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/

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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 PhD thesis is now online!

I don’t have much to say with this post, except that I have received word that my thesis has been placed in the Northumbria Research Link. Here’s the link to it. I’d love to know what you think, and if you’re interested in collaborating on future research, please do get in touch.

Thesis abstract (as finalized for assignment of examiners)

I should have waited until today before posting the abstract, but I was too excited about it to let it go any longer. Today I had a meeting with my second supervisor, who explained the feedback he had emailed me and told me I didn’t have to stick to 300 words. So here’s the revised version. (I’m leaving the original version up because I did say it was the original version. <smile>)

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Exploring Techno-Spirituality:
Design Strategies for Transcendent User Experiences

This thesis presents a study of spiritual and transcendent experiences (STXs) — experiences of connection with something greater than oneself — focusing on what they are, how artefacts support them, and how design can contribute to that support. People often find such experiences transformative, and artefacts do support them — but the literature rarely addresses artefact support for STXs. This thesis provides a step toward filling that gap.

The first phase of research involved the conduct and analysis of 24 interviews with adults of diverse spiritual perspectives, using constructivist Grounded Theory methods informed by relevant literature and by studies performed earlier in the PhD research programme. Analysis found that STXs proceed in three stages — creating the context, living the experience, integrating the experience — and that artefacts support at least two stages and people desire enhancements to all three. This STX framework supports and extends experience structures from the literature: it recognises the top-level categories as stages in a cycle where integration alters future contexts, and it extends the structure of STX by incorporating the relationships of artefacts and of enhancement desires to the stages of these experiences. This extended structure constitutes a grounded theory of transcendent user experiences.

The second phase involved the design and conduct of three “Transcendhance” workshops for enhancing transcendence, which aimed to elicit speculative design ideas in an atmosphere of fun and play. By playing a game that incorporated themes from the grounded theory of transcendent user experiences, workshop participants sketched 69 design ideas for techno-spiritual artefacts. Analysis mapped the ideas to the stages of STX and drew on relevant research to inspire possible extensions to the workshop-generated ideas. By far the largest number of ideas mapped to the STX stage Creating the Context, with very few mapping to Living the Experience, which suggests that context may be easier than lived experience to understand and address directly. This point is especially important for experiences such as STX that are tricky to define, impossible to arrange or anticipate, and thus unsuitable for straight-forward “classic” user experience methods. Transcendhance workshops approach techno-spiritual design peripherally, “sneaking up” on the lived experience by addressing the context.

This thesis combines the grounded theory of transcendent user experience with the Transcendhance workshop process, presenting peripheral design as a promising strategy for facilitating design to enhance spiritual and transcendent experiences.

Thesis abstract (more or less)

My supervisor says it’s OK for me to post my abstract here. What you see below isn’t what actually went into the Assignment of Examiners form, because after I wrote it I learned that the committee that reviews that form is very picky about language, so although there is precedent in my faculty for writing a thesis in the first person, I changed it for the form. (Man, I hate passive voice.) So what I’m posting here is what I originally wrote, before I revised it to use the third person. I may revise and/or expand it a little for the thesis itself, but this accurately conveys the gist.

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This thesis presents a study of spiritual and transcendent experiences (STX) — experiences of connection with something greater than oneself — focusing on designing to enhance them. Such experiences can be ineffable and transformative and artefacts can support them, but the literature rarely addresses the connection between artefacts and these experiences. This thesis provides a step toward filling that gap.

I conducted and analysed 24 interviews with adults of diverse spiritual perspectives, using constructivist Grounded Theory methods as informed by relevant literature and by studies conducted earlier in my programme. I found that STX proceed in three stages — creating the context, living the experience, integrating the experience — with artefact support and desires for enhancement applying to all stages. My theory supports and extends experience structures from the literature: it recognises the top-level categories as stages in a cycle where integration alters future contexts, and it adds artefacts and desires to the structure of these experiences.

I designed and conducted “Transcendhance” workshops for enhancing transcendence, employing play to stimulate design ideas. Using themes from the grounded theory, workshop participants sketched 69 ideas for techno-spiritual artefacts. I mapped the ideas to the stages of STX, building a framework to guide techno-spiritual design. Living the Experience and Creating the Context showed a large disparity in mappings, suggesting that context may be easier than lived experience to understand and address directly, especially for ineffable experiences that are tricky to define, impossible to predict, and thus unsuitable for straight-forward “classic” user experience methods. The workshops approach techno-spiritual design peripherally, essentially “sneaking up” on the lived experience by addressing the context. Even fanciful ideas provided insights for techno-spiritual design.

