Design fiction by Sandy Claes and Hanna Johannsen
Thursday, June 15, 2017
No Choice
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
Hell hath no fury like an elderly woman scorned
Design fiction created by Kay Rogage and Mary Barreto
Persephone is a cantankerous 75 year old woman who is impatient and insensitive to others. Persephone lives in a council block and is frequently disturbed by the other neighbours. She lives next to a young family who’s children are always playing football in the corridors and another young couple who have wild parties and play loud music until the early hours of the morning. Persephone has lodged complaints with the police on several occasions, she has even chased the children out of the corridor with her walking stick but they still persist to play in the corridor and seem to think it is a game to make noise and get a chase.
Persephone lost her husband to a heart attack 5 years ago, her family live in on the opposite side of the world and can only visit once a year at Christmas. Persephone often gets scared at night and sleeps very little since her husband died. Persephone’s daughter advised that she should call the council to see if they can address the noise problems. Persephone has tried to ring the council several times but she gets stuck in a queuing system and keeps ending up connected to the wrong department and being put on hold. Enough is enough and Persephone decides to go to the council office to sort things out once and for all.
It has been a long time since Persephone has been to the town council offices, in fact she hasn’t been since she registered the death of her husband. Lots of things have changed since she last went and the lobby space is unfamiliar to her. She looks around for a receptionist but instead is faced with a screen under what looks like an umbrella. The screen is saying something to Persephone but she doesn’t realise that it is talking to her. Persephone looks around for a bell or some way to speak to someone. There is nothing there other than some screens which keep talking. Persephone gets angry and hits her stick off the floor, she shouts to see if anyone is around. Still no response except those blasted machines talking.
Persephone walks up to one of the machines and which says “Hello Persephone, how are you coping since your husband passed?”. Persephone is outraged at the impertinence of the machine, she prods the machine with her stick in the same way she prods the noisy kids. “Who the hell are you?”, “How do you know my name?”. “1st June 2012 you came to register your husband’s death, what brings you here now, is there something else you want to register, another death maybe?”. Persephone is outraged!! She shouts at the machine and hits it with her stick again, the screen cracks, an alarm goes off, the shutter comes down and Persephone here’s the screech of cars and police sirens approaching. As the police enter Persephone says “Just the person I wanted to see, I have a complaint to make about my neighbours”….
Persephone is a cantankerous 75 year old woman who is impatient and insensitive to others. Persephone lives in a council block and is frequently disturbed by the other neighbours. She lives next to a young family who’s children are always playing football in the corridors and another young couple who have wild parties and play loud music until the early hours of the morning. Persephone has lodged complaints with the police on several occasions, she has even chased the children out of the corridor with her walking stick but they still persist to play in the corridor and seem to think it is a game to make noise and get a chase.
Persephone lost her husband to a heart attack 5 years ago, her family live in on the opposite side of the world and can only visit once a year at Christmas. Persephone often gets scared at night and sleeps very little since her husband died. Persephone’s daughter advised that she should call the council to see if they can address the noise problems. Persephone has tried to ring the council several times but she gets stuck in a queuing system and keeps ending up connected to the wrong department and being put on hold. Enough is enough and Persephone decides to go to the council office to sort things out once and for all.
It has been a long time since Persephone has been to the town council offices, in fact she hasn’t been since she registered the death of her husband. Lots of things have changed since she last went and the lobby space is unfamiliar to her. She looks around for a receptionist but instead is faced with a screen under what looks like an umbrella. The screen is saying something to Persephone but she doesn’t realise that it is talking to her. Persephone looks around for a bell or some way to speak to someone. There is nothing there other than some screens which keep talking. Persephone gets angry and hits her stick off the floor, she shouts to see if anyone is around. Still no response except those blasted machines talking.
Persephone walks up to one of the machines and which says “Hello Persephone, how are you coping since your husband passed?”. Persephone is outraged at the impertinence of the machine, she prods the machine with her stick in the same way she prods the noisy kids. “Who the hell are you?”, “How do you know my name?”. “1st June 2012 you came to register your husband’s death, what brings you here now, is there something else you want to register, another death maybe?”. Persephone is outraged!! She shouts at the machine and hits it with her stick again, the screen cracks, an alarm goes off, the shutter comes down and Persephone here’s the screech of cars and police sirens approaching. As the police enter Persephone says “Just the person I wanted to see, I have a complaint to make about my neighbours”….
