A very intense CHI conference

The CHI 2019 conference ended yesterday. It was the most intense CHI I’ve ever had — I was on stage five times in two days. (In fact, it was the most intense conference experience of any kind that I’ve ever had.) Here’s a brief run-down of my activities.

alt.chi presenting

I started by presenting my alt.chi paper in the 9am session on Tuesday, after getting up at 4:15 that morning and finally finishing my slides about 8:15. (It’s easier for me to get up early than to stay up late.) Several people told me it was really good and said it should have been a full paper. I’m pondering how to enrich it for submission to another SIGCHI conference.

Diversity and Inclusion Lunch

For the past few years, CHI has had a Diversity and Inclusion Lunch on the Tuesday, and this year I spoke about doing a PhD as an older student (I started at 60). I won’t say more about that here because I plan a separate blog post on that talk. I’ll just say that my first draft was six minutes long and I had been told to target 3 minutes. I ended up with about 3.5 (which was fine), but it took a good while to cut it down to that and still convey everything important. That talk, too, wasn’t completely finished until almost the last minute (the night before). It was incredibly well received; see my blog post about that specific talk.

UX Event

I had the role of Industry Liaison for this year’s conference, and the main thing I did for that was to organize and chair a “UX event” on the Tuesday evening to get academics and practitioners exploring together things they could do to help bridge the gap between them. The event started with a talk by Giles Colborne, followed by three brief presentations with ideas for addressing the problem, followed by more than an hour of working together to create bridging ideas and plans for putting them into practice. This effort builds on previous work (mainly at CHI conferences) regarding research-practice interaction. This event was very popular, and we had a fantastically even balance between academics and practitioners. I ascribe much of the academic interest in the event to the REF (Research Excellence Framework), a newish way of evaluating UK universities’ research that includes its impact outside of academia. The event was partially successful — some folks thought it was fabulous and others (including myself) expressed concerns — and I’m still collecting outputs from it and have created a Slack team in hopes of fostering further discussion and bridge building. (If you’d like to join the Slack team, send me your email address; and if I don’t know you, tell me why you want to join and/or what you see yourself contributing.)

Session chairing

On Wednesday I chaired a paper session. I hadn’t had time to read the papers closely (my bad!) but I had at least read the abstracts and I had some idea of what they were about. And of course I paid attention to the presentations. One of a session chair’s most important responsibilities is to keep the session on time: CHI sessions generally have four presentations each, and the presentations are timed to start and end at fixed times (for the last few years they’ve had 20 minutes each, including Q&A), and I had to cut one presenter off before he was finished and hold another back from starting two minutes early. A key person in SIGCHI told me later that I had amazing session-chairing skills (I think he was referring to my timekeeping), which pleased me inordinately.

SIG co-chairing

I collaborated with two people to run a special interest group (SIG) at the conference (and two additional people to write the proposal for it); our SIG was on technology to foster transformative experiences. I was a relatively minor figure in this one, so it wasn’t very stressful for me.

Future possibilities

Several things came out of various discussions.

My PhD supervisor was there for part of the time, and he attended my alt.chi talk (and was one of the people who said it should have been a full paper). We have been invited to write an article for a journal, so we sat down together and worked out a way to approach it. We explained the approach to the journal’s editor, and he agreed in principle. So now we have to write an abstract and get busy on the article.

I suggested to my SIG co-organizers that we explore ideas for collaborating on other research, and we talked for about half an hour about that. There’s an event happening in Milan in about ten days, but unfortunately I can’t go to that because of a work commitment on the same day. I think there’s a lot of potential for that collaboration.

I’ve been invited to Weimar to speak and discuss. I don’t know a great deal about what that’ll turn into, but I trust the person who invited me and I know we’ll work out something good.

And finally, I had lunch on the last day with someone I met at a conference several years ago (while we were both students). He works for a large company that is open to supporting research that might benefit them, and I told him of something I want to know more about (not related to transcendent or transformative experiences, but something else altogether), and he seemed excited about the idea. I’m optimistic on that front as well.

