design – Tzu Hsu Chu

Intellectual Production #1 – Users, Uses and Usability

Formulate a conception of usability and what is missing from the conception from an educational perspective — what is educational usability?

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with the iterative design, evaluation, and implementation of interactions between humans and technological interfaces as a system.

The principals of usability are guidelines that help measure the quality of human-computer interactions, taking into consideration of interface functionality, efficiency and effectiveness depending on user’s needs, contexts and level of satisfaction (Issa & Isaias, 2015, p. 30)

From an educational perspective, I believe that context and user’s needs should be prioritized when it comes to evaluating the educational usability of educational technologies and resources within a learning context. Ideally, this would be implemented as a system, such that the interfaces can assist the user’s with their learning process, and can be adapted to fit the user’s ever-changing needs. This means necessarily having interfaces that are accessible to fit the user’s needs physically, cognitively, culturally, and digitally to provide support that is contextualized.

Based on Woolgar’s paper, identify and discuss 2 examples of “usability gone wrong”.

In Woolgar’s paper (1990), he seemed to be concerned about usability testing within the “right context” of both the user and the environment.

Having chosen employees within the company as test subjects (p. 81) , it is unclear whether or not their behaviors will reflect that of what is expected by their target users. Even with the provided manuals, it is uncertain that the instructions are “sufficiently clear” to target users, such that the errors made in the usability tests could be misattributed to other factors (p.82). Lastly, due to the simulated environment, the test subjects even ironicized their attempts of creating an “objective test” , making it challenging to discern whether the test subjects behave in a way “natural” to target users at all (p. 86).

Lacking concrete definition of the machine and user personas, and simulation of “objective tests of natural user behavior” overall undermines the robustness and reliability of the usability test.

Discuss the differences seen in the two excerpts of “usability”

…the usability evaluation stage is an effective method by which a software development team can establish the positive and negative aspects of its prototype releases, and make the required changes before the system is delivered to the target users"  (Issa & Isaias, 2015, p. 29).

“…the design and production of a new entity… amounts to a process of configuring its user, where 'configuring' includes defining the identity of putative users, and setting constraints upon their likely future actions” (Woolgar, 1990).

Based on the two excerpts, it seems like both of them are converging on the idea of iterative and interactive systems to adjust and create better experiences for users when they utilize the interface.

The main difference seems to be that Issa and Isaias’s approach is more from “after-the-fact” feedback, such that improvement is based on the reactions and responses of users. On the other hand, Woolgar seems to make “before-the-fact” assumptions of the users to see whether the hypotheses are confirmed or not — hence “configuring” its users.

While both approaches create recursive feedback loops to push development of the interface and are initially “human-driven” in design, it makes me wonder — how much of our interactions with technology are directed by human agency, and how much of our interactions are shaped more by the affordances of our technology?

References

Issa, T., & Isaias, P. (2015). Usability and human computer interaction (HCI) In Sustainable Design (pp. 19-35). Springer.

Woolgar, S. (1990). Configuring the user: The case of usability trials. The Sociological Review, 38(1, Suppl.), S58-S99.

Final Project- MySupport App (Helena and Sophy)

Our MySupport App is a centralized communication platform for support workers that assist students in special education.

Check out our website here: MySupport Website

Final Project Proposal – “MySupport” Database Web-Platform (Helena and Sophy)

Project Overview: MySupport

Our goal is to offer a digital centralized health management platform for special education students. Oftentimes, special education students have a large support network that can include a multitude of personal support workers (PSW) and individuals. For example, special education students can have school teachers, external tutors, speech therapists, physical therapists, and more depending on their needs.

Through our experiences working the public health system (Helena) and working with youths on the autism spectrum (Sophy), we realized there lacked an accessible and centralized platform for parents and PSWs to communicate and collaborate with each other.

Our platform serves to create a centralized space where all the support workers can input data, information, and clinical notes about the child’s progress for the parents and all the other PSWs to access.

Challenges MySupport Tackles

- Parents are overburdened with administrative tasks
  Students with special needs or extra support often need a large and expansive support network. Oftentimes, communication between PSWs is limited and parents need to devote a lot of time and energy to reiterating, organizing, and archiving information about their special needs child. Parents struggle with updating new PSWs and they are usually left with the task of ensuring that new PSW are given the information needed to appropriately support their child. Parents, who require more support to begin with, then are tasked with administrative duties that take time away from their ability to better care for their child and family.

- Information is not centralized between PSWs
  Currently, information about special education students is not centralized in one place. The challenges this presents is that, they don’t have access to the information and progress that is being made by other PSWs that could better inform their practice and give the student the best support possible. An example being, that a student’s teacher could better help the student in the classroom if they are aware of the progress being made with the tutors or the speech therapist.Oftentimes, there can be a huge turnover rate of certain PSWs members on the team (e.g. tutors, educational assistants, etc.) such that it takes extra time and effort onboarding someone new. Having a centralized communication platform with information of the child available can streamline the process, and hopefully help with building rapport quickly between the child and new team members. An example being that with the profile and additional information available on the platform, the new member can have a better idea of how the child is motivated, their preferred ways of communication, and any additional behavior that PSWs should know such that they can build a connection to support their needs.

- There is a limited ability to extrapolate data
  The disconnection between all the progress being made by each support worker also means there is no easy way to collectively track the child’s progress and attain real ent and important data. Oftentimes, there is no way for the parents or the PWS to collectively assess the child’s behavior and recognize patterns or changes. In addition, having context specific records of behavior patterns that pop up can also help the team understand what needs to be done to provide the right support.