Combining the grounded theory of transcendent user experience with the Transcendhance workshops, I developed peripheral design as a promising strategy for facilitating design to enhance spiritual and transcendent experiences.

The best kind of compliment

Last night I received an email from another graduate student doing research in techno-spirituality. This woman is in a different university, in a different country, and in a different area of techno-spirituality — her research involves Islamic applications, mainly for helping elderly people conduct their spiritual and religious practices. She has asked my input from time to time, and now she’s finishing her thesis. She wrote me last night that the alt.chi paper that my supervisor and I published three years ago — “Spirituality – There’s an App for That (but not a lot of research)” was the primary motivation for her study.

It’s a nice feeling of accomplishment to be considered and cited as an expert in my field. I find it far more gratifying, though, to know that my work inspires and motivates others.

I love this work.

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!

Keyword frustration

Fairly soon (perhaps shortly after CHI), I’m going to issue a call for a consensus around the keywords we use in techno-spirituality research. Author keywords (the keywords that authors list when they submit papers) are all over the place, and this is causing me (and no doubt others as well) to miss finding existing research that could be useful. But a full-text search gets a gazillion papers that aren’t relevant, because they often use the terms in ways other than what would indicate religious and spiritual life — e.g., “in good faith” or “the spiritual successor to {X} project” or “the religion of open source”. Other HCI research areas may well suffer the same sort of inconsistency, but as techno-spirituality is a very small and relatively new specialization, I think this lack of consistency poses an especially large challenge to us in becoming aware of each other’s work and finding possibilities for collaboration and cross-fertilization.

I have many more thoughts on this, but I’m not going to go into them in this post because I am working on a paper and don’t have time right now to write them up in a clear and well-structured way. But I do have a few ideas for approaches to addressing the challenge:

• A Facebook group for techno-spirituality researchers
• A Twitter hashtag for techno-spirituality (I’ll certainly create a Twitter list from my own account — which btw is @ebuie)
• A Google Doc or Spreadsheet for collaboration on the development of a set of common keywords we can use

I’d like to invite comments and suggestions here, to seed this effort. And if you’re going to CHI, let’s talk in person as well. If you’ve worked to address this problem in a different specialty, I’d especially love to hear about your experiences.

And now, back to the paper.

A multipurpose weekend in Edinburgh

I spent the weekend in Edinburgh. I went because I was giving a poster at the EuroIA 2013 conference and was spending Friday there. But the trip also allowed me to attend Saturday’s celebration of 200 years of Scottish Unitarianism, at St. Mark’s Unitarian Church — which is, fortuitously, just a block from where the conference was held.

My EuroIA poster (see image; sorry the photo is so poor but that’s a phone camera for you) explained how designing for spiritual experience is like designing a woodland clearing for watching the stars. It described my two research projects so far, and talked about how techno-spirituality needs more UX folks involved. It didn’t get as much attention as some of the other posters, but it got enough for me to be satisfied that I had begun to engage the UX practitioner community.

On Saturday I learned a lot about the history of Unitarianism in Scotland. In 1813, Parliament (the Scottish one, I think) repealed the law that made it illegal to express views that disagreed with the Christian concept of the trinity, and the Scottish Unitarian Association was founded one week later.

After the celebration I walked up to St. Giles High Kirk of Edinburgh (formerly called St. Giles’ Cathedral) and spent about 45 minutes absorbing the atmosphere and taking photos. When I was there in February I didn’t have my “real” camera with me and didn’t feel it was worth paying £2 for a photo permit. But this time I was prepared, and especially with the beautiful light at the time, it was well worth it. Here’s my favorite of the photos I took. (The others can be found on Flickr.)

I stayed over Saturday night and attended the service at St. Mark’s on Sunday (although I must confess I found it slightly weird to have a Unitarian church named for a saint) and enjoyed it very much. While in the company of the Unitarians, I spoke with representatives of the congregations in Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Edinburgh (I didn’t meet anyone that I knew to be from Dundee) and they are all interested in having me come and give my service on technology and spirituality to their congregations. Aberdeen is likely to happen sometime in March. I’d like to do Glasgow in May and then rent a car and head for Islay and Jura. It’s been far too long since I’ve been to the land whence the Buies came.

Public engagement, travel to interesting places, learning, and meeting lovely people — what more could I ask?