All in all, it was a very good CHI. And I’m very ready to see some castles and abbeys in the Scottish Borders on my way home.

Some important literature to support TUX research

As I mentioned earlier this year, in my description of the alt.chi paper I’m going to present at the CHI 2019 Conference next month, I am concerned about what I see as the almost complete lack of citations of transcendent experience literature in the human-computer interaction (HCI) research on transcendent experiences facilitated by technology. A number of studies of techno-spirituality cover transcendent user experiences (TUXs), but strikingly few of them cite any literature on the pertinent experiences or attempt to define the experiences of interest.

To help address this situation, I have created a resource of literature (mostly research papers) that were of particular value to my PhD research and that I think might help other researchers understand and/or define transcendent (user) experiences. By no means does my list does include all of the literature on any of these topics — and what’s there as of this writing is just a start — but I hope it will help move things forward.

I’ve created this resource as a separate site, not part of this one (which is mostly a blog). I’ve done this to keep separate the personal (this one) from the strictly informational (the literature resource).

You’ll find the literature resource at transcendhance.wordpress.com/literature/

---

Note: I use “transcendent experience” as a general term for the type of experience that involves a feeling of deep connection with something greater than oneself. These experiences are called by many other names, including spiritual experience, peak experience, and religious experience. Transcendent experiences may or may not be religious. See my PhD thesis for a more in-depth discussion of the terminology.

My first post-PhD publication (incipient)

Yesterday I got word that the first piece of work I’ve derived from my thesis has been accepted. The venue is the “alt.chi” track of the CHI 2019 conference (to be held in Glasgow this May). alt.chi is “a forum for controversial, risk-taking, and boundary pushing presentations at CHI. … Contributions to alt.chi often innovate methodologically, critique accepted practices, or take on controversial questions.” I had a critique to offer.

Here’s the abstract of my paper:

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in HCI research on the use of technology in spiritual practices. Some of these works cover spiritual/transcendent experiences associated with these practices, but strikingly few of them describe in any way the experiences they studied or aimed to support, let alone give operational definitions of the terms they use for those experiences. Even fewer papers cite any literature on the relevant experiences. We have to ask: How do the authors understand the experiences their work is aiming to observe, invite, or support? How do they know when and whether they have observed, invited, or supported the kinds of experiences they target? How do they know what they are studying?

This paper discusses the presence and absence of operational definitions for spiritual/transcendent experiences in HCI research, and of citations of relevant literature. It speculates about possible reasons for the oversight and proposes some operational definitions aimed at filling the gap.

As soon as I identified that gap in the HCI literature, I knew it would be a good topic for alt.chi; and I was encouraged by a comment from one of my thesis examiners, during my viva (thesis defense), that I had made a good case for defining it as a gap. For this paper I decided that finger-wagging alone wasn’t enough — or even appropriate — I needed to offer at least an approach, if not some part of a solution. So I added in the definitions of terms that I had provided in my thesis and proposed them as operational definitions for transcendent user experience (TUX) research going forward.

The reviews of my submission were uniformly positive, and the reviewers offered helpful suggestions. Now I have ten days to consider them, incorporate them as makes sense to me, and put the final version in camera-ready format.

I’ll post the final paper as soon as ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) allows me to do so. This will probably be sometime in April.

UX Cambridge: A good debut with Sigma UK

I’ve just returned from the UX Cambridge conference, having had a wonderful time. I attended interesting, high-quality presentations and gave two myself that were very well received. I met fascinating people and had exciting, energizing conversations. All in all, a great experience.

