Put your notes from the workshop here
Attendees:
- BEN HOOKER
- SARA LJUNGBLAD
- ALLISON WOODRUFF
- RYAN AIPPERSPACH
- LORA OEHLBERG
- ERIC PAULOS
- ALI DADA
- MARCUS FOTH
- ERIC HARRIS
- JEN MANKOFF
- JAY HASBROUCK
- NATASCHA MATTHES
- JEFF LEBLANC
- TOM IGOE
- ELAINE MAY HUANG
- MYRIEL MILICEVIC
- AJ BRUSH
- DOMINQUE GUINARD
- AMANDA WILLIAMS
Tom Igoe's intro
Amanda's notes:
Discusses themes that came out of the workshop submissions:
- infrastructure
- better information will lead to better habits
- interactivity increases participation
- using less vs. using more and having less impact
- he mentions the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate, that better energy efficiency will just lead to more demand.
Dead, Dying, and Disabled Technologies Session
The purpose of the following exercise was to stimulate creative thinking around place-appropriate, culturally-contextualized re-use and re-purposing strategies for technologies in the home. Using data from ethnographic research conducted for Intel by Jay Hasbrouck and Sue Faulkner, a group of 18 participants was divided into 3 subgroups, each of which were given a set of data for one household (one from Egypt, the other two from Germany and Brazil). Data included household narratives (4-6 page descriptions of occupants, their interests, occupations, daily routines, values, worldview, and the home's technological eco-system), cognitive map artifacts (participant-generated renderings of household floor plan, overlaid with color-coded participant responses to various lines of inquiry, see http://www.intel.com/technology/itj/2007/v11i1/s1-mapping/1-sidebar.htm), and a collection of photographs from home visits / tours.
After familiarizing themselves with the data, each subgroup was then tasked with 'inventing' a set of re-use or re-purposing strategies that were aligned with the household priorities and interests, were culturally and socio-economically appropriate, and integrated the household's current technological eco-system. As each subgroup presented their strategies, the discussion was broadened to include design approaches and directions that could include these (or other) strategies that integrate cradle-to-cradle thinking and greater product life-cycle awareness.
Notes from Dead, Dying, and Disabled Technologies brainstorm:
German family
Potential repurpose / re-use strategies:
- 'Appliancing' devices / clustering capabilities with experience groups (music/entertainment, business, etc.)
- Raised issues around dispersion of devices with more specific purposes vs. convergence of increasing numbers of capabilities in fewer devices and how 'sustainable' that may or may not be.
- Research question: does 'appliancing' increase life of product and chance of more positive consumer experiences and more positive end of life experiences?
Egyptian family
Potential repurpose / re-use strategies:
- PC Doctor as broker / device coordinator
- Opportunities to develop networks to utilize broker's knowledge about displacement/replacement from a community of devices that extends beyond individual households. (eg. give the laptop that has been repurposed as a music server to another family that needs more computing power, and replace it with something better suited to being a single-purpose appliance)
- dumb terminals for children's rooms and shared server for family instead of individual machines for everyone
Brazilian family
Potential repurpose / re-use strategies:
- Dual purpose the family's multiple TV's as both TV's as PC screens.
other strategies:
- they could use some sort of thin client/media player that could connect to the TVs
- solution: get the daughter an iPhone, let the family use her PC instead. She needs the thin client
General notes from Tom:
- Reconfiguration only works when it's easier than the alternative. There is a service to be made in repurposing older PCs, offering easy-to-use reconfiguration disks, e.g. an OS "recovery" disk that makes the machine into a media player
- "People like to think that they are superusers." - Lora. One way to make this more realistic is to let your phone/other devices inform you what you don't use, so that when you upgrade, you get a phone that doesn't have features you don't use. Even better, gather that data and deliver to the manufacturer, so they have a realistic picture of what gets used, what needs to change, what can go.
- Fast turnaround should be a design feature. Can special function modules be compatible but not physically connected to the phone? wifi, Xbee, Bluetooth enable this. See the Holux Bluetooth GPS dongles.
More notes (from Jay):
- Modular units that fit together "like legos"
- USB as standard between units
- 'Dual system' PC that can be switched easily to stand-by using back-up system
Final session, hardware group: A lot of this discussion was around sensor nets and the environmental data that could be generated from consumer mobile devices.
- Eric H: There's a layer of abstraction lower than motes, etc. that would be useful. Also, some standards on how things connect.
- Tom: How about data from manufacturers about how it's made, so it's easier to un-make safely?
- Jeff: Specific applications for sensor nets are needed because going to be returned value.
- Eric P: From the gov't: "If it doesn't get measured, it doesn't get done."
It can be hard to decouple sense-able things, like for example, particulate matter and humidity. [amanda's notes]
Who will maintain the datasets assembled by open networks?
How do you control the data overflow from consumer-owned sensors?
- Eric P: Trust & Reliability are huge. People don't use data they don't trust
Is there a way to tag non-expert data? How do you certify data? Non-expert data can be useful to see general patterns, so you know whether it's worthwhile to go to professional data for the real thing.
Metrics and description schemes. If expert metrics and description schemes were shared by amateurs, it makes room for more meaningful conversations between the two. So we need to find ways of making the metrics and description schemes used by experts more clear and accessible to amateurs and consumers.
Someone mentioned the notion of "living with data". [amanda's notes]
- Both Erics: our role is to generate more ideas about what to do with consumer-generated environmental data and to help people connect with that data, e.g. iggybacking sensors on ubicomp devices.
- AJ: If you broaden the motivations of designers and technologists to include sustainability, you get a more holistic picture of the thing you are building, and who for. But how do you do that?
