Talk by Oliver Miles

Oliver Miles, a new PhD student in the lab, will give a lab talk this week.

'Coffee Wizard': an approach to understanding and provoking digitally-enabled, value driven consumption

What choices do coffee drinkers make when limited, qualitative values are the only means of selecting product? What is a ‘Wizard-of-Oz’ experiment; and how might it be useful in discovering new and ‘personalised’ constellations of value? Answering these questions is the focus of my current work; uniting the practices of industry - traditionally more aligned to product portfolio optimisation using large datasets and statistical methods - with powerful ethnomethodological tools more traditionally practiced in human computer interaction (HCI). My presentation will introduce the concept of ‘values’ in relation to coffee consumption, give an overview of industry practice in terms of current approaches to personalisation, and identify the gap considered worthy of further research that forms the foundation of this work. Moreover, my presentation will elaborate on the Wizard-of-Oz framework as a useful and powerful mechanism for testing speculative technical interventions; moving beyond discussion of the literal product and toward potential value-harnessing technologies.