- Good morning all.
Thank you, Gabriela, for this wonderful opening.
I'm Anton from USI Lugano in Switzerland,
and I happy to be here to present this work
conducted together with my co-workers,
Masako Kitazaki from Musashino Art University,
who's in the audience right now.
And William Odom from Simon Fraser University
as well in the audience.
And Marc Langheinrich from USI Lugano.
Let me start with the context here.
Sharing Economy Services are very popular today.
You might know or use this kind of services.
They allow effectively and efficiently connect people
who have resources like cars, apartments, and tools,
and who need them at the given time
using an online platform.
Going forward, the report from the British government
from 2015, I think, I predicted that
sharing economy services will reach a 50% market share
in 2025 in accommodation and car sharing sectors.
So this is all on the rise.
So over those three examples
of popular sharing economy services on the left,
profit-driven so they take in cut on each transaction
and somewhat controversial in their nature,
in terms of how they treat their workers
and the implications for when it comes to taxation
and stuff like that.
So, however, in addition to the services,
we also see the rise of the nonprofit approaches
to share an economy that might be less known,
but equally important, such as local resource-sharing
communities and collectives, tools and equipment libraries,
and various grassroots initiatives and cooperatives.
So now there's some commonalities and differences
between these two, so both enable peer-to-peer interactions
and allow a temporal relations between peers,
and often using an online platform
as a tool to access to the shared resources.
However, there's many differences
with regard to the business models
when it comes to expectations of compensations
and environmental concerns,
and impacts on the local communities.
On the whole, both approaches,
profit-driven and non-profit approaches,
to the shared economy, generated some interest
in the HCI community
and subsequently created substantial research knowledge.
Now, we wanted to know how can designers
both improve existing sharing economy platforms
and create the new ones.
To approach this goal, in our previous work,
we reviewed relevant HCI studies
and attempted to map this design space
of sharing economy into the five main themes,
which is shared content, addressing the question,
"What is being shared?"
Target audience inquiring to whom sharing takes place.
Motivations to share,
addressing why actually people share stuff.
And aspects of privacy and trust,
which inquires how users feel about privacy and trust
issues when deciding to share.
And requirements to user experience.
Those concerns with a question like,
"How is the sharing taking place?"
Additionally we also formulated,
in our previous work, based on this mapping,
a set of specific design recommendations
to support design practitioners of online platforms,
to devise new value-added services
for the sharing economy in general.
And facilitate the creation of instances of alternative
sharing economy models in particular.
So academic audiences often appreciate this kind of insight.
However, Roedl and Stolterman found that in general,
designers have a number of challenges to interpret
considerations produced by the designs researchers.
They often find them too abstract, too difficult to use,
and too hard to search for.
Specific question that we wanted to ask in this paper
is how we can make our design insights
more accessible to the design practitioners.
We sought inspiration in the designs cards
as a genre of the designs toolkits to translate
the knowledge between design research and design practice.
Firstly, design cards have been found useful
in various application domains.
For example, they helped conceptualizing
the IoT applications, raising awareness about
data protection regulations,
and supporting a design of tangible learning games,
as well as making use of different theories like
behavioral change theories to design interactive systems.
Secondly, design cards support various design activities
such as collaborative and playful ideation,
code design, prototyping, and et cetera.
We therefore drew on these efforts
and have developed the sharing economy designed cards.
With the goal of eight designers in operationalizing,
they research knowledge in the context of sharing economy.
Our card deck consisted of 24 cards,
covered these five particular themes:
content, audience, motivations,
aspects of privacy and trust, and user experience.
They are all distinctly colored.
We also included the black blend card
for each theme to allow their extensibility.
So this is not the, you know, it's a growing set.
Each card is divided into the seven sections.
First is the card's theme, then it's a leading question,
then we have a design goal here, searchable keywords,
actionable recommendation, and detailed description,
and an example from an existing service.
We formulated two research questions around cards used.
We wanted to know what are the opportunities and challenges
adapting the cards in the designer's creative processes.
And secondly, we want to specifically understand how can
cards being used in different stages of the design process.
For that, to answer these questions,
we designed a study that consisted of two stages.
First stage was individual interviews
with 16 designers and sharing economy experts.
And on the second stage, we engage in the two
creative workshops with five participants,
each also with designers
and sharing economy expert community.
At the first stage, the goal of these individual interviews
was to elicit designer's and expert's
professional reflections about the cards themselves,
and understand how the cards could used for evaluating
existing sharing economy platforms.
We can conducted most of our interviews
using Skype and audio recorded them.