My major presentation was a one-hour tutorial on designing for older adults. Titled “Older adults: Are we really designing for our future selves?“, the tutorial discussed the common slogan “designing for our future selves” and teased apart the two types of issues that people face as they age — challenges due to changes in our bodies, and challenges due to unfamiliarity with newer technology — and discussed the implications that those two types of challenges present for the design process. I used examples from my own experience of aging (I’m just shy of 64 now) to illustrate and personalize the issues. For example, I didn’t need reading glasses until ten years later than most people do, and I’m still using a low-power magnification; but I’m probably a little early with the challenge of dexterity and stability of my hands, as I have both mild osteoarthritis and essential tremor. The tutorial elicited a lot of great questions, and the exercises saw lively discussion among the participants. People said (and tweeted) a lot of nice things about it, and I had some great conversations afterwards. The slides are on the Sigma Slideshare.

The other presentation was one of the “lightning talks” that these conferences run at the end of the second day. At one of the talks the first day, I had asked a question and raised some objections based on the answer, so the organizers asked me to do a lightning talk. Rather than speak about that objection (which would have taken me longer to prepare), I spoke against the oft-stated idea that a product “should be usable with no training”. Here are the slides from my lightning talk. The Sigma team are planning a blog post about it, so stay tuned. This talk elicited some great questions as well.

This was my first foray into representing Sigma at professional events, and I’d say it went rather well.

It was also my first visit to Cambridge, and I think I’ll enjoy living there.

CHI 2016 poster for my late-breaking work

In my last post I wrote that I had submitted a thing to the Late-Breaking Work venue of the CHI 2016 conference. For some reason I neglected to add a post saying that my submission was accepted. Odd that I would forget something like that.

Anyhow, it was accepted. LBWs are presented as posters, and I’ve just finished preparing mine. You can find the “paper” on the “Papers” page of this blog and you can see a larger version of the poster (one where the text is actually legible) by clicking on the smaller version on this page. (I put “paper” in quotation marks because it’s not considered a paper in the CHI sense of a full research paper that gives quasi-maximum kudos and counts toward academic tenure.)

I’m on the schedule for the Wednesday and Thurssday, so if you’re at CHI I hope you’ll stop by and talk to me during the conference reception or one of the relevant coffee breaks. See you there!

Guerrilla IA – a workshop at UCD-UK 2015

I’ve just learned that Adam Babajee-Pycroft and I will be giving a workshop at the User-Centred Design UK 2015 conference (London, 24-25 October). Called “Guerrilla IA: Drafting an Information Structure When You Can’t Do a Card Sort”, the workshop builds on a talk I gave at World Information Archicture Day 2014, in Bristol. (Here’s my blog post about that talk.) While analyzing comments for a paper on YouTube meditation videos, I realized that the technique I was using (“inductive content analysis”) was building me an information architecture, and that it was a technique that could be useful to IA practice. So I presented this idea to a group of information architects (duh! :-) and Adam approached me afterwards to ask a few questions. He told me he was about to begin a project that would be a good candidate for trying it out, and I was excited to learn that my goal of bringing research into practice might bear fruit so quickly (if goals can be said to bear fruit). Well, the technique turned out to work very well on his project, and the two of us have teamed up to create a workshop/tutorial to introduce and teach people how to use it. We will be giving this workshop for the first time at UCD-UK, so come join us! And stay tuned for further developments. :-)

World Information Architecture Day 2015 – Bologna

Last month I spoke at World Information Architecture Day 2015 Bologna, one of the two Italian events among the many around the world that celebrated WIAD 2015. This year’s worldwide theme was “Architecting Happiness”, and because the organizers in Bologna expected a relatively high percentage of their attendees to be from industry and not to be specialists in information architecture or user experience, they asked speakers to focus on an environment to which everyone could relate. They were happy with my proposal to speak about government systems, about which I had spoken several times before and which I already had in US and UK versions. So I had to translate the text of my slides into Italian, find photos and screenshots that would depict the concepts as relevant to the Italian government, shorten the thing a little, and emphasize happiness a little more. Then respond to the light edit, done gracefully and competently by Chiara Scesa, and head off to Bologna. Oh, and in the meantime collaborate with Luca Rosati in preparing a 2.5-hour hands-on workshop on usability evaluation for the afternoon session.

