Presentation by m.c. schraefel and Alan Dix

Producer: David De Roure Executive Producer: Jeremy Frey

The smarttea cast (in alphabetical order):Gareth Hughes….the Scales, various apparati, Other Ontology Guy

Hugo Mills…Ontology Guy m.c. schraefel…Narrator

Graham Smith…The ChemistEarly Tea Track rhythm guitar: Terry Payne

Java Swing Bass: Alex Rogers

Technical Consultants: Alan Dix and Luc Moreau Filmed Entirely on Location at the University of Southampton

Making Tea with Chemists: Exploring Boundaries and Breaking

BooksA smarttea production

No chemists were hurt in the making of this presentationOfficial web site: www.smarttea.org

Designing a digital lab book

eScience context: rapid communication of and access to results in progress not just in pubs

Bottleneck: wet lab records are paper based - difficult to access/share

Goal: convert paper system into digtital one

Many Lab book Replacements have been tried.Many have failed or had limited take up

How would we succeed?

Initial Approach

Our own field studies - rapid ethnography, targeted interviews, observationsGood for Context of work/artefact use

Preliminary Artefact Overview

No dedicated location

Data vulnerability

Access limited

Privileged IP * rigts

Uniqueness

Communal worth/private work

Historical significance

Missing pieces

We understood the artefact’s role.We had a strong sense of the environmentWe had a picture of why some of the book’s affordances were appropriate (and why some were not)We did not know how the chemists really engaged with the artifact in the process of an experiment

Problem: we aren’t chemists

Designers do not need to be domain experts

Much to be said about not being an expert - not missing the obvious - ability to get limnal.

But this was too domain naïve

So…

As an experiment

We made tea

Why make tea: available approaches and problems in ucd

Observation of an Experiment - even rapidExpert and artefact walk throughsApprenticeship and PrototypingCultural ProbesTask AnalysisDeconstruction/Reconstruction

Other methods: assumption of Time and Expertise

Chemistry experiments can take days, weeks,

months, years.They require high

domain knowledge

They are fluid, loosely structured

things

Breaking the book: Decon/Recon

We wanted to design services to support the activities that took place in the lab - to leverage what is already done

Thus, we questioned whether the UI needed to mimic paper

we sought to create the affect of the paper experience

Hand written coshh form

Hand written lab book entries

What we needed

A way to extend decon/recon for non-expertsA way to compress timeA faithful, not overly simplified processA way to engage the process

A language we (chemists and designers) could all understand to interogate the process (the experiment)

Enter Analogy

Making Tea: design elicitation through analogy

Developed and validated the analogy with chemistsGave us a way to ask questions that would not otherwise have been possibleLet us maximize observationGave us repeatabilityDerived rudiments of a process model, tooProvided lingua franca with chemistsProvided a fun low risk environment that facilitated discussion among participants

Making tea with kitchen

tools

Making tea with

chemisty kit

Tea gave us a way to understand not only the process but the experience of the process for our design.

Sample Questions from Tea

Is that it? No really, that’s all you record?So, do you add the milk first, or the tea first?

Tea 1 Tea 2

Tea 2aTea 1a

Tea 1b

Positive experiences - affect to capture

Casualness of entry, pictures and notes

Low attention, but frequent focus

Minimal description of activities

High degree of multi-tasking (multiple experiments on the go, much flipping back and forth)

Readily accessible; “safe”

Integration with other methods

Task analysis of data entry interaction throughout experiment - caveats for loose variants - derived from mT

Lo-fi Prototype designs

Design review: We ran through our lo-fi prototypes with chemists by running the tea experiment

They knew what was going on and could comment on veracity, features, process

Initial ideas were good but the prototypes were too intrigued - did not reflect/support practice

Design review was critical for reality checking; tea made that possible

Results

In real use, chemists were able to record their experimentsAfter about ten minutes of use, they forgot about it as a new thing, and just used itMaking tea worked

“I can go anywhere and its, like,this is me and my data. It’s all there! Bang!”

Spaghetti Tea: How does making tea work?

Make this into several slides

design world

domain worlddesignprocessdesignedartefact

designworld domainworldre-presen-tation ofthe domainworld

designer visitsbrings backrepresentation

designworld domainworldinvited infuture users

re-presen-tation ofthe domainworld design optionsrepresented

designworld domainworld

tea makingneutral meetingground

More for alan

Types of felicity

Types of boundary interupts

Types of disruptions

Integration with not replacement of other methods

(alan, these are notes for you)

It’s not about the bike book

We didn’t set out to use a tablet

We wanted to try really breaking the book, distributing the parts across the lab - that’s how it’s designed.

All we could get was a tablet - which looks like a book - sort of.

To paraphrase Lance Armstrong

Aside

Generalizing:Making Analogies

The analogy is key: it is developed within the expert and design community - common ground

A domain expert participates

Analogy foregrounds processes and interaction with artefacts

Facilitates expert elicitation and design translation

Conclusion

Making tea - design elicitation by analogyGave us

Time

Process

Interaction

Maximized ethnography and enabled task analysis AND story telling to communicate the issues to another domain (recently, semantic web/grid modelling)

Pubs

m.c. schraefel, Gareth Hughes, Hugo Mills, Graham Smith, Terry Payne, Jeremy Frey. Breaking the Book: Translating the Chemistry Lab Book to a Pervasive Computing Environment. Forthcoming, Conference on Human Factors (CHI), 2004. Preprint athttp://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00008641/

•schraefel, m. c. and Dix, A. (2004) Within Bounds and Between Domains: Making Tea as neutral territory for design elicitation. Submitted to Proceedings of HCI 2004 Design for Life, Leeds, UK.http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00008820/

schraefel, m. c., Hughes, G., Mills, H., Smith, G. and Frey, J. (2003) Making Tea: Iterative Design through Analogy. In Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems, 2004 (forthcoming). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00008672/

Jeremy G. Frey, David De Roure, m.c. schraefel, Hugo Mills, Hongchen Fu, Sam Peppe, Gareth Hughes, Graham Smith, Terry R. Payne. Context Slicing the Chemical Aether. First Workshop on Hypermedia and the Semantic Web, in conjunctions with Hypertext 2003.http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

m.c. schraefel, Leslie Carr, David De Roure, Wendy Hall. You’ve Got Hypertext. JoDI, forthcominghttp://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00008701/

http://www.smarttea.org

Thank you!

Questions?

QuickTime™ and aVideo decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Demo: coming into the Making a Cup of Tea with Milk and Sugar experiment