben Freeth

John Bowers

Much past research has addressed technical problems

such as latency to create simulacra of co-present
performance settings. In contrast, we draw on the
literature on digitally mediated performance in HCI to
gain a richer context for understanding networked live
musical events. We describe a system, MESHWORKS,
which permits the definition of varied participation
roles and unusual network topologies, and explore its
use to realize ArCCADE a project to create events that
support multiple overlapping musical ensembles and
invite curiosity-driven exploration by the audience. Our
experience with the system, the events and the interfaces
we built to support engagement are discussed. In
particular, we document how a musical community
has emerged around our research and discuss wider
implications for how we conceive the cultural meshwork
new performance technologies are implicated in.
b.c.freeth@ncl.ac.uk

Paper

Volvelles, Domes and Wristbands:

Embedding Digital Fabrication within a
Visitors Trajectory of Engagement
Nissen B, Bowers J, Wright P, Hook J, Newell C

Bettina Nissen

John Bowers

We present the findings of an empirical design study

exploring how situating digital fabrication within a
souvenir-making activity can enrich an audiences
encounter with cultural events and engage visitors
in discussion and reflection upon their experiences.
During an incremental accumulative design process, in
collaboration with an arts organisation, we developed
a series of fabrication activities that offered visitors the
opportunity to create their own personalised souvenirs
based on their experience of a cultural event. By
analyzing visitors trajectories of engagement with the
event we explore three key findings: activity embedded
digital fabrication engages new audiences, encourages
conversation and reflection, and presents organisations
with new and more playful ways to gain insights into
audience experiences.
b.s.nissen@ncl.ac.uk

Jon Hook

Paper

PosterVote: Expanding the Action

Repertoire for Local Political Activism
Vlachokryiakos V, Comber R, Ladha K, Taylor N, Dunphy P, McCorry P, Olivier P

Vasilis
Vlachokyriakos

Rob Comber

Karim Ladha

Nick Taylor

Online and digital technologies support and extend

the action repertoires of localized social movements.
In this paper we examine the ways by which digital
technologies can support on-the-ground activist
communities in the development of social movements.
After identifying some of the challenges of deploying
conventional voting and consultation technologies for
activism, we examine situated political action in local
communities through the design and deployment of a
low-cost community voting prototype, PosterVote. We
deploy PosterVote in two case studies with two local
community organizations identifying the features that
supported or hindered grassroots democratic practices.
Through interviews with these communities, we explore
the design of situated voting systems to support
participation within an ecology of social action.

v.vlachokyriakos@ncl.ac.uk
Paul Dunphy

Paper

Cinejack: Using Live Music to Control

Narrative Visuals
Schofield G, Green D, Smith T, Wright P, Olivier P

Guy Schofield

David Green

Cinejack is a system for directing narrative video

through live musical performance. Cinejack interprets
high-level musical content from live instruments and
translates it into cinematographic actions such as edits,
framings and simulated camera movements. Cinejack
explores a novel and highly pragmatic approach to
interface design, where affordances of users own
musical instruments are used as controllers through an
interpretive interaction scheme. The Cinejack software
was developed through a multi-stage design process,
based around existing creative practices. Features of
the authors own practice were used to form an initial
specification, while further phases were structured
around collaborations with musicians and film-makers.
As much as possible, this development took place
outside the laboratory, with the software supporting live
audio-visual shows in real music venues.

Tom Smith
g.p.schofield@ncl.ac.uk

Note

Time Telescope: Engagement with Heritage

through Participatory Design
Schofield G

Guy Schofield

Time Telescope is a site-specific digital art installation

which allows viewers to explore an area of the city
of NewcastleGateshead at various points in history.
The installation formed part of a project in which a
participatory interaction design process was used to
engage young people with the heritage of their local
area. The telescope itself and the project through which
it was designed is discussed in relation to the goals of
the project and its impact upon the young participants.
g.p.schofield@ncl.ac.uk

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Pictorial

Admixed Portrait: Reflections on Being

Online as a New Parent
Trujillo-Pisanty D, Durrant A, Martindale S, James S, Collomosse J

Diego
Trujillo-Pisanty

This Pictorial documents the process of designing a

device as an intervention within a field study of new
parents. The device was deployed in participating
parents homes to invite reflection on their everyday
experiences of portraying self and others through
social media in their transition to parenthood. The
design creates a dynamic representation of each
participants Facebook photo collection, extracting and
amalgamating faces from it to create an alternative
portrait of an online self. We document the rationale
behind our design, explaining how its features were
inspired and developed, and how they function to
address research questions about human experience.