The speakers’ dinner was amazing. Not so much for the food — although that too was good — but for the company and the conversation. The six of us were three organizers (some of whom were also speakers) and two speakers besides myself (Luca Rosati and the closing keynote speaker, journalist Luca De Biase — evidently most of the speakers couldn’t make the dinner), and with that small a group everyone could participate in the larger conversation if they wanted. I greatly enjoyed getting to know everyone, and I felt energized and very much appreciated.

My talk opened the event. Technical problems prevented my presentation itself from appearing in the day’s video feed, but the audience questions did make it there. You can get the gist of the talk from the slides on SlideShare, (or if you wish to do so in English, consult the US or UK version), and I’ll summarize the questions and answers below.

1. Question: In your list of stakeholders, you did not mention those who design and develop government systems. Was this a choice?
   Answer: I forgot them. Which is ironic, because I have been one of them for most of my life. But yes, they are stakeholders too. Thanks!
2. Question: The graph regarding security, which shows an inverse relationship between the level of security and the quality of the user experience — could it be that when you increase security it just becomes more difficult to improve user experience?
   Answer: Yes. This graph came from the book and I am not in complete agreement with it; I agree with you.
3. Question: In the UK environment, where you are now, how common, how frequent is it that they introduce usability methods in the design of government systems?
   Answer: They have a centralized digital government agency, which has a strong user research team that supports the government agencies in doing this, and they have a style for all the government, that they should follow.
4. Question: In your experience, the fact that there are projects in which usability for the public servants gets very little consideration — is it a problem of awareness of the customer, or of the budget allocated to the project? Is it possible to increase awareness without cutting too much into the budget?
   Answer: The problem is with both. One problem is that the expenses of development belong to one group and the benefit of efficiency belongs to another — such that the one responsible for development doesn’t want to pay for something that benefits someone else. But there is always a way to increase happiness and usability without spending too much. It’s difficult, but with enough understanding, enough process, one can… My motto is “Any improvement is always an improvement.” Even if you can’t reach perfection, if you can improve usability and happiness, you have done a good thing.

Watching this video, I am struck by how much my accent in Italian has deteriorated in the almost 14 years since my husband died (there’s nothing like living with a native speaker!) but my command of the language is still good enough that I was comfortable giving my talk and answering questions in it. With a hesitation here and there while I searched for a word.

I won’t take much space (or my time) to describe the other morning talks, but I did want to mention briefly the one by Italo Marconi on ethics, happiness, and positive design. I found it provocative and interesting, something to be thought more about. (Although I can converse in Italian all day about ordinary topics such as what to have for dinner or how to get from Point A to Point B, deeper and more involved topics — at which Italians can be very good — are more difficult and I have to work harder at them.) I hope I will get the opportunity to talk with Marconi further.

In the afternoon, Luca Rosati and I led the usability assessment workshop, with the participation of Fabio Vitali as well. (Here are the slides, which Luca prepared.) We divided the group (some 75-80 people) into teams of six people and gave each team one of Jakob Nielsen’s ten usability heuristics, with questions developed by Giorgio Brajnik and revised by Luca, to aid them in conducting their assessment. We then set the teams loose on trenitalia.com, a site with which we knew everyone would have had not only considerable experience but also many difficulties because of its myriad usability problems. After 20 minutes we brought the large group back together and asked each team to share what they had found. I wish I could post the lists of problems that the teams reported, but I don’t think anyone kept the flip-chart sheets on which we recorded them.

As we were tidying up, Luca De Biase asked me a very good question. Trenitalia, he pointed out, already has much of this information from their logs, but they seem completely disinclined to do anything about the problems. How could an exercise like this make any difference? he asked. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a good answer for him; four weeks later, I still don’t. But I keep thinking about it. If you have any ideas, please comment!

