using open-ended interviews, and videotaping and observing work, which have not traditionally been a part of the computer science ’tool-kit’, have been an invaluable help in providing the essential insights into the environment for which we design.
Studying mobile work makes it even more important to take the development pro-cess into the field, because the work place itself is not fixed but spread throughout the work area at the different components and machines. We need to utilise the field not only in the early stages to explore the work setting and work practise but throughout the entire process. Using the field as an active resource in design e.g. doing workshops or setting up prototypes for evaluation enable us to see the effect the prototype has on the environment and what tools and other resources are necessary in specific work tasks. Furthermore, because we are studying mobile work in a process environment it becomes crucial to move away from the traditional office and control room studies e.g.
[Mackay et al., 1998, Heath and Luff, 1996, Suchman, 1996] and find new techniques for studying and designing in a mobile context. The work we have been studying is characterised by being extremely distributed and mobile; for many of the wastewater operators their daily tasks kept them on the move, traversing the plant and taking oc-casional trips to the control room to verify or check status for a subprocess. Thus we are no longer able to set up two or three cameras with the expectation that they will be able to cover where the action is. As one of my colleagues so aptly put it:
Wherever you choose to put up a camera you will get the impression that things are happening somewhere else.
This has two implications for how we structure our field studies. First, it puts emphasis on being in the environment and experimenting with different ’shadowing’
strategies such as following different workers, following a part of the process, following a document, etc. Second, it puts focus on the need for engaging the operators actively in the design process because they have the overview of the complexity of the work processes.
6.3 Design and usability methods
Design within the Scandinavian tradition is an open, explorative process using proto-types and mock-ups to provide hands-on experience with the object of design, metaphors and caricatures to inspire design and scenarios and work descriptions to anchor the de-sign. Cooperative design or design within the Scandinavian school for systems devel-opment has always emphasised the need for user participation [Greenbaum and Kyng, 1991]
as they are the experts in the work practise—better than anyone they understand the practical problems of the work we are trying to support. However, we need to move past the limited approach of collaboration between the designer, the usability workers and the users. The success of design, particularly of computer-based artifacts, is de-pendent on the ability to bring together all actors with valuable competencies related to the design process and the area of design, and support their voice in the design process, be that technical, aesthetic or sociological.
6.3.1 Prototypes and mock-ups
Prototypes and mock-ups are valuable resources in design, enabling the participants in the design process to express ideas and visions as tangible,physical objects. Physical
objects have the advantage of being easily contextualised and used as a clear point of reference e.g. in comparison with other objects. There’s a remarkable difference be-tween saying ’it should be small’ compared to ’it should not be any bigger than this’.
Using mock-ups can help trigger work operations based on tacit, non-explicit knowl-edge which is otherwise impossible to access. Furthermore, prototypes and mock-ups from different stages of a projects provides a unique look into the development pro-cess and thus play an important part in the ’accumulation of design knowledge’ in the construction and use of a design collaboratorium as described in [Bødker et al., 2001].
Similarly, prototypes and mock-ups from other projects can be introduced as a source of inspiration. An excellent example of the multiple roles of prototypes in design is de-scribed in [Petersen and Halskov, 1999, Bødker et al., 2000] [P1]. It presents a collab-orative design workshop with participation from three different groups of participants:
designers, usability workers and software designers. The participants in the design workshop had brought different prototypes of the products they work with to estab-lish a common understanding of what different groups of participants were engaged in. During the design discussions, the different prototypes were used as resources in design, as objects of discussion and inspiration, to exemplify typical object of work, or as props for enacting use situations. Furthermore, different types of prototypes can accomplish different goals. Low-level mock-ups like simple Styrofoam blocks may be successfully used as basis for projecting a vision of piece of future technology by users by carrying it around in the work environment and describing a future work scenario.
Blocks of wood or plastic wrapped in different materials without any computational function may be used to assess questions of shape, ergonomics and weight of the tech-nological artifact. Higher-level software or hardware prototypes are needed later in the design process for specifying whether the information visualisation principles used are sound, whether the right information is made available and whether the information structure is correct and usable in the work context when we are dealing with the user interface aspects of design. In the CIS project we used several different kinds of pro-totypes, e.g. testing different visualisation strategies on paper. Later in the project we made software prototypes, implementing the chosen visualisation strategy on two dif-ferent technological platforms and evaluating them with other researchers, designers and users at a workshop on the wastewater treatment plant. The concreteness of the software prototypes gave us useful feedback on the display layout and the relevance of information at a very detailed level. Details concerning the design process and the resulting prototypes can be found in [Nielsen and Søndergaard, 2000] [P4].
6.3.2 Metaphors and caricatures
Finding inspiration for design and introducing elements of creativity and innovation into the design process are highly attractive yet elusive and non-formalisable aspects of doing design. Using metaphors and caricatures to juxtapose apparently conflicting con-cepts and twist the familiar can aid us in unearthing new views of the design object and bring new inspiration into the design process. We have worked both with metaphors and caricatures built on a theoretical foundation as means of confronting the familiar and pushing design ideas beyond focusing rigidly on the work tasks they should sup-port and allowing the participants in design to create a shared design space from which to proceed. The details of these efforts in relation to the BIDI project will be covered in Section 6.5 and for now I will look at the work forming our basis for using metaphors and caricatures, and work relating to our approach.
