Hello and welcome back. Today, we'll be talking about the idea of implications for design, which is another way of communicating the findings of your formative research work. So the key questions in implications for design is how we can get others, so let's a say a team of designers or a team of builders who didn't participate in the formative study. To really understand the newest findings of our formative work and use those understandings to make specific design decisions as we move forward with implementation while the design process and technology. So we talked about a few of those in previous videos, so we talked about things like personas and news cases But implications for design is a particularly common one in computer interaction research. So frequently, when you look at papers and this is the example of a previous paper of mine. I don't expect you to be able to read this but it has something, a section titled, translating themes into implications and opportunities for design. Or other papers will actually just have a section that's titled implications for design. That help draw out the lessons from this very new ones informative worked into something that others can intervene and act on. Overall there's four types of designed implications. There are sensitizing concepts, there are abstraction and meta-abstraction, instantiation of the designed, and prescription. And we'll talked about each of these when we look at more details here. So the first of these are Sensitizing Concepts. The idea that your formative work could have pointed out to some underlying concept that a designer must keep in mind as they are designing. These are frequently rather broad. So sometimes, they point out kind of shortcomings of previous work in their field or something that previous work in the field hasn't really considered. So three examples of this might be considering conflict and non-consensus in families. This is something that came out of my previous research. What I saw is that a lot of work in human computer interaction treated the family as a single unit that had kind of harmonious goals. But as I was studying divorced families and families where parents travel a lot, I actually found that there were a lot of examples where the two parents don't agree with each other, or the goals of the parents may conflict with the goals of the child. And so, a sensitizing concept that I may want to communicate to designers for family technologies is not to assume that everybody's on the same page. To really consider the idea of conflict and non-consensus. Similarly, in a recent talk I heard, it talked about the idea of digital privacy. And particularly focused on a very important group, survivors of partner abuse. Frequently when you talk about digital privacy to technology researchers, you might get flippant answers like privacy is good. If you expect privacy, then that's something you're never going to get in the modern world. But the context of survivors of partner abuse is a really interesting one where we really do want people to be able to feel safe again and to be able break the cycle of abuse, escape their abuser, and be safe afterwards. But where technology may actually do things that can reveal their location or reveal something about them that they don't want their abuser to know. And it kind of flips that idea. Really does mean that we have kind of a moral imperative as designers to consider digital privacy, rather than say, if somebody wants privacy, they should not use our system. And as another example, a lot of work on online health support communities. So in my case, this is working with people who use technology for recovery from addiction and alcoholism, finds underlying concepts like the idea of trust. So how people use the community and what they find valuable and it really depends on how much they trust the other members of the community. So if you think about trust as a desensitizing concept, you may design your systems in different ways. You may design your systems in such a way that it increases that idea of trust. Or increases the idea of social capital between two people really continue exchanging support until they can trust one another. But as you see these are all kind of broads. So they're not saying specifically build X or build Y. They're saying consider this ideas because they're important to think about as you're deciding what to design or how to go about it. The other kind of level may be something like abstraction or meta-abstraction. So what it does is it's clarifies important abstract functionalities, but it may not yet specify specific technologies or solutions. So for example I did a lot of work with cross cultural families, one of the things I found that one abstract functionalities that may help those people Is helping them discover shared or conflicting values. So when people come from different cultures they may not even know ahead of time that they have some values that conflict but actually asking them to perhaps share those values or respond to them is helpful for them deciding what to do in cases where conflict does arise. Now, here I'm not saying, well, you should design a Facebook of sorts, where you put down all your values and then it compares all your values to your extended family's values and points out the differences. I'm just saying that any way you can confide of helping family members discover those shared values could be useful. Similarly, in my work on supporting parent-child communication across distance, one of the things that I found was that a lot of technologies that have developed for communication really have originally been developed for adults so they focus on this idea of conversation, the idea of talking to each other. But I found that the abstract functionality that's particularly important for communication with children is actually shared activities, because that's what parents and kids tend to have their most meaningful conversations is when they're doing something together. Whether that's playing a game or helping with homework or even doing the dishes together, rather than just sitting across the table from each other and asking each other questions. So again, I'm not saying exactly how that shared activity could be supported. I mean it could be Minecraft, it could be World of Warcraft that you're playing together. It could be some sort of an online help for homework portal. But I'm just saying that the abstract functionality that is important to support is that idea of shared activity. And as the last example one of the things that I find in my work on helping people recover from addiction and alcoholism is that in person contact is very important for that social support. So you may think about the idea of how to reward people as they spend more time together with other people in recovery, or how to help connect them with other people who are nearby, so they can get that in person contact. But again, the idea is that the abstract functionality you want to support is connecting people in person, rather than only connecting people online. So let's talk about the third type of implication for design which is known as instantiation. So this is perhaps the easiest one to explain. So this is about providing a possible design solution. So these are actually two sketches from a paper on class cultural parenting. And they provide two very specific instantiated design solutions. So the one on the right is called cultural care box, and the idea is that members of the family from multiple cultures would sign up for a box to learn more about the other culture. And they would get digital artifacts like recipes for food to make, videos to watch, something like cartoons to share with kids. Articles about specific holidays, and so it's basically information to help them respect the other culture more. Another example, the one on the left here is called Quizomatics. So this is kind of a specific instantiation of one of the abstractions, abstract functionalities that I was talking about on the previous slide. So before I was saying help family members discover shared and conflicting values. And Quizomatic is supposed to do that by giving you fun quizzes that you can take. Which generates sharables that you can share on Facebook something like the Harry Potter parent I most like is Molly Wesley or something like that, something that you have fun sharing. But then it also combines those answers from your partner, from your extended family and gives you kind of points where you can easily compromise so things where perhaps one person really cares deeply about something. The other person may not agree but they don't really care that much about the way it's done. That's needed compromise or discussion points so areas where both people care deeply and we have disagreements that can lead to discussions on the topic and gives some opportunities to celebrate the values that they do share in common as well. So again, these are very specific actual solutions to the idea here as I'm saying you make a website and the person who's using this website goes through this process to actually arrive at identifying these shared values. Whereas the previous abstraction idea was just identifying abstract functionalities that would be useful for people. And the last type of implication for design is known as prescription. So this idea is about prescribing or saying specific requirements for a solution to work. So these can be fairly low levels. So for example, if you're designing some sort of video chat system, you may say that the frame-rate should be at least 30 frames per second to support smooth interaction. So it's a very concrete specific requirement that the system might need. Or maybe you're doing something like a crowdsource system, system where answers for questions are gathered from people online. And so, what you want is your answers to be validated by at least three other crowdworkers in order to prevent spam from being part of the answer. So it's a kind of another example, it's being very concrete. Or it may be you're doing something like experience sampling which is sending texts to participants to ask them answers to specific questions. Perhaps to inform your digital system that you're building. And a specific requirement might be something like it's not sending anymore than three texts a day. Otherwise, participants might find that intrusive and not accept your system. So again these are very, very specific, they're telling exactly what the system should do and system to actually work. So taking all those together, what is it that makes a good implication for design, because all of these four are actually quite different from each other. And so, I said there's kind of four different things that are important for implication for site to have. I mean the first one is obvious, it should be accurate to your context, so if you're trying to describe and get these implications for design from your formative work. The implication should in fact be true to what your participants shared whether through interviews or things that you observe, the participants doing informative study. The other thing is should be interesting enough that it generates and inspires future work. If you're telling people something they already knew, then i'ts not early going to do that much to inspire future work. It should be actionable. So this is perhaps harder with some of them are more abstract ideas like sensitizing concept or future abstractions. But it should be something that the designer can look at him and think, yes, I think I can see which designs would work based on a implication, and which designs wouldn't work based on a implication. And lastly, it should be original and novel, and this is perhaps the quality that's most prized in research publications on the topic, but I think most people want to be surprised by the findings of of a formative study and not just be told things that they already know. Now, the last point that I want to leave you with is that the question of who writes implications for design is actually a very debated question in our research community. So in the past it's typically been kind of the ethnographer or the formative researcher who works on the project. But others have pointed out that perhaps doing good implications for design requires some design skills as well. And perhaps it should be a designer that actually creates those implications for design, and then acts on them. And certainly, there's a lot of debate and I'll point you to the paper that has that discussion. I'd be curious to hear what you think of this. So for more information, there's two papers that I think are really good reads, so, one is generating implications for design and it actually covers all four of these categories that I've also covered in these slides. It kind of discusses how other authors have. Discussed implications for design that came out of their formative work, and in general, which ones are more or less common is our research community. And the second one is a critical discussion of implications for design that kind of follows onto this question of, who should be writing these implications for design and should formative research towards the judge based on the implications for design that it provides. So that's all that I have for you today and I hope to see you in the next video.
