Talks by Joe Marshall and Joel Fischer

Joe Marshall and Joel Fischer will both give short talks to the lab.

Joe Marshall - Exertion games for health make no sense (and so what…)

Exertion games are games where players must do physical exercise in order to play the game. They are heavily pushed in HCI as a potential solution to various public health issues, most notably to combat the rise in the prevalence of overweight and obesity, a.k.a. the 'obesity epidemic'. Unfortunately this idea is based on misunderstandings of the issues surrounding recent population level changes in body composition and a complete failure to consider wider research into weight loss, exercise, physical activity vs obesity and studies of gaming and games themselves. Further to this, an awful lot of HCI exertion gaming work cites a small selection of medical literature when making the argument that altering game habits towards exertion games will cure the obesity epidemic; unfortunately as I'll show with a case study, the way in which this is cited often demonstrates a complete misunderstanding or failure to read the cited literature. I'll also talk briefly about potential implications of this for HCI as a field. 

Joel Fischer - “Just whack it on until it gets hot”: Working with IoT Data in the Home

This paper presents findings from a co-design project that aims to augment the practices of professional energy advisors with environmental data from sensors deployed in clients’ homes. Premised on prior ethnographic observations we prototyped a sensor platform to support the work of tailoring advice-giving to particular homes. We report on the deployment process and the findings to emerge, particularly the work involved in making sense of or accounting for the data in the course of advice-giving. Our ethnomethodological analysis focuses on the ways in which data is drawn upon as a resource in the home visit, and how understanding and advice-giving turns upon unpacking the indexical relationship of the data to the situated goings-on in the home. This insight, coupled with further design workshops with the advisors, shaped requirements for an interactive system that makes the sensor data available for visual inspection and annotation to support the situated sense-making that is key to giving energy advice.