Sign up for our workshop Exploring the value and significance of bringing a craft ethos to debates around the IoT/connected things

Call for Participation

Join us for a one day workshop to explore how a craft practice and ethos can help us to respond to privacy, trust, bias and the Internet of Things.

“How healthy is the internet?”  As more and more things become internet-connected (i.e. become part of the IoT) questions of trust, privacy, security, data ownership, data bias, and the commercial abuse of data, become ever more pressing. This reflects a recognition of a wider problem with the internet alongside the rapid developments in machine learning (i.e. AI) and how it is being unreflectively ‘put to work’ in an ever-increasing range of applications. This workshop will explore these tensions and concerns through the lens of craft, both as a practice and a conceptual ethos.

This studio will use embroidery as a craft-oriented communal/social practice activity to scaffold a discussion framed by our craft ethos characteristics, involving notions of; subjectivity, bespokeness, localism, embodiment, provenance, authenticity, and care-full-ness. Embroidery is an appropriate craft-oriented method which we believe encourages flavors of conversation that are distinct from other forms of participatory workshops. Whilst these activities will likely enable mindful stitching, we are more pointedly using this method as a dialogical activity where the acts of communal stitching will enable us to direct conversation to certain aspects of craft characteristics beyond the literal objects participants are making. Through this embodied making activity, you will create a bespoke embroidered badge based on a set of provocations and take a deep dive into the issues with IoT we have highlighted.

Through making together in small groups, supported by experienced researchers working in the field, we hope to provide an environment for rich discussion and material speculation on alternative visions of ‘healthier’ connected futures. The studio will use the embroidered outcomes as well as a range of predesigned props and design resources to not only discuss entanglements of living well in a digital culture, but also to help us collectively and individually envision stories/scenarios which encapsulates vision/s of an alternative, healthier, digitally connected future. At the conclusion of the workshop we will explore the possibility of setting up a special interest group that takes our thinking forward into the future.

More information and Sign up here

Come and join our group! We are currently advertising for a new staff member to join our HCI group at the School of Computer Science.

Supporting the expansion and development of the SAHCI group, topics of interest include but are not limited to: tangible computing, digital fabrication, ubiquitous computing, information visualization, human-centered artificial intelligence, augmented reality, novel software and hardware interactions, and critical HCI. Expertise in the field of HCI and technical expertise in the creation of hardware and or software interactions is of particular interest.

For more details: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CRS296/lecturer-senior-lecturer-reader-in-human-computer-interaction-ac7180gb

Closing Date: 17th August 2022

Please share far and wide

The paper is open access: Representational transformations: Using maps to write essays.

Summary of the paper and its findings

We built a tool to study how writers move between map and text to write essays. The main takeaway is that important cognitive work happens in the transformation process between map and text representations.

There are lots of existing tools for building representations to support complex cognitive tasks – e.g. argument maps, text, notes, slides, sketches, and so on. But tool support for the transformations *between* representations is much more neglected – and we think it’s crucial!

We built Write Reason, a tool which combines a text editor and a mapping interface. You can drag parts of the map into the text, and parts of the text into the map, and it helps you keep them in sync.

We then studied how 20 students used Write Reason to write essays. You can interactively explore the maps and essays built by participants. We identified key properties of transformations: change in representation type, cardinality, and explicitness. And we found that most used an all-at-once batch translation, while a few used bit-by-bit interleaving. 

We think understanding transformations is crucial for building the next generation of multi-representational tools. How can we better support multi-transformation pipelines like these? Can automation unlock more complex + powerful workflows, which would be tedious to do manually?

Our findings revealed and falsified some of the key implicit assumptions that we baked into the design of Write Reason. We hope that these reflections will help other designers and researchers start one step ahead of us and avoid these mistakes!

Project page. Paper (open access).

Thrilled to see Iain and Guilherme graduating this week. Congratulations on your well-deserved success Dr. Carneiro & Dr. Carson!