Research Journeys making the invisible visual in this paper,
we critique the ways that we report on community focused research and HCI
and suggest how the pictorials format can facilitate transparency and support
reflection on community spaces that bring them to life and support design processes.
This paper sets out to make for specific contributions.
Firstly,
the typical text heavy research paper often seen that HCI conferences may not
always be the ideal way to report on community focused work.
The current paper is published as
a pictorial format, a paper composed primarily of images rather than text.
We suggest that this pictorial publication format can provide scope to share aspects
of our work that could otherwise remain unpublished and unexamined.
Secondly, we discuss how researchers carrying out community based research as
outsiders only ever form partial perspectives of community spaces.
Researchers perspectives can be composed
of the journeys that they make to, through and away from community spaces.
We suggest that sharing those journeys in visual format provides the researcher
an opportunity to transparently share their partial perspectives with readers
and elicit other perspectives to inform the design process.
Thirdly, we critique the term in the wild often used.
as a blanket term for all community
focused work outside the lab, HCI research can mask the unique ways
in which researchers may engage with those communities.
Much of our work is rendered invisible by current practices.
So we seek to make the invisible visual
and to bring to life contexts that the term in the wild can mask.
We look to visually account for the social, cultural and material
environments in which HCI projects are accomplished and to make what is often
considered 'in the wild' visible through imagery.
Finally, we illustrate this argument through reporting of our research journey
to a number of islands off the west coast of Ireland as part of a project that is
developing technology to support rural community radio.
In doing so, we wish to focus primarily
on our third contribution: what we learn about 'in the wild' context through visually
representing our research journey to the reader and how this might support design.
Next, we discuss our methodology before presenting some of our findings.
The research journey reported in this
paper was undertaken as part of a large EU funded project focused on the evaluation
of a novel technology intended to support communities in setting up and running F.M.
radio stations in a cheap and accessible manner.
The project is a collaboration between university researchers,
commercial software developers and community organizations and three
remote locations on the periphery of Europe.
In Romania, in Madeira, in Portugal and on islands off the West Coast of Ireland.
In each location, community radio stations are set up and run by community
organizations in collaboration with the local population.
And the technology is supplied by the project.
As researchers, we are interested in understanding how
the communities each engage with the technology,
with questions such as whether the technology is useful
in supporting the setting up and running of a radio station.
The challenges with doing so,
how to improve the technology, how to support governance of stations via
software, and ultimately whether these activities
support the communities and reaching their own self-declared goals
On one Island that had already established a community radio station
our attention was to learn more about how the radio might support community needs
and to increase participation. On another island
our intention was to explore initial ideas for the radio station that had not yet
been established. We present our Research Journeys as
a series of themes, a visual archive to suggest forms of inquiry.
There is something special in what images
elicit for us as researchers what they show and tell.
That words cannot.
How they can assist in immersive reading of the accompanying text.
We looked to our research environment for a rich visual experiences.
In doing so, we work in a similar way to visual ethnography,
with our primary focus on peripheral awareness of context and place.
We therefore situate our imagery
in between spaces, in visual methods, research and HCI.
For our findings,
we found five main themes: sense of place, transportation and transition,
work and environment, supporting cast, artifacts and equipment.
For the purposes of this presentation, we will focus on two main themes.
The first is transportation and transition.
Through our transitions on our research journey from the mainland to Islands,
on ferries in West Cork, we learn from our visual experiences
that there are questions we need to consider in design.
For example, how do we design for seasonality?
How do we not privilege one construction of the rural space over another?
The fact that the only other people
on the ferries evening crossing were two other researchers was telling for us.
Did this suggest over research
of the rural Ireland population we would be visiting?
How can we engage this population if that is how they feel?
We learned this through our research
journey, through the transitions and transportation that we take.
The second thing we've called artifacts
and equipment - stumbling across images of the landscape
informs us about the rural community in which we work.
And of the technology projects that came
before us. On one island, an image of an abandoned wind turbine,
described as an 'innovative and ahead
of its time project' illustrates to us that it was not
sustainable as when the project and the funding related waned,
the technology now lies unused.
This image becomes a reminder to us of the importance of designing
for sustainability from the beginning of our project.
So now for our discussion:
Through these images, we learn about the landscapes
and temporalities of their rural locations, we engage with how the seasons impact
place, the different meanings of place depending on positions.
For example, whether
you are a seasonal swimmer, a visiting researcher and arts student or a resident farmer.
How do we include those that have migrated
from rural areas to contribute to the radio process?
What specific materiality might influence project outcomes?
How can technology support all of these various needs?
We also noticed active engagement
from people who are working on issues that matter to them together visually.
We learn through the process that there is a tension between our desire to use images
to increase our research transparency, and the level of comfort that rural
residents have with research and being the subjects of research itself.
When we conduct research in the wild,
there are many ethical dimensions that must be considered.
By taking you on our research journey in rural Ireland,
we hope that those that inspire and host this work are exemplified and celebrated.
Although our perspective is not whole, this curated collection of photographs
and sketches reveals the often hidden side of our collaborative work.
Thank you.