Talks by Richard Ramchurn and Stefan Rennick-Egglestone

Richard Ramchurn of the Horizon CDT and Stefan Rennick-Egglestone will both give short talks to the lab.

Richard Ramchurn

This talk explores the design space of bio-responsive entertainment, in this case using a film that responds to the brain and blink data of users. A film was created with four parallel channels of footage, where blinking and levels of attention and meditation, as recorded by a commercially available EEG device, affected which footage participants saw. As a performance-led piece of research in the wild, this experience, named #Scanners, was presented at a week long national exhibition in the UK. We examined the experiences of 35 viewers, and found that these forms of partially-involuntary control created engaging and enjoyable, but sometimes distracting, experiences. We translate our findings into a two dimensional design space between the extent of voluntary control that a physiological measure can provide against the level of conscious awareness that the user has of that control. This highlights that novel design opportunities exist when deviating from these two dimensions: when giving up conscious control and when abstracting the affect of control. Reflection on of how viewers negotiated this space during an experience reveals novel design tactics. 

Stefan Rennick-Egglestone - Health Technologies ‘in the wild’: Experiences of Computerised CBT

The widespread deployment of digital technologies by professional health services will providing a substantial opportunity for studies that document experiences usage in naturalistic settings. This presentation considers Computerised CBT (CCBT), an approach to the treatment of common mental health problems which has already been integrated into a number of health services worldwide. It reports on a UK-based study of user experiences of engagement with several popular implementations of this approach, conducted in collaboration with the Centre for Primary Care Research at the University of Manchester. In presenting findings from this study, I consider some specific issues which are still of general relevance to the design of effective health technologies, such as the usage of technology by individuals who have been misdiagnosed, and the impact on interaction on strongly-held beliefs about the value of technological forms of treatment. I also consider the question of how to design technologies that appropriate for users experiencing deep and pernicious levels of despair, and how to design for effective engagement and disengagement from technologically-orientated treatment programmes.

This study has been presented in substantially more detail in the following publication: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/31286/