Lucy The Cat
Design fiction created by Graham Dove and Antti Jylha
Sheherazade is visiting Edinburgh Council to renew her licence for showing her cat Lucy. She does this every year. Lucy is a super valuable Persian and to show her, Sheherazade must validate who she is regularly. Sheherazade is 74 years young and super proud of Lucy, who has been a part of her life for seven years now. Lucy is purring softly and Sheherazade is smiling. As she enters the courtyard lobby of the council's new buildings and approaches one of the Sound Umbrellas, she is approached by one of the helpers who says, "Hi, I'm Gary how can I help you today?"
Sheherazade is feeling confident and replies, "It's OK I want a more personal experience, so I won't be needing you today." She walks towards one of the Sound Umbrella bubbles and it drops down to adjust its screen, speakers and sensors to fit Sheherazade and Lucy. This makes her super comfortable because she feels that the system has responded to her and has made the effort to adjust itself and accommodate her needs. "What can I do to help you?" the softly reassuring voice asks? "I've come to register Lucy for shows", she replies. The Sound Umbrella's camera see's the cat and guesses that this is Lucy. A paw-print reader emerges at cat level. Lucy places her paw on the reader.
Sheherazade is watching the Sound Umbrella's screen and sees the photo of Lucy as a kitten that was taken when her birth was registered. Sheherazade feels warm and protective, and cries a little as she remembers how cute Lucy was at that age. The Sound Umbrella then shows Sheherazade a history of the previous times she has brought Lucy for her license renewals – each time there is a photo and listing of the shows she has attended and the prizes she has won. To Sheherazade this is the most valuable service her council provides. She is super happy and smiles inside and out. The Sound Umbrella asks Sheherazade if all the data is correct, and she ponders for a moment or two before saying, "Yes".
Of course it was correct she thinks, it always is!
The Sound Umbrella thanks Sheherazade and asks her if she would like to go through to the cat counselor to have this years photo's taken and license issued. She takes one last look through the previous years' photos and says, "Yes". The directional paw-prints showing Sheherazade and Lucy the way to go light up in front of them.
Sheherazade is visiting Edinburgh Council to renew her licence for showing her cat Lucy. She does this every year. Lucy is a super valuable Persian and to show her, Sheherazade must validate who she is regularly. Sheherazade is 74 years young and super proud of Lucy, who has been a part of her life for seven years now. Lucy is purring softly and Sheherazade is smiling. As she enters the courtyard lobby of the council's new buildings and approaches one of the Sound Umbrellas, she is approached by one of the helpers who says, "Hi, I'm Gary how can I help you today?"
Sheherazade is feeling confident and replies, "It's OK I want a more personal experience, so I won't be needing you today." She walks towards one of the Sound Umbrella bubbles and it drops down to adjust its screen, speakers and sensors to fit Sheherazade and Lucy. This makes her super comfortable because she feels that the system has responded to her and has made the effort to adjust itself and accommodate her needs. "What can I do to help you?" the softly reassuring voice asks? "I've come to register Lucy for shows", she replies. The Sound Umbrella's camera see's the cat and guesses that this is Lucy. A paw-print reader emerges at cat level. Lucy places her paw on the reader.
Sheherazade is watching the Sound Umbrella's screen and sees the photo of Lucy as a kitten that was taken when her birth was registered. Sheherazade feels warm and protective, and cries a little as she remembers how cute Lucy was at that age. The Sound Umbrella then shows Sheherazade a history of the previous times she has brought Lucy for her license renewals – each time there is a photo and listing of the shows she has attended and the prizes she has won. To Sheherazade this is the most valuable service her council provides. She is super happy and smiles inside and out. The Sound Umbrella asks Sheherazade if all the data is correct, and she ponders for a moment or two before saying, "Yes".
Of course it was correct she thinks, it always is!
The Sound Umbrella thanks Sheherazade and asks her if she would like to go through to the cat counselor to have this years photo's taken and license issued. She takes one last look through the previous years' photos and says, "Yes". The directional paw-prints showing Sheherazade and Lucy the way to go light up in front of them.
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Initial Workshop Reflection
Our #acmDIS2017 workshop concluded with the presentation of seven short, fictional stories engaging with the issue of how people live with the built environment that interfaces with personal data. How did we get there?
First and foremost by being fortunate enough to have a great set of participants, 17 of them in fact. Thank you all! Participants arrived from across Europe and the US and there was great a cross-section of interests. Following the brief overview presentation by us organisers, these interests were evident in the short 3-minute presentations we exchanged with each other. They ranged from study methodologies to new uses and abuses of personal data, from public visualisations of personal behaviours to addressing building processes and from the use of sensor networks to understand building interaction to a whole host of other concerns. There is still much more to discuss.
Following this, we asked participants to work with mundane sensing and actuation technologies as well as widely available IoT devices. Things like ID card readers, key pads, sliding doors, speech interfaces and EEG head trackers. A wide variety of technologies that can be used to interface people and adaptive buildings today. Teams then used these technologies to design with, to create new interactive building systems, responding to a loose brief provided by us: Consider a specific building type. Consider the types of experiences that people have in this type of building. Design a system that responds to this context. An initial presentation of those systems followed at around lunch time.
We then challenged the teams to consider specific user groups that would use the new building system and associated services, to think beyond the 'interactive moment' and more long-term, and we challenged teams to address specific privacy and data retention concerns. Teams used these to further discuss and refine their designs.
At this point, we asked teams to split up to concentrate on developing design fiction in pairs, writing a utopian and a dystopian story about each of the proposed building designs. In a nutshell, this is how we got to design fiction. Watch out for future posts that show some of these.
First and foremost by being fortunate enough to have a great set of participants, 17 of them in fact. Thank you all! Participants arrived from across Europe and the US and there was great a cross-section of interests. Following the brief overview presentation by us organisers, these interests were evident in the short 3-minute presentations we exchanged with each other. They ranged from study methodologies to new uses and abuses of personal data, from public visualisations of personal behaviours to addressing building processes and from the use of sensor networks to understand building interaction to a whole host of other concerns. There is still much more to discuss.
Following this, we asked participants to work with mundane sensing and actuation technologies as well as widely available IoT devices. Things like ID card readers, key pads, sliding doors, speech interfaces and EEG head trackers. A wide variety of technologies that can be used to interface people and adaptive buildings today. Teams then used these technologies to design with, to create new interactive building systems, responding to a loose brief provided by us: Consider a specific building type. Consider the types of experiences that people have in this type of building. Design a system that responds to this context. An initial presentation of those systems followed at around lunch time.
We then challenged the teams to consider specific user groups that would use the new building system and associated services, to think beyond the 'interactive moment' and more long-term, and we challenged teams to address specific privacy and data retention concerns. Teams used these to further discuss and refine their designs.
At this point, we asked teams to split up to concentrate on developing design fiction in pairs, writing a utopian and a dystopian story about each of the proposed building designs. In a nutshell, this is how we got to design fiction. Watch out for future posts that show some of these.
Monday, June 5, 2017
Key Information
A summary of some useful, key information:
The workshop is designed to get us to work together on the emerging relationship of personal data and the built environment. We will spend the minimum amount of time presenting to each other, and most of the time working on a shared design exploration.
Could you please prepare a short (2-4 mins) Powerpoint presentation to introduce yourself and the key take away message from your paper. No more than two slides, please. Please send these to me by Friday 9th of June lunch time, so that we can merge them into one presentation.
As mentioned in the call, we will prepare a compendium of accepted contributions and share those with you before the workshop.
Workshops are being held at The Glass Room - Edinburgh Napier University (Not at the main conference venue). Details can be found here: http://dis2017.org/venues/
Tea/coffee breaks and the lunch break are provided for by the venue. Could you please let us have any dietary requirements? I will pass them on, while I don’t know yet how much influence we have on what is being served.
We are planning to collect generated material and do some audio/video recording during the workshop. This is covered by UoN Ethics and full details will be available at the start of the workshop. People are free to choose not to participate in the evaluation and still take part in the workshop fully.
Preliminary Workshop Programme
This is the preliminary workshop programme for our session on Saturday 10th June
9:00 Welcome tea and coffee
9:15 Welcome address
Introduction to the workshop topic by the organizers and the schedule for the day.
9:30 Participant presentations
These presentations are designed for people to introduce themselves and their paper, 2-4 minutes each.
10:30 Tea and Coffee Break
10:45 Design Session 1 – Devices, Places and Systems
In groups: Developing new user experiences around IoT devices in specific settings
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Group Feedback
Groups briefly feed back on their designs to the full workshop.
13:30 Design Session 2 – People and Fictions
Deepen the designs drawing on feedback and additional challenges
15:30 Tea and Coffee Break
15:45 Group Feedback
Groups present final designs
16:15 Concluding discussion and future plans
17:00 Close
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