Talks by Gustavo Berumen Salazar and Adrian Hazzard

Gustavo and Adrian will update the lab on their work in this digital lab meeting.

Gustavo Berumen Salazar — Towards a Data-Driven Design of Smart Fast Moving Consumer Goods

We conducted a quantitative ethnography of cooking intending to obtain a detailed understanding of how Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) are used in practice. We devised a variety of analysis methods that allowed us to obtain information about the use of FMCGs such as their frequency, duration, and place of use.

We aim to use our data as a tool during co-design workshops to create data-driven inspired designs of smart versions of FMCGs. We are planning to use the data in three ways: to contrast, to inspire, and to support designs.

Our research is a work in progress and we would highly appreciate any ideas, questions, and suggestions about how to present our results for publication and how to use data for design.

Adrian Hazzard — Composing User Experiences: what can the theory and concepts of music composition tell us about user experience design?

Gaver (2012) noted that, “design researchers often 'borrow' conceptual perspectives from other disciplines and discuss their applicability for design”, and the HCI community is littered with examples. A quick survey might include dramaturgy, narratology, ludology, role play, architecture, and somaesthetics. Furthermore, designers often engage with tools to stimulate and shape design choices, and reveal relationships between their features and functions, such as ideation cards and concept mapping. 

The typical perspective of research at the intersection of music and HCI is the investigation of HCI theory and principles to inform the design of new interfaces and interactions for music making and performance. Comparatively little work considers the opposite perspective, i.e., how might the theory and concepts of music inform interaction design in general? This talk will outline some (very) early thoughts on the latter. The process of music composition considers a rich and nuanced set of concepts that – I believe – have the potential to illustrate multi-faceted spatial and temporal relationships between ‘actors’ and artefacts, which would speak to a broad range of user experiences. I am interested in canvasing thoughts and comments from the MRL community about this.