I stumbled across a journal I kept from my trip to Africa last year. It’s made for some great reliving in my jetlagged state this morning. Here’s my favourite excerpt:
Godwin grew up on one of the larger islands in the lake, and he still lives there. He’s just completed building his first house, and lives there with his mother and two sisters. He has a canoe made out of a eucalyptus tree that he uses to get to and from work – about an hour paddle in each direction. He told me he’s planning on marrying soon, as soon as he can afford a good dowry for his girlfriend. He said he’d like to pay 4 or 5 cows and the same number of goats, but that it was difficult to save enough money to buy the animals. Wealth matters in your family life here – he told me his father was wealthy, and as a result was able to afford 18 wives. Unfortunately, this spread his father’s fortune very thin and Godwin himself was not left with much when his verile father died at the age of 96 after fathering about 80 children. I’m not sure I believe him or not – I told another one of the staff members here about it and he said he’s going to find out if it’s true. The fact that it’s even remotely possible seems other worldly to me. Polygamy seems very common in Uganda – the muslim influence – but Godwin and I both agreed that one wife was enough.
Having just arrived back from another trip through Europe, it’s highlighted the value of keeping a journal like this as a record of the sites, sounds and most importantly, the people you encounter. It’s worthwhile keeping a journal in the context of a PhD too – there seems to be a lot of encouragement for including some reflective writing in a thesis these days, and if it helps me get to the word limit I’m more than happy to do so!
Last week I attended MobileHCI 2011 in Stockholm to participate in the doctoral consortium – a forum for PhD students to present their progress and gain feedback from more experienced researchers (i.e. oldies). It was one of the best experiences of my now two years (eek!) as a PhD student. I got great feedback, and left feeling inspired and encouraged. Thanks to the panel of advisors for making it a very rewarding experience.
The doctoral consortium and subsequent conference were not the only sources of inspiration on this trip, however. After heading to Oslo to visit an old friend I stopped by the Edvard Munch museum to catch a glimpse of The Scream. It wasn’t on display after all, but had been replaced by an exhibition focusing on the creative process behind the paintings.
For each of his major pieces, Edvard went through many hundreds of sketches and variations, playing with the composition, colours and materials. He even went as far as painting many “final” pieces with slight variations and choosing between them. I never knew, but there are multiple Screams in existence – the painting shown here (“History”), had at least 20 versions on display.
I know it’s been said before that creative genius is actually the result of hard work and perseverance, but seeing such tangible examples of something moving from a sketch to a masterpiece was truly inspiring. It humanised the process of creativity.
The photo below is Munch painting “The Sun”, on a very big ladder.
Another source of inspiration was the Nobel Museet in Stockholm’s Gamla Stan. It was full of quotes from laureates about the importance of ideas (especially bad ones), of failing, and of stimulating environments for creativity.
The museum is less about the individual achievements of these exceptional people, but more on what it takes to inspire a person to such heights. There are videos on the process of creativity, sources of inspiration from notable laureates, and more.
This has been a very inspiring trip, I hope to return to Scandinavia very soon.
It’s a common story that the focus of a PhD changes dramatically as you progress through it. In almost two years I think I’ve written about 10 different abstracts, all with some kind of common thread but with decidedly different implications for the activities and outcomes of the project. In that spirit, I’d like to post another abstract!
This one I think pulls together a lot of the thoughts I’ve had over the last few months and gives me a bit more direction (which hopefully will translate in to more frequent posts here). No doubt there’ll be more versions, but for now this is what is making sense to me.
This thesis expands the understanding of the relationships between technology, people and environmental knowledge.
Our understanding of the environments we inhabit have always been socially grounded; the interactions we have with a space define it, and the meaning we construct about these places is socially embedded. As technology becomes increasingly mobile and ubiquitous, it too has become socially embedded. People are connecting across time and space, and real-time access to vast amounts of information are changing the ways we interact with the world in tangible ways. The spaces we inhabit are at once physical, social and digital – they are blended.
There has been much research into the potential for technology to facilitate collaboration and co-presence, and around the ways technology use and infrastructure influences our perceptions of and movements in the world. However, there has been little that looks at the combination of both: how we can co-create an understanding of our environment that crosses the seams between physical and digital spaces.Through an ethnographic study of rangers in a national park, this thesis will build upon the current research around environmental knowing and its implications for ubiquitous and mobile computing. It will provide exploratory designs for two different systems that demonstrate blended space for the purpose of sharing local knowledge about the environment, and will discuss the potential for digital space to enrich this knowledge. This thesis argues that by decreasing the divide between physical and digital spaces, we can facilitate and enrich our understanding of the locations we interact with.
Thoughts appreciated!
Personal geographies is a term I’ve been using in (thus far private) writing and preliminary analysis of diary studies and interviews I’ve conducted with park rangers. The above picture is the result of combining a particular kind of personal geography – jogging trails through New York city. It’s also an increasingly common type of visualisation; the visualisation of movement to emerge the shape of a space. Twitter heat maps and flickr overlays are also in vogue (not that that’s a bad thing!). The best thing about personal geographies is that, when combined, they form social geographies; the sense of place that has arisen through a community’s interaction with the city. What the visualisation above shows is a particular interpretation of a place, and one that was not necessarily deliberate.
This is also another example of digital data imposing itself on the physical world – it’s becoming increasingly easy to access the data in the digital layer above us. The seams between digital and physical are blurring too; as this example shows, our physical being in the world increasingly generates digital data, without consciously creating “content”. Conversely, the act of deliberate “generation” of content can influence our physical space and the actions we take in them. At the most basic level, think foursquare check-ins influencing which bar you go to.
We’re already living in a hybrid physical/digital world – and they’re increasingly influencing each other in ways designed or not. In fact, the duality of physical and digital may be a generational divide – in 100 years (less?), it will most likely sound comical to separate the two.
Link: Drawing New York
It’s been a bit of a black hole on this blog recently – the promise of posting “essays” every few weeks scared me away from posting anything at all. I’ve been doing writing, but nothing that is ready for public consumption just yet. There will be writing published, but not for a few more weeks.
Over the past month I’ve been busy collecting data for my first case study, and a few days ago I arrived in San Francisco for WWDC, the Apple developer conference. I’m working on designs for a qualitative analysis tool for iOS devices, which I hope to build some interactive prototypes with while I’m here. The conference has a UI Lab with Apple designers, who critique your designs, and a few hands-on technical sessions around maps, visualisations, etc, which I’m hoping to apply to some prototypes.
This trip is the first of a few over the next few months – in July I’m presenting a poster and participating in a workshop on Geovisualisation at the ICA Conference in Paris, and in late August I’m heading to MobileHCI to participate in the doctoral consortium. “Excited” is an understatement!
So, I hope you can forgive the lack of content here recently. Normal programming will resume soon, now that I have this essay-monkey off my back.
When I started my research, I didn’t fully understand how lucky I was to have an industry partner attached to the project. As part of an existing Design Research Institute project, my PhD position was essentially like a normal full-time position, with a project ready to kick off; all I did was slot in and get started. Which, of course, sounds much easier than it was.
I’m now about 50% through my allotted time, and about one month in to my field work. The idea all along, even in the very first version of my research proposal, was to base my research around case studies. This isn’t surprising, and is still true; however, my idea of what a case study is has changed significantly. When I first started, I understood the entire geographical region of a park to be my case study. “Wilson’s Promontory National Park” was going to be a chapter in my thesis, and the unit of measurement would have been people’s behaviour in and around that location. I thought that simply having an industry partner meant I could tick the case study box.
Based on the handful of interviews I’ve done so far I now realise that just as much happens outside a park than in it, and that narrowing the case study to a geographical location would ignore the thread of knowledge that goes through the entire organisation, and is not just situated in the park. Whilst locations (and people’s understandings of them) are still the core of my research, the actual frame through which I analyse that has changed. My case studies are no longer just geographical locations, but are ecological projects that start and end outside of the park.
Parks and people
Parks Victoria is a large organisation with many different focuses, summarised up by the phrase “Healthy parks, Healthy people”. This suggests two primary facets to park management: the ecological integrity of the park, and the focus on the public’s enjoyment of these natural environments. Whilst these values appear to be at odds with each other at times, they are also closely intertwined; people cannot enjoy parks if the ecology is not managed correctly, and tourism provides valuable financial support to allow purely ecological projects to continue. The emotional connections people establish with parks similarly gives Parks Victoria added weight when it comes to gaining clout with the state government. People are passionate about these places, and this translates into votes.
That aside, my research is focused on the ecological management of parks, particularly in relation to the sharing and generation of tacit knowledge about bushfire prevention, management and recovery. Internally, this kind of management falls under the umbrella of “natural values”, a term that describes the ecological management priorities in and around a given park.
Natural values management
The organisation has a set of values that dictates the kinds of ecological management projects that are planned and carried out. These values act as a means to prioritise the management activities in a park, and may be something like:
Ensure endagered species and their environments are protected.
From this value, the management team – working with park rangers – plan projects to achieve and satisfy that goal. These projects may be to do with monitoring of species populations or the control of noxious flora that could jeopardise the species’ habitat. Once a project is decided upon, a team of people design and plan the research project, collaborating withrangers to choose practical and appropriate sites, and sometimes with contractors and other groups to carry out the actual research. Analysis is then fed back into the organisation and contributes to long term trend mapping.
It is these research projects that provide a common thread throughout the whole organisation, and I now plan on following two of these projects as case studies. One project will be based at Wilson’s Prom, whilst it’s looking like the other will be in the Otways National Park.
The thread between locations, people and space
By having natural values management projects as broader case studies, I will hopefully have a more complete picture of what happens during park manangement, and this picture will not be limited simply to a geographical location. Whilst the way people relate to locations is still the core of my research, having an organisation wide thread to follow will allow me to:
- Understand individual rangers and scientists views of the locations they manage, in the shared context of an NVM project.
- Understand how different people interpret the same space; do rangers and scientists have different views on locations, and what implications does this have when they come to work on the same project?
- Examine how these differences play out in a project, and what it may mean for the design of a context-sensitive knowledge tool.
Similarly, by having two sites of research, I will be able to:
- Compare the kinds of knowledge being generated and used across similar projects, but different locations.
- Generate a set of design principles that could be applied across more varied environments. Whilst parks are still the focus, having multiple locations will make the principles for situated and located sense-making more robust.
Implications for design
From an analysis of qualitative data around these case studies I hope to establish some broad design principles that I can use to come up with a location-based, multi-faceted and in-situ knowledge service. I hope this exercise will contribute to the broader ubiquitous computing literature, and I’m also hoping to develop some basic working prototypes to be used and tested in the field. I’m going to WWDC in June, and will use what I learn there to do some rapid prototyping (and check out San Francisco, of course).
This is not an essay
Obviously this isn’t an essay on knowledge spaces, as I had previously posted. Given recent flooding at Wilson’s Prom – my primary case study – I had to refocus on finding another case study site last week. The park received 500mm of rain in one 24 hour period, and most of the infrastructure in the park has been damaged or washed away. Access is limited to the park, and the staff based there have been shifted away from their usual roles – everyone is focused on recovering the park as quickly as possible, and are now working outside the park until work facilities have been restored. This post is a step towards some kind of contingency plan, and we’re all hoping The Prom will recover quickly.
This weeks writing will be around the topic of spaces. I’ve been doing reading around things like Storied Spaces, Mixed Reality and Social knowledge and want to start tying some of these together. I can’t tell you much more, because I won’t know what I want to say until I start writing!
That said, if you’d like to get a sense of how it’s evolving over the next two weeks, keep an eye on the Mendeley group I’ve created that houses the references I’ll be using.
Should give you some interesting reading in the meantime, if you’re that way inclined!
Having recently cleared my plate of most other work commitments, I can now say for the first time, accurately, that I’m a full time student. I was only ever working one or two days a week, but those extra days are already making a difference.
When thinking about how I’d like to use this time, I found myself remembering Reuben’s app a week project. As a learning exercise for mobile development, he set himself the goal of making one app a week for 6 weeks. It seemed to work really well for him, so I’m going to borrow it!
App Essay a week fortnight
I’m not making apps (yet), so I’m structuring this around discreet strands of research in my PhD. One of my goals for this year was to write more, and I feel like an essay is an independent bite-sized piece of work that I won’t feel pressured in to including in my final thesis. Which, by the way, I have no idea how to structure at the moment. So I’m hoping this exercise will provide me with a nice collection of written material to draw from once I start putting the actual thesis together.
Reasons? I’ll give you reasons!
This is why I think this will work for me:
- I work well to deadlines. My supervisors have been great a pushing me to write papers for conferences, etc, and I’ve found that setting a topic and writing on it is a good way to feel productive. Without a set topic and a deadline looming I’ve tended to either procrastinate or go off on too many unrelated tangents.
- I have too many tangents. At the moment I have about 5 different areas of research that I’ve been reading about. Most of them overlap somehow, and to start structuring my thoughts on these in to chapters seems too hard at this stage. Again, I feel that focusing on these smaller, discreet pieces will allow me to move forward a lot faster. There’s something about having “Thesis.doc” open that scares me.
Rules? I have those too!
So i’m going to set myself my boundaries to stick to:
- Essays will be started on a Monday, and must be completed by the following Friday
- They should be a minimum of 2000 words and contain completely original writing. I can’t copy and paste things from other writing I’ve already done.
- They should essentially be a review of the literature with a particular take that is relevant to my research.
- I will post the essay topic on the monday with some recommended reading for anyone that is interested.
- I may or may not publish the final essay on this blog, depending on how I feel about it. I should post at least an introductory and concluding paragraph from the writing.
So that’s it. I’m already a day behind this fortnight’s essay, so time to start planning it!
Last night I had the great privilege of presenting to the ARSyd group out of Mob Labs offices in Sydney. The beard jokes kept on rolling. Very special thanks to Rob Manson and Alex Young for organising the event and having me!
Here are the slides, or you can view them on slideshare:
This week I went to a seminar that focused on communicating research. It was a pre-requisite for entering the 3-minute thesis competition, which seems like a mini-TED for research students with a time limit. I don’t know if I’ll enter the competition (although there’s some impressive cash amounts up for grabs), but I’ll definitely be using some lessons from the seminar in my writing. The main thing I took away from it was the importance of having a story around the research, and allowing people to feel an emotional connection to it. This post is my attempt to add that story.
The story of National Parks
People love national parks – they are places families go, where summers are spent, and where kids grow up. They provide an escape from architected office buildings, armpits on crowded trains and suburban peak hour traffic. The air is fresh, and the landscape is rejuvenating.
When such a place is ravaged by fire, those that have developed a connection to it feel violated – it’s as if their house has been burgled. An uninvited stranger crashes through, sweeping away the things they feel that connection with and leaving a shell. Like being burgled, it’s not just the memory of absent things that lingers – it’s the thought that the once unquestionably secure destination is no longer so. We never feel completely at home again.
On top of this, fire is devastating for the ecology of a park. When controlled, it is a necessary part of managing the landscape. When unplanned, it can permanently damage the land and the lives of the creatures that inhabit it.
It’s important that we do all we can to manage the risks of unplanned fire.
Some rangers live in the city, and not all of them have beards.
Luckily, there are people whose job it is to do this. Parks rangers are often based in the same park for many years, and over this time they learn to recognise signs in the environment that warn them that a fire may get beyond control. They have sensors that tell them about fuel levels and soil moisture, but, like most of us, they also rely on their instinct, or their tacit knowledge.
At the same time, back in the city, there are people who don’t wear khaki shorts who play just as important a role in the park. These people keep track of ecological research about parks, plan studies to discover populations of rodents, and keep tabs on the regrowth of native scrub. They also coordinate external groups of volunteers and researchers who contribute information back to the organisation, and provide those “on the ground” with the data they need to make decisions.
Both types of park ranger contribute to keeping the ecological balance necessary for healthy parks, and healthy people. However, both are struggling under the sheer weight of data available to them. Relevant scientific studies get lost in filing cabinets, and even when they are accessible they are not easily integrated into management plans. Similarly, rich, tacit knowledge is not accessible to other staff, and is lost completely when rangers retire or move on.
So on one hand, they need help dealing with the sheer quantity of data available to them. On the other, there’s a need to capture the rich, experiential knowledge that can help bridge the gap between the numbers, the park and the people in it.
A consensus of interpretation
The one common element to all of this data, information and knowledge is location. Reports are about regions in a park, rangers visit specific points and extrapolate their assessment to broader areas, and remote sensors are scattered in the park, forming a virtual topography of data on top of the natural environment.
Given the located and situated aspect of park management, it makes sense to give rangers tools to view information through the lens of location. It makes even more sense to give them tools through which they can record, interpret and use information about these places in the places themselves.
There are bodies of research that indicate that information makes more sense to us, and is more useful, when presented in the same context in which it is to be used. Facilitating the exploration of information in the places they are about can lead to the generation of better quality understandings of this information.
Similarly, we want to allow rangers to add their own meaning on top of this raw information, and to share and evolve that with other rangers. There’s also research, and indeed entire disciplines, that focus on computer supported collaborative work and show that the shared interpretation of data leads to better outcomes.
In the cloud
What this research plans to do is allow rangers to explore and interpret data about places, through mobile technology, in those very same places. Similarly, we want to allow rangers to share their interpretations of data with other rangers. By interacting with information and each other through mobile technology, rangers will ultimately form a human filtered and rich-in-quality body of knowledge that lives “in the clouds” above parks.
By giving rangers better access to the most important knowledge about parks, and particularly knowledge around fire management, they will be better equipped to manage and prevent unplanned fires. Uninterrupted, families can continue to form memories tinged with green, native flora and fauna can continue to flourish, and rangers can continue living in the country or in the city and with full freedom of choice around facial hair.
/eom
Well, that’s my first shot at adding some kind of narrative around what I’m doing. I’m in the process of applying to a doctoral consortium, and think this will really help me add context and reason to the more academic details. Thanks Inger!
