Transfer Scenarios at Pasta and Vinegar

Nicholas Nova blogged recently about the method transfer scenarios, marginal practices and design. He finds marginal practices interesting as they "involve passionate users about certain domains and areas". He suggests that people in the music industri should read “Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore” (Albert Mudrian, John Peel),which according to Nicholas is a good example of an interesting marginal practice (people playing music as speed as possible with extreme vocals).

Designing for New Photographic Experiences: How the Lomographic Practice Informed Context Photography

This paper has been accepted to theDPPI'07 Conference in Helsinki,22-25thj of August.

The paper describes how Lomographers (amateur photographers using old russian cameras) contributed in the design process of context photography.

Smart home technology

This paper describes a study of how orthodox jews make use of smart home technology. It illustrates how a marginal practice (rather than general mainstream users) can provide an alternative perspecive of meaningful technology use.

The technology is used to make one day each week free from work and active technology use, in order to reflect on God and to focus on spending time with loved ones. This paper also discusses intersting findings when the technology does not work as expected, suggesting that people make up their own reasons for why this is and the people in the study found their own relaxed ways to work around it.

A. Woodruff, S. Augustin and B.E. Foucault. "Sabbath Day Home Automation: ‘It's Like Mixing Technology and Religion’." Proc. CHI 2007, San Jose, CA Apr. 2007, to appear.

Allison Woodruff

Transfer Scenarios

"Transfer Scenarios: Grounding innovation with marginal practices" has been presented at the CHI-07 Conference as a fullpaper. This paper describes a design method intended to stimulate a new mindset about a specific technology. The paper presents a design case were we designed "Personal Embodied Agents (agent and robot technology) based on interviews concerning interests in reptiles as pets. The emerging applications are called Autonomous wallpaper and Glowbots.
Glowbots will be presented at Emerging technologies at Siggraph, 7-9 August, 2007.