After the workshops, the attendees reconvened for the closing keynote. De Biase focused on the “knowledge economy”, where value is concentrated in the immaterial, where innovation exists only when it is adopted, and where design matters. He described the new narrative as one in which innovation is an ecosystem, analogous to the environment. Most people, he observed, now know that their invididual actions count toward the quality of the environment and that the quality of the environment matters in their own lives. “I hope it doesn’t take us 50 years to see the infosphere as an ecosystem to maintain,” De Biase said, “to see the Internet as a common good, managed in a healthy way, contributing to its value.” Designers are among those who do tend to see that already, he said, and who carry a code of ethics, of awareness, that recognizes that polluting the infosphere damages us all.

In response to a question from the audience, De Biase discussed information overload, how it can affect our interactions on social media, and how design can play a role. Companies such as Google and Facebook, he said, use technological methods to address information overload: Facebook, for example, uses an algorithm that prioritizes recently-clicked friends in determining the order of posts to show in your news feed. This approach reduces information overload, he said, but it creates an “echo chamber” that feels comfortable because it surrounds you with people who hold similar ideas to yours. But this isn’t the end of the story, he assured us. “After social media — that is, the media that connect people who like each other — arrives an epoch of civic media, in which people connect because they have something in common — projects in common, citizenship in common, choices to make in common.” He described a project on which he collaborated — the construction of a platform for consulting with citizens around rather heated themes such as the Italian constitutional reform. The problem, he said, was that if they made it too easy for citizens to interact with each other, to propose ideas, and to post comments, people tended to attack each other. So they made it easy to propose ideas but slightly harder (two clicks) to make comments; and instead of a “Like” button for proposals they used a triangle that offered three responses: “I agree”, “I disagree”, and “I don’t understand”. This changed the dialog, he said, to be more civil and thoughtful.

“Quindi, design conta“, De Biase declared. “Therefore, design counts.”

Amen, my friend; amen.

De Biase’s talk was so rich with insights that I can’t possibly do justice to it here. You can read his own summary (at the bottom of his blog post about the event), or you can watch the video of the talk (both in Italian).

After the conference, De Biase asked several people to write short articles on information architecture and user experience for the weekly technology insert he edits for an Italian daily newspaper, and I was one of them. I worked with Luca Rosati , who coordinated four of the articles (including his own), and was grateful that they invited me to write mine in English. Rosati translated it into Italian, and today it appeared online.

Four seminars in a month

Three in three days, actually, then one about three weeks later.

Early last month I traveled to Scotland to give seminars on my PhD research to three groups: the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at Dundee University and both the Design Informatics and Social Informatics groups in the School of Informatics at Edinburgh University. The seminars were very similar but slightly different, and I received some good and useful questions and comments from all three groups. Then last week I gave what was basically the Design Informatics talk to the TechWeb group in the Informatics Department at the University of Bologna (Italy), where I got some rather different but also valuable questions and comments. Fortunately, UniBo didn’t ask me to translate my slides, although I did most of my speaking in Italian.

I had gone to Italy mainly for World Information Architecture Day 2015, to give a talk and co-chair a workshop, but that will be a separate blog post because (a) I still have a lot of work to do to get it ready (and a lot of PhD work too, having been gone from that for most of a week), and (b) my WIAD talk and workshop were about a completely different topic (not my PhD research). Since I was in Bologna anyway, I took advantage of the occasion to offer my seminar to UniBo.

My debut in (academic) stand-up comedy

Two weeks ago I did something* that it had never occurred to me I would ever even consider, let alone actually do. About four times a year, at The Stand Comedy Club Newcastle, they have a special evening called Bright Club. Billed as “the thinking person’s variety night” and described as “researchers become comedians for just one night”, Bright Club started at University College London and has expanded to a dozen cities around the UK.

Here’s the video of my performance. I suggest you watch it before you read the rest of this post , or you could find your viewing enjoyment degraded by spoilers.

It all started with an email from The Graduate School at Northumbria University. (Well, I suppose it really all started with last year’s performance by Pablo Puente, husband of someone who recently got a design PhD at Northumbria.) I had heard it was great fun, and in the spirit of public engagement, getting more involved in the community, and just having a bit of fun I decided to attend the training session to find out more and decide whether I wanted to perform.

The trainers included two organizers and experienced comedians from Public Engagement at Newcastle University’s Life Science Centre, plus a professional comedian. We started off with a go-around about where were from and what our subject area was (most of us were from Northumbria), and then they talked to us about the structure of comedy and how we should formulate our sets. I wasn’t sure I could write one and have it ready to perform in two weeks, so I said I’d come to the first of the three rehearsals and decide then. But an email the next day said they already had four of the eight slots filled, so I went ahead and signed up to do it.

We were required to attend two of the rehearsals, but as a major newbie and OCD suspect I went to all three. The first time all I had was some notes I had made, while most of the others had draft scripts. Even though they had told us we didn’t need to have anything written for the first rehearsal, I felt woefully unprepared. But I got some good feedback, and I went home and started writing. The second rehearsal revealed that my script was too long, and again I got some good feedback about what to cut and how to present some of the material. People really liked the faces I made at the audience. The third rehearsal came in at just the right time. (We were allowed eight minutes, and they suggested we plan it for 7.5 to allow time for laughing.)

I was really worried about not being able to remember it all. I had started with a set of questions that I often get from locals about my experience as an American living in the North East of England, and to help me remember the questions in order, I invented an interviewer who would ask me the questions as she read from her notes. I was also going to read some of the comments on the YouTube meditation videos that I had analyzed in one of my studies, and the advisors said that it could be very effective to pull a list from a pocket and read them that way. So I did.

In the end I forgot only one line, and although it was funny† it wasn’t critical to the gist or the flow. I did go over my time limit by more than three minutes, however. I ad-libbed a little, but I like to think it was mostly because the audience laughed. They laughed a lot.

And afterward, two women over 50 came up to me and told me how important they thought it was that older women are participating in these kinds of events, that our voices are being heard. That was as gratifying as the laughter. Maybe even more so.

---

* I haven’t blogged about this before now because I was waiting for the video to become available.

† As the last part of the answer to the question about what I like about living in the North East: “I also like all the ancient ruins I find around here. (Don’t anybody take that personally.)”

Thoughts on NordiCHI 2014

I may be jumping the gun slightly, posting this tonight when there’s one more day of NordiCHI to go, but my talk was first thing this morning and a lot has happened since then.

I got up at 4:45 to rehearse a couple of more times for a 9am talk. I made a few mistakes in the talk itself, but nothing earth shattering — and I finished on time. Only one person asked me a question during the session itself, and I was kind of disappointed in that (I figured it indicated relatively little interest), but during the rest of the day at least a dozen people came up to me to say how much they enjoyed it, and most of them asked questions or wanted to talk further. Some of the questions were about imaginary abstracts (which are peripheral to the focus of my research, but useful nonetheless) and some were about techno-spirituality (which is the focus of my research :-). Two people urged Mark^* and me to participate in future conferences, one about design for quality of life (in 2015) and the other a science fiction track in a 2016 conference. I said I’d love to (of course :-) and would pass the word along to Mark. (Which I promptly did. And of course he was delighted to hear that. :-) I was also invited to give talks to two groups at Edinburgh University in the new year, and of course I said yes. :-)

Lots of interest, lots of interest. Conferences really do wonders for my mood. I skipped the second session this morning to read the papers that were going to be presented in the session I was chairing during the third session, and while I was sitting there I was approached by a guy with a video camera, who said he was asking people to express their reactions to NordiCHI in one word. Mine came to me right away — “energizing” — and he filmed me saying that. “Energizing!” I suspect they’re going to use the clips in the closing plenary event, which I think is pretty cool.

There’s so much going on in the European academic community. I would dearly love to find a way to remain part of it. Stay tuned.

P.S. I’ll put the slides on SlideShare before long. But before I can do that, we have to indicate the sources of the images we’ve used.

---

^*For new readers of this blog, “Mark” is Mark Blythe, my primary PhD supervisor and coauthor of the three published papers to which I’ve contributed. I’m first author on two of them; Mark is first author on the one I presented this morning.