And we then transcribed them verbatim and quoted parts
that were relevant to our research questions.
At the second stage, the goal was to understand
the potential value of the cards in the process
of creating new value-added services in the sharing economy
in collaborative setting.
We recorded and analyzed video,
the data from the both workshops,
as well we collected participants reports
produced during the workshops.
We developed corresponding design methodology
for the cards used in a collaborative workshop
based on the Google design sprint approach.
Each sprint took two hours and consisted of eight different
individual and group activities adopted from the prior work.
We specifically chose this sprint format
as being close to the industry demands,
where designers have to make decisions
within limited time, and within limited resources.
We developed the supporting design materials
for this sprint, namely design brief,
with a particular client, challenge,
and deliverable scenario, and three personas
to facilitate this workshop.
And we also created several mapping and prototyping
templates to eight different stages of this sprint.
We elicited the range of reflections and reactions
on the cards used, from perceptions of their usefulness
to consideration and their use in the participants' work.
As well as to perspective adaptions
in the different stages of the design process.
And to the reflections how to create
new materials using the cards.
For the purpose of this talk,
I will focus only on two set of insights.
For the rest, I will invite you to check out the paper.
I will start with opportunities and difficulties.
Participants discussed the value of the cards
to support both existing and new instances
of sharing economy services, and argued on the importance
of looking beyond profit-driven aspirations,
like in the case of Gladys.
"Sharing economy platforms are rather new phenomena.
"There are many of them now,
"you pay and you get the service.
"The cards let the designer step back
"and look at the bigger picture,
"to slow down a bit and to think
"how we can improve a service in different ways
"beyond an economic point of view."
Some of our participants saw the cards as a checklist
featuring best practices, which can be cross-referenced
against the platform designs.
Morten spelled this out.
"For example, picking one of those cards
"and checking that the goal is already designed
"in the service or there'll be more work to do.
"Also after moving to the right side of the card
"and checking some of the concrete examples
"how to manifest these kinds of goals on the UI level."
With reference to the challenges of adapting cards,
we encountered that, though examples were regarded
very informative and clarifying,
they also raised concerns of being too specific.
Nevertheless, participants found them to be
specially beneficially for the less experienced designers
and even known designers.
"Those example make me focus and comply to the goal
"in a way that may limit my imagination.
"However, they may be a good for those
"who struggle to interpret a goal."
Furthermore, several participants contemplated
on the card's use being to structure their design critique,
like in the case of Pierre.
"I don't have to think about the process.
"The cards are hint for me to use within my expert feedback.
"The colored themes are helping me to structure my thoughts
"and overall documentation process
"from different perspectives.
"There are some ready-made suggestions
"that I can communicate to a client.
"It provides me certain confidence
"when it comes to naming sections of the report."
Moving on, our findings involve the cards were useful
in different stages of the design process.
For instance, participants have found the cards useful
in the focused brainstorming sessions due to the sprint.
And used combinations of card, looking for a similar thread.
Aubry explained, "I was going deeper and deeper
"within a single goal per theme, and expanded it to extreme
"in order to see how the goal could be implemented
"on the Content, Audience, Privacy & Trust levels.
"One can focus on one specific goal that could be seen
"or interpreted through different layers of Content,
"Motivations, UX, in order to build a coherent story."
As expected, cards were widely used during these
sketching and prototyping activities.
Those are few examples of the wireframe's lo-fi prototypes
interactive workflows that envisioned during our workshop.
Here, they illustrated the exact concept
of the local toy bank and target audiences.
They proposed in an online service that would support
the renting and sharing of upcycled toys.
On the picture on the left, Diana highlighted how the cards
can help to develop her concept.
"The features I added here thanks to the cards
"were donate option, age selection, and story telling."
Both interview and workshop participants
reported beneficial to use the cards for the key
their designs to the colleagues and group of stakeholders.
Emma detailed that the description part of the card
was crucial during this phase.
"I also like the images and little stats
"that you have here in the cards.
"If you're going to present to your client,
"in this deliverable you can use these cards
"as a kind of give yourself some credibility,
"advocating particular design decisions."
Few participants mentioned that some of the themes,
such as privacy and trust, were often overlooked
in the early stages of the design process.
And here, Adam emphasized the importance of that.
"Privacy is often left out in the design stage,
"usually the solution architect tries to add it
"at the later stage
"and designers don't often think about it.
"The card just reminds them how to bring this issue up."
The majority of our participants agreed that the cards
can be used as a guiding tool
to evaluate existing platforms and services.
What is more, participants reported that cards
could help them to understand some of the design issues
they were not anticipated earlier.
Like in the case of Jehanna.
"The card helped me to notice a problem
"that I didn't take into consideration.
"Even though I didn't find a solution
"for the issue just now,
"the card helped me to approach the problem."
Furthermore, cards offered potential design solutions
for those problems, like in the case of Worden.
"For an average user, it's hard to say often
"whether rating 4.2 is good or bad.
"Airbnb could provide some contextual information,
"such as service ratings in certain city,
"explain what this rating mean.
"Like if you click on Accuracy, it can be described
"for those who opted to learn more about it."
Collectively, this card deployments illustrated how
they could be used during different stages
of design process, as well as they provoke discussion
on the commonalities and differences
between the other design toolkits.
Our findings show that the cards not only facilitated
to create new design materials to informed decision-making
in a group setting, but also provided a hands-on guidance
on different parts of the design process,
like focused brainstorming, prototyping activities,
advocating results of stakeholders,
refining in detail ideas.
And more importantly, they can be used for evaluating
existing platforms and identifying potential design issues.
This use of the cards, as analytic toolkits,
are rarely described in the literature.
What is more, while numerous express
that it is the design cards effectively
had actively supported the divergence step
of the design process, our research highlights the key value
for better supporting the convergence activities,
like deciding a particular design concept
or obligating their decisions.
Many design toolkits adopt abstract visual examples
for brainstorming purposes.
We extended this approach to our cards
and incorporated screenshots of the actual UIs
from the existing platforms.
It was found particularly useful
for junior designers and non-designers
who struggled to interpret the goal or recommendation.
To address concerns of limited times and resources
that practitioners have to employ broader approaches
to design, such as contextual interviews,
our cards can be seen as a what-to and how-to toolkit
to help designers to navigate specifics
of the sharing economy and to develop their ideas
in this space by offering adequate amount of details
needed at different stages of the design process.
To wrap it up, our paper offered two contributions.
The cards and the corresponding design methodology
for their use in the collaborative context.
And insights and findings that surfaced
during two deployments with a 26 participants.
In particular, our participants found the cards useful,
not only in the collaborative activities
to create new sharing economy design concept,
but also in individual activities
to provide structured design critique
on the well known existing platforms.
I brought cards over here
if you would like to check them out later.
And also, they are available for download.
If you're interested to hear more
about alternative models of the sharing economy,
we are organizing a special interest group
later this afternoon after lunch.
So with the colleagues and we hope to see you there as well.
And thank you for your attention.
(audience applauds)
- [Moderator] Thank you very much, questions, please?
- [Man] Thanks for an interesting talk,
I was wondering whether the designers that you involved
in your study, whether they had already,
are planning on working on shared economy platforms
or whether they were just general designers,
not necessarily experienced with shared economy.
- Thank you for question.
The question was about whether designers
priorly knew about the sharing economy or not.
In our particular instance,
the designers were only broadly familiar
with the concept of sharing economy.
They used the services before especially in the interviews,
we interviewed them about particular service.
Only few of them actually designed the services themselves.
So there was kind of a mix of people.
That is why we also incorporated in our,
in the two stages of our study sharing economy experts
to provide specific feedback on the content of the cards.
- [Man] Thanks.
- [Moderator] Any other questions, please?
- [Woman] We have one from the audience.
(audience member speaking off-microphone)
- [Moderator] I would like to ask people
to move towards the center
so that they allow people who are standing to take a seat.
Thank you very much.
- [Woman] Thanks for interesting talk.
I see that your cards addressing, like accountability.
And I was just curious if the cards,
will they all be used to create these oppressive
power structures like we seem to see in Uber,
or do you have things that can explicitly guide away?
How can you see the sort of power structures
within what you're going to create or in any certain issue,
or is that something you leave to the users of the cards?
Thank you.
- Thank you for your question.
The question about accountability and power structures,
and possibility to creating them using the cards.
So maybe I should give you a little bit of context.
The cards were created as an effort surveying literature
on the digital sharing of those sharing economy.
Lots of issues come up in challenges
that we try to incorporate and reflect in these cards.
Particularly, aspects of power,
they are not very clearly or explicitly visible there.
So that's why we kind of open up,
and for every single theme of the cards
we offer the blank cards experts and designers
could kind of add their own thoughts and ideas.
And, for instance, those themes about power.
So we're not trying to kind of enforce,
but let the designers think about it
and make their own decisions about their audience
who are involved and about the stakeholders of them,
so it was kind of open-ended in a way.
- [Moderator] Thank you very much.
Let's give Anton another round of applause.
(audience applauds)