MySupport Solutions

MySupport seeks to make the lives of parents and families easier by removing the burden of tracking and organizing feedback and progress between PSWs. Parents, especially in blended or divorced families where guardians are not always together to support the child may benefit from centralized communication. Further, with children that require a high level of support, extended family like grandparents might also be involved. MySupport allows all relevant parties caring for the child to stay updated and aware of their development. Effectively, the platform streamlines communication across all stakeholders and removes the possibility that information will be forgotten, lost, or missed.

Demographic and Target Audience

Guardians of Special Education Children
Parents of special education children could use this platform as a means of centralizing communication and communicating with all PSW.

PSWs Supporting Special Education Children
The personal support workers who are working to support special needs children in all aspects of their life would benefit from a centralized platform that allows for progress management.

How Does it Work?

All personal support workers would be given access to the child’s profile and each PSW worker would have a respective section where they would be able to upload documents, add updates, and keep track of the child’s progress. Over the period in which they are supporting the child, each PSW would also have access to the other PSWs sections to be able to see their updates as well. Parents would be able to control who has access to each section, for example a parent might not feel comfortable with a tutor seeing the physical therapists updates, so the tutor would only have access to the school teachers updates. The control of visibility would be determined by the parents and the respective PSW. However, each PSW would have a dashboard where all the updates from other PSW would be centralized and organized so that they could stay in the loop with the students’ progress through written documentation.

Further, our platform would include integrated survey and questionnaire methods that allow parents and PSW to keep track of progress being made using assessment methods that could then be extrapolated to find patterns and helpful data.

Platform Outcomes

The centralized platform would mean that all the information and required documents would be added to the platform by individuals. Each individual would need to have a place to store their respective materials as well as one place where all the updates could be easily displayed, preferably in a chronological order. Further, this dashboard would act as a database that allows parents and PSW to search for information if they need to reference anything.

Technical Components

We intend on deploying our product ona cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The benefit of using a CRM platform in a healthcare management setting, is that it includes several automation and integration features that would make catering our product to several PSWs more inclusive. For example, being able to integrate Google Classroom schedules as well as an Outlook calendar into a centralized calendar system ensures that all important dates are automatically populated. Further, contact management and pipeline management are needed to help track and manage progress and internal development.

Salesforce would be an ideal platform, as it is expansive, versatile, and scalable depending on the team’s needs, and the cloud-based portal would make the platform accessible. However, a limitation to using this platform is that the service is not free for small business or individual users. Meaning, it is more cost effective for the development of our prototype to look elsewhere and find a product that is more financially accessible in the time being.

Similar CRM technologies include Hubspot, Zoho, Freshsales, Insightly, etc.

For the demonstration of our tool, we plan to use Hubspot as it is more user-friendly on smaller scales and has more affordable plans. In the Free CRM Plan, the automation function is limited, and requires upgrade and payment. It can also be easily integrated with other external applications for file storage, spreadsheets, emails, databases, etc.

Limitations

Our main limitation is to ensure that the healthcare management system must comply with HIPPA health regulations and privacy concerns.

Intellectual Production #1 – Media Ecology

Defining “Media Ecology”

In Lum’s introduction to media ecology (2000), he states “media ecology should be viewed as a field of study that is ever-evolving”, as can be seen in the back and forth between scholars. He attempts to position media ecology as an “intellectual tradition and a theoretical perspective”. However, to define media ecology as such is to be limited to passive perception and reception. To “wake up from our environmentally-induced stupor” (de Castell et al., 2014) we need to not just unilaterally, but reciprocally and actively engage with the environment around us. To find ourselves embodied and as embodiment, and also embedded into the environment, perhaps to an extent such that when we reach out to embrace the world, we can also feel the imprint of the “fleshiness” of the world around us.

Form AND aFFORDANCES

Nystrom’s Generalizations of Form and Biases (Lum, 2000)

Nystrom’s generalizations of forms and their “biases” really intrigued me, though I argue “affordances” seems more fitting, as it has a more positive connotation of what it has to “offer”.

I make this distinction, as “affordances” looks for the “potential” rather than the “limitations”, and I think that is a core essential part of “media ecology”. The “potential” for media to have impact to “create the environment or symbolic and cognitive structure in which people construct the world they know and understand, as well as its social, economic, political and cultural consequences” (Lum, 2000, p.2)

Selbstbildung – mediation bewteen organism and environment

To see “potential” is to harness the human agency that we have in making meaning of the world around us in the ways that we are situated in, as Geddes argues “no living organism can be understood except in the terms of the total environment in which it functioned” (Strate & Lum, 2000, p. 68).

However, the boundaries can seem quite blurry, where does an organism end and the environment begin? Just as the physical form of media is as important as the symbolic form it conveys, and that “the content of a medium is another medium” to the extent of “understanding media as environment and environment as media”, there seems to be systems within systems that are interrelated, connected, and can be two things either/or and both at once. Like “building” in the nominal sense contributing to part of the city landscape as container, provides a space or activities as an interface, and engaging with the space through social practice as a way to create meaning (de Castell et al., 2014). What is built simultaneously builds new substance that feeds into itself, and continues to be used to create new substance. The self-recursion of constant mediation between organism and environment as “selbