Workshops

The main conference will be preceeded by two days of workshops, which provide a forum for people to discuss areas of special interest within pervasive computing with like-minded researchers and practitioners.
Two-Day Workshops
Designing Wellbeing
Designing Performative Interactions in Public Spaces
Monday 11th June
Food for Thought: Designing for Critical Reflection on Food Practices
Research in the Wild: understanding ‘in the wild’ approaches to design and development
Crafting urban camouflage
Perspectives on Participation: Evaluating cross-disciplinary tools, methods and practices
Designing Interactive Lighting
Tuesday 12th June
Supporting reflection in and on design processes
Designing for Cognitive Limitations
Designing Musical Interactions for Mobile Systems
(DIY)biology: Designing for Open Source Science
The Message in the Bottle: Best Practices for Transferring the Knowledge from Qualitative User Studies
Re-conceptualizing Fashion in Sustainable HCI
Slow Technology: Critical Reflection and Future Directions
Designing Wellbeing
Website: http://di.ncl.ac.uk/designwellbeing/
The workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers, designers and practitioners who are working on, or are interested in the topic, of wellbeing in the field of interaction design. It aims to establish a foundational agenda for interaction design research around the concept of wellbeing and will provide a platform to share resources, create new ideas for design and build valuable future collaborations. Participants will further be invited to create low-fidelity prototypes that supports aspects of wellbeing using Gadgeteer. Stimulated debates are envisioned to contribute to a better understanding of how wellbeing can be facilitated through digital design.
Organisers: Anja Thieme, Madeline Balaam, Jayne Wallace, David Coyle and Sian Lindley
Designing Performative Interactions in Public Spaces
Website: http://dcs.gla.ac.uk/workshops/performative2012
More and more interactive artifacts are used in public on an everyday basis, and metaphors from performance and theatre studies find their way into research on these interfaces. Building on the assumption that every human action in public space has a performative aspect, this workshop seeks to explore performative interaction as it occurs in real world public settings. This workshop will examine the design of performative technologies, the evaluation of user experience, the importance of spectator and performer roles, and the social acceptability of performative actions in public spaces through a variety of theoretical discussions and practical design activities.
Organisers: Julie R. Williamson and Lone Koefoed Hansen
Food for Thought: Designing for Critical Reflection on Food
Website: http://urbaninformatics.net/workshop/ffthought
This workshop addresses the opportunities and challenges for the design of digital interactive systems that engage individuals in critical reflection on their everyday food practices — including designing for engagement in more environmentally aware, socially inclusive, and healthier behaviour. The workshop will include a design session where the participants will be asked to respond to the challenging local issue of alcohol and fast food consumption, ultimately leading to broader socio-cultural transformation of Newcastle’s foodscape. The workshop will provide a unique forum to discuss existing theoretical and pragmatic approaches, and to envision novel ways to design technology that encourages sustained critical reflection.
Organisers: Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Rob Comber, Conor Linehan and John McCarthy
Research in the Wild: understanding ‘in the wild’ approaches to design and development
Website: http://www.researchinthewild.org
We are starting to see a paradigm shift within the field of HCI. We are witnessing researchers leaving the safety and security of their controlled, lab-based environments and moving their research out into ‘the wild’. Their studies are carrying out in-situ development and extended engagement, sampling experiences and working with communities in their homes and on the streets. This research has initially focused upon understanding the impacts that technological intervention has upon our day-to-day life and is leading us to explore the ways in which in-situ design, development and evaluation can be used to understand and explore these technological interventions. Is it the case that lab-based studies, taking people out of their natural environment and designing in the lab without long term user engagement are no longer appropriate to properly understand the impacts of technology in the real world?
Organisers: Alan Chamberlain, Andy Crabtree, Tom Rodden, Matt Jones and Yvonne Rogers
Crafting urban camouflage
Website: http://prusikloop.org/urbancamouflage
As interactive systems become increasingly entwined with architecture, and spaces become more able to detect the presence of individuals, should the need for control of visibility as a temporary personal state be a factor considered in interaction design? This one-day workshop will take a playful approach to exploring how low-cost materials and tools can be used to manage personal visibility in monitored public space, by designing and testing prototypes for rendering people invisible using craft and physical hacks to explore the limits of a computer vision tracking system (OpenCV). By explicitly engineering modes of failure, we can learn how visibility and invisibility can be managed, while also considering potential improvements in robust tracking for interaction design.
Organisers: Karen Martin, Ben Dalton and Matt Jones
Perspectives on Participation: Evaluating cross-disciplinary tools, methods and practices
Website: http://di.ncl.ac.uk/participation/dis2012
This workshop brings together a cross-disciplinary community of researchers and practitioners interested in participative practice and interactive systems design. The workshop addresses growing fascination with participation across interaction design, community informatics, the arts, science and social science, and asks workshop participants to reflect on the ethics and efficacy of the tools and methods used in these diverse practices. The aim of the workshop will be to map out a critical framework exploring the qualities of participation from multiple disciplines. The workshop outcomes will outline how cross-disciplinary perspectives on participation can contribute to participatory and user-centred interaction design.
Organisers: John Vines, Rachel Clarke, Tuck Leong, Peter Wright, Ann Light and Ole Iversen
Designing Interactive Lighting
Website: http://interactivelight.id.tue.nl
The Light Emitting Diode is a game changing technology. The rules for designing with light now have to be rewritten as this technology offers the designer radically new opportunities. LEDs can be applied in their thousands in luminaires or embedded in the architecture, and all could be controlled individually to obtain the perfect lighting design. These developments are certainly exciting but we need to understand how they will enhance people’s lives for the better. For this workshop, the aim is to explore new ways of interacting with light that suits our ideas for the future and exploits the possibilities of the LED.
Organisers: Dzmitry Aliakseyeu, Bernt Meerbeek, Jon Mason, Harm van Essen, Serge Offermans, Alexander Wiethoff and Norbert Streitz
Supporting reflection in and on design processes
Website: http://reflection.projects.cavi.dk/
The goal of the workshop is to explore how design processes extending longer periods of time, weeks to several months, can be documented and analysed. The workshop is unconventional in that participants must commit to documenting a design process for a period in time prior to participating in the workshop. During the workshop, participant will share accounts of how they have documented design processes and discuss how the work of reflecting on and analysing design process can generate new insight about design processes, for instance concerning how collaboration unfolds, the role of design materials, or how design ideas emerge.
Organisers: Peter Dalsgaard, Kim Halskov and Steve Harrison
Designing for Cognitive Limitations
Website: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~mccricks/dis12-cogdisab/
People with cognitive disabilities that affect their memory, attention, and comprehension can become overwhelmed when using technology—just as cognitively-demanding situations like driving or multitasking can hinder anyone’s technology use. However, appropriately-designed technology can assist in overcoming cognitive disabilities and limitations. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners with design experience in the many areas of cognitive disability and limitation to exchange, evolve, and develop strategies for design. Workshop participants will present lessons from their own experiences, and workshop activities will employ claims-based design strategies toward identifying, comparing, contrasting, and mapping approaches for addressing cognitive disabilities and limitations.
Organisers: Scott McCrickard and Clayton Lewis
Designing Musical Interactions for Mobile Systems
Website: http://sopi.media.taik.fi/mobilemusic/
Mobile music technology is a vast growth area, and has emerged as a field in which many of the specific design challenges and affordances of mobile technologies can be explored. The mobile is not just a smaller computer, and requires different tactics and strategies for user interaction. This workshop will discuss the specific interaction design challenges for building engaging and creative musical activities on mobile devices. Participants will share knowledge on interface design models that push the limits of what a mobile can offer for creating rich musical interactions. The workshop will culminate in an evening event, a public concert of mobile music.
Organisers: Koray Tahiroğlu, Atau Tanaka, Adam Parkinson and Steve Gibson
(DIY)biology: Designing for Open Source Science
Website: http://staceyk.org/diybioworkshop
Over the past decade, a community of biologists, artists, engineers and hobbyists has emerged to pursue biology projects outside of professional laboratories. As developments in DIYbio (Do It Yourself Biology) continue to expand science practice beyond professional settings and into hackspaces, art studios and private homes, HCI research is presented with a range of new opportunities. Our one-day workshop will be structured around several hands-on biology activities to explore the materials, practices and challenges of garage biology. We hope to bring together a diverse group of HCI researchers as well as scientists and artists to critically re-envision the role HCI might play at the intersection of biology, computation and DIY.
Organisers: Stacey Kuznetsov, Alex S.Taylor, Eric Paulos, Carl DiSalvo and Tad Hirsch
The Message in the Bottle: Best Practices for Transferring the Knowledge from Qualitative User Studies
Website: http://di.ncl.ac.uk/uxmessage/
This workshop aims to identify and improve current strategies and practices for transferring knowledge from qualitative user studies to inspire an experience-centered design process. The message (e.g., qualitative user study results) can be skewed when passed on from one phase to another in the design and development process. Moreover, the way insights are communicated is often not inspiring enough. At the end of this workshop we will have identified strengths of a few methods, tools, and techniques selected from examples of best practices, and summarized limitations and challenges of knowledge transfer and communication practices within experience-centered design.
Organisers: Marianna Obrist, Daniela Wurhofer, Petra Sundström, Elke Beck, Elizabeth Buie and Jettie Hoonhout
Re-conceptualizing Fashion in Sustainable HCI
Website: http://dis12fashion.wordpress.com
In this workshop, we intend to explore within the HCI community the importance of fashion in the IT industry. We will explore the meaning of fashion and how fashion and sustainability could and might interplay in the design of interactive technology. Participants in the workshop will collaborate in a practical exercise to act as a stimulus for thought concerning how the notion of fashion affects people’s behaviors and attitudes toward digital consumption. Participants will also share their own personal experience, behavioral changes, as well as insights related to sustainability and fashion.
Organisers: Yue Pan, David Roedl, Eli Blevis and John Thomas
Slow Technology: Critical Reflection and Future Directions
Website: http://willodom.com/slowtech
Over a decade ago Hallnas and Redstrom’s seminal article on Slow Technology argued that the increasing availability of technology in environemts outside the workplace requires interaction design to expanded from creating tools to make people’s lives more efficient to creating technology that could be embedded in everyday environments over long periods of time. The Slow Tech design agenda has since expanded significantly. This one-day workshop aims to advance the Slow Tech design program by exploring the various practical, methodological, and theoretical motivations, challenges, and approaches implicated in doing research and design in this growing space.
Organisers: William Odom, Richard Banks, Abigail Durrant, David Kirk and James Piercee