6.3. DESIGN AND USABILITY METHODS 41 Metaphors are extremely powerful tools for conveying meaning and intention into particularly graphical constituents of a user interface. Using existing artifacts as ba-sis for a metaphor or building on existing metaphors are very direct ways of taking advantage of users’ experience with a task or object and lift it into a new context.
Furthermore, when we contrast different metaphors or use apparently unrelated and sometimes contradictory metaphors for a design object, like using a bowling alley as a creative metaphor in design of a CD rack, or look at a library as a meeting place and contrast this context with looking at it as a storage facility, metaphors become a source of inspiration rather than mere receptacles of previously defined meaning. I want to emphasise the work of [Madsen, 1994, Erickson, 1991, Laurel, 1986], which deal with these issues and others in relation to the creation and use of metaphors in the user in-terface.
Caricatures or extremes that take a feature or characteristic and exaggerates it to over-emphasise it and thereby makes it more visible are also excellent sources for in-spiration in the design process. By exaggerating elements of the design or the use situation, like the plus- and minus- scenarios described in [Bødker, 1998] which em-phasises and exaggerates the positive aspects of future technology and the negative, respectively, we provoke and confront different views on a problem and thus provide a strong focus on the consequences of a design or change in the work practise and avoid the bland middle-ground of indistinction. In particular, I find the use of cari-catures which are based on theoretical structures particularly interesting as a source of inspiration and creativity in the design process because they allow us to reflect back on the theoretical assumptions as well as provide different perspectives to de-sign through. Furthermore, theoretically founded caricatures provide a well-defined structure within which to work and provide a high degree of control in choosing what we wish to examine and thus map a design space rather than just trying out random characters. As described in Section 6.5.2, we have experience with using four theoret-ical perspectives of human-computer interaction described in [Kammersgaard, 1988]
as starting point for four character-based interaction perspectives. These characters were used to emphasise different aspects of interaction in a setting based on real work descriptions and provided new views of what role technology could play when in-troduced into the work setting. Our efforts produced a creative design space which was negotiated and created by all the participants rather than actual, usable design prototypes for implementation. The details of this use of caricatures is presented in [Bødker et al., 2000] [P1]. These caricatures were later used in forming the interac-tion styles described in [Øritsland and Buur, 2000] which were utilised to inspire de-sign of a handheld device for wastewater treatment. Using a theoretical structure as a metaphor in design can also inspire design as we realised when experimenting with using the three augmentation principles defined by [Mackay, 1998a]. Exaggerating the three distinctly different perspectives and relating them to interaction with physical objects using a PDA, we discovered new possibilities in interacting with a handheld device other than using a stylus and the screen. The details of this experiment is pre-sented in [Bertelsen and Nielsen, 2000] [P5].
Others have worked with metaphors and caricatures in the design process and of these I would like to point out two new and interesting examples. The first is [Djajadiningrat et al., 2000] which describes how extreme characters and interaction relabelling can be used in the design process to produce new and quite radical ways of interaction with an everyday object. In considering how interaction with a gun could be
transferred to the designing a new calendar the relabelling triggers new ways of think-ing about interaction in general. The second is [Iacucci et al., 2000] which describes how role-play may be used in design of mobile technology.
6.3.3 Scenarios and work descriptions
Whether we refer to them as “work descriptions” and “future scenarios” [Kyng, 1999],
“instances” [Christensen et al., 1998], “critical and typical situations” [Carroll et al., 1991]
they all cover the concept of scenarios as examples of present or future work situations describing different elements of a work practise for different purposes.
Scenarios can play many roles in the design and development process, depending on the particular circumstances, phase of the project and goals. In the early stages, scenarios can e.g. be used to create visions of future work using new technology and serve as tools for creativity and inspiration, throughout the project, they can be used to identify and analyse problems and provide possible solutions by e.g. ’playing out’ the examples, and in later stages they can e.g. be used to structure prototype evaluation sessions; highly detailed and controlled scenarios can guide the user through exactly the parts of the prototype we wish to be focused on while the more general scenarios leaves the user free to explore the prototype and how the different parts relate to each other and to his or her understanding of the work in general. Most importantly, and common to scenarios regardless of their purpose and shape, is the underlying link to the real work settings which helps us anchor our design efforts to the work practise we are engaged in designing for. The role of scenarios in design has been discussed e.g.
in [Bødker and Christiansen, 1997, Bødker, 1998, Kyng, 1999], showing scenarios as valuable, dynamic resources in user-centred design to illustrate needs for technolog-ical support as well as to reflect on how the future work situation may change the work practice. As described in Section 6.3.2 we used caricatures in the BIDI project based on a set of theoretical perspectives of human-computer interaction combined with science-fiction characters and used these in a workshop where a design assign-ment was to choose one of these interaction perspectives and create a future scenario based on a video scenario from the combined heating and power plant. Just as the caricatures served the purpose of inspiring and provoking the way we look at work in a wastewater treatment plant, the work descriptions or video scenarios were necessary anchors into the concrete work environment. Another example of the use of scenarios as mentioned in the beginning of this section, namely as a means of creating visions about future work can be found in [Bertelsen and Nielsen, 2000] [P5] where the use of the augmented reality principles as metaphors resulted in four future scenarios that described work with a mobile device.