Themes
Much of CUHTec's research can be summarised by these main themes:
Dependability, Inclusive design, Sociability and Enjoyment and the user experience.
Dependability
The information and communication technology that we use in our homes is already complex and set to become even more sophisticated in the years to come. Complex technology can fail in unpredictable ways and techniques are needed to ensure that the systems that we rely on in our homes are as "dependable" as critical systems in the work place. In the work domain there are techniques for ensuring this for critical systems such as aircraft flight decks, control rooms or financial dealing. The DIRC project has the general aim of applying these techniques to new socio-technical systems and researchers associated with CUHTec have been working with DIRC collaborators in the particular area of technology to support older people living independently.
Part of this work was to adapt existing dependability frameworks, in the light of ethnographic studies of frail older people living independently. This lead to the design of procedures for matching electronic assistive technologies to the needs of a given older person. A telecare provider in Northern Ireland is intending to use one of these procedures as part of their post installation checks.
Another part of the work was an analysis of what can go wrong in the lives of older people. This lead to the design of telephone-based volunteer-mediated online shopping service that is now running as a pilot scheme with Age Concern York. This is socially dependable in the sense that it recreates the social contact obtained while shopping, is accessible to all who need it and reliably delivers the goods.
Future research will examine how the concepts developed through the study of the dependability needs of older people can be generalised to other populations using technology in their home such as families with small children.
Inclusive design
Many older people are unable to use appliances and products because of poor design. Lettering may be to small for anyone without perfect vision to read. Beeps and other sound signals may be too quiet or too high pitched. The designers may assume a way of working that is unfamiliar to the whole cohort of older people who grew up before the widespread use of Windows.
CUHtec researchers contributed to the i-design 2 project which was to address these problems. The project has produced an Inclusive Design Toolkit to help organisations and designers produce better products that are accessible to the widest possible range of people. It containts guidance that ranges from corporate level strategy to project level advice, and includes interactive resources such as visual impairment simulators and an exclusion calculator.
However, many computer products and internet tools exclude whole groups of people because they simply do not do anything that these people want doing for them. Why would you want to use email if no-one else that you know uses it? Why would you want to buy your groceries on-line if you enjoy going to the shops? A second approach to inclusive design is to ask "what is it that these groups do want from technology?" This is the theme of the part of the i-design 2 project CUHTec was involved in. The product of this part of the research is a Wiki called WikID where older people can talk to researchers and designers about their experiences of technology.
Future research will extend WikID as a resource for designers.
Sociability
New communication technologies offer new ways of socialising that are yet to be fully exploited. For example, a project carried out by CUHTec researchers as part of the People at the Centre of Communication and Information Technologies looked at the use of telephone conferencing as a recreational activity. It is possible to connect several people to the same phone conversation at the same time via a telephone conferencing switch. While this technology is used regularly for business it is less commonly used just for socialising.
Researchers studied existing telephone conferencing groups run by the Community Resource Team in Hackney. This befriending scheme supports elderly individuals through recreational telephone conferences and weekly one-to-one contact. The aim was to find out what made these conversations enjoyable and suggest ways that technology could improve these recreational experiences. The study confirmed the value to participants of telephone conferencing. One person interviewed described the scheme as a 'godsend'.
Another possibility CUHTec is exploring is to find new ways of linking older people to their adult children. For example, the Virtual Frosted Window takes the form of a two-way video link with a camera and a TV screen in each of two dwellings. The image is deliberately obscured so that it looks as if you are viewing the other room through a frosted glass window. The aim is to make people feel that they are near to each other even though they are far apart, without making them feel they are being spied on. A similar project involving CUHTec uses jewellery pieces that can transmit information to each other. When one person cups the necklace in their hands, the other person's piece gently vibrates. The aim is not to replace normal conversation on the phone or in visits, rather to encourage it by bringing the other person to mind.
There relatively is little previous scientific work on how to identify when people are enjoying themselves. With the participants' permission, they obtained tapes of groups of older people. These were analysed for conversational structure and points of "flow" identified. Flow was taken as one important indication of enjoyment when socialising. Experiments were constructed to test two ways that flow might be encouraged with future developments in domestic communication technology. These experiments involved nearly 200 people randomly allocated into telephone conferences of around 4-6 people.
Neither experiment was conclusive but we have demonstrated a quantitative methodology for testing inventions designed to make electronically mediated conversations more enjoyable.
Future research will consider how spontaneous co-involvement could be encouraged through technology with visual aids in addition to the voice channel. This has become possible with multimedia mobile phones and domestic broadband.
Enjoyment and the user experience
When we buy a film, some music or a game we are buying an experience. Even technologies that are there to do something for us such as on-line shopping may also be valued for the experiences they provide. Scientific methods are now starting to be applied to the challenge of designing for a good experience. CUHTec researchers are leaders in this field.
But can we design for an experience? How can we evaluate whether an on-line shopping experience is as good or better than the experience of shopping in a bricks and mortar store? To begin to answer these questions we need theory of what experience is, and then to develop a method for experience-centred design. A framework for thinking about these issues has been developed by Peter Wright with his colleague John McCarthy from University College Cork is informing much of our research in this area (see table below).
| Sensual | our sensory engagement with a situation - its look, feel, atmosphere: imagine your first parachute jump, concrete, palpable visceral |
| Emotional | The evaluative relations that unite needs and desires to the particular: that was satisfying / frustrating, I'm proud of that solution! |
| Compositional | Relations of parts and wholes of a situation, before during and beyond: what's this about, what has happened, what should I do? |
| Spatio-temporal | The quality of space and time, the particulars of place: where am I, how soon can I quit? time just flew by! |
| Wright and McCarthy's threads of experience | |
Future research will make this understanding accessible to those who design technologies for the home through methods and tools.
