COLLABORATORS: Will Odom METHODS: photography, personal inventories, contextual interviews, card sorting, clustering and affinity diagramming
+ OVERVIEW Why do some artifacts endure and attain sustainable longevity of use while others are discarded without thought? This ongoing study investigates this question as means to design more meaningful, enduring, and sustainable digital artifice.
+ CURRENT WORK Using refined methods from previous work, this study investigates people’s relationships with digital and non-digital objects in the home, with an eye toward the ways in which products improve rather than deteriorate over time. During in-home interviews, a card-sorting method with the images provided from each respective participant’s camera study was used to explore and construct a global portrait of object relationships and attachments. During these exercises, participants were asked to think aloud as they arranged images of their objects along several semantic differentials, which prompted exploration of, among other things, (i) relative levels of attachment, (ii) perceptions of new vs. old, (iii) emotional vs. functional value, (iv) level of physical involvement through use, and (v) relative ability to augment or personalize.
+ PREVIOUS WORK Drawing on concepts from philosophy of technology, this project interprets observational fieldwork data collected from 32 personal inventory sessions. These sessions involved touring participants' homes while elliciting responses about relationships with diverse and particular domestic artifacts. We clustered our findings into the four relationship styles of (i) engagement, (ii) histories, (iii) augmentation, and (iv) perceived durability. Design principles and research questions were developed based on these relationships. This work is in collaboration with Will Odom, Erik Stolterman, and Eli Blevis and builds on previous work by Blevis and Stolterman.
+ PUBLICATIONS: Odom, W., Pierce, J., Stolterman, E., & Blevis, E. (2009, April). Understanding Why We Preserve Some Things and Discard Others in the Context of Interaction Design. In Proceedings of CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems, Boston, MA. CHI '09. ACM Press, New York, NY.
Odom, W., Pierce, J. (2009, April). Improving with Age: Designing Enduring Interactive Products. In Extended Abstracts of CHI '09, Boston, MA. CHI '09. ACM Press, New York, NY.
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