Abigail Durrant
diego.trujillo-pisanty@ncl.ac.uk

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Workshop

HCI: Human-Computer Improvisation

Bowers J, Taylor R, Hook J, Freeman D, Bramley C, Newell C

John Bowers

Robyn Taylor

Jon Hook

This workshop explores the forms of improvisation that exist across various
disciplines, how they can be observed empirically, how improvisation
relates to technology and design, and how communities of improvisation
exist and evolve. Through the use of these topics to stimulate discussion,
along with group activities founded in theatre and music improvisation,
we investigate how the study of improvisation can be used to inform
contemporary HCI.
john.bowers@ncl.ac.uk

12

14

Chatting D

David Chatting

Contribution

Speculation by Improvisation

I am a designer who uses improvisational techniques

to explore the impact of emerging technologies
in everyday lives. This paper outlines how I use
improvisation in the production and development of
speculative designs and how an audience can engage in
their own improvisations with the resulting prototypes.
This draws heavily from the tradition of improvisation
in theatre. I illustrate this with my Runner Spotters
project developed while studying at the Royal College
of Art, London.
david.chatting@ncl.ac.uk

13

P-WiP

Intimate Care: Exploring eTextiles for

Teaching Female Pelvic Fitness
Almeida T, Comber R, Olivier P, Balaam M

Teresa Almeida

Rob Comber

Madeline
Balaam

photo: Ko-Le Chen

Intimate care is integral to the lifecourse, including

care tasks linked to personal hygiene, bodily functions
and products. In this paper, we explore the potential of
eTextiles as catalysts for conversations around intimate
care. We designed a kit that integrates eTextiles as the
core material to teach and learn about intimate parts
of the self and to support body literacy. We deployed
this design kit in an educational context, with a group of
six female participants aged 15-16. We suggest avenues
for future research within health and wellbeing, in
combination with smart, wearable materials.
t.a.almeida@ncl.ac.uk

14

P-WiP

A Quantified Past: Remembering with

Personal Informatics
Elsden C, Kirk D

Chris Elsden

Dave Kirk

As digital technologies increasingly mediate, capture

and record our everyday lives, HCI research has
considered the consequences for human memory
and what Banks calls The Future of Looking Back. In
this paper, we extend this research, and argue that
the proliferation of personal informatics tools - such
as location tracking app Moves, or wearable activity
monitors - offer an alternative lens on the past. With
a focus on understanding the situated experience of
remembering, we question how we might interact
with our Quantified Past, the personal, historical
record being created by our daily use of these tools.
Bringing together recent HCI research on memory and
personal informatics, we introduce an ongoing userstudy identifying current experiences of looking back
with different self-tracking tools. From this, we raise
several speculations for the long-term design and use
of personal informatics tools and the data they produce.
c.r.elsden@ncl.ac.uk

15

EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in

Digital Civics

Digital Civics PhD students will be responding to these

challenges by undertaking training in the social, political
and economic contexts of citizenship, community , and
local service provision. They will also undertake training
in participatory methods, digital design and technical
aspects of digital services. They will undertake PhD
research by working closer with local communities, local
government and non-Government agencies and other
local service providers. A major focus of the centre will
be citizen participation and citizen-generated initiatives
and content.
The centre is aiming to create a generation of doctoral
students capable of engaging in both multi- and crossdisciplinary research, equipped with the conceptual,
technical and practical wherewithal to design, develop,
evaluate, and ultimately innovate, digital technologies
and methods for this complex arena. We therefore
expect students and researchers to be graduates
of diverse disciplines including computer science,
education, health and clinical sciences, social science,
architecture and planning.
If you are interested in
studying for a PhD in Digital
Civics please talk to one of
our group members or visit
http://digitalcivics.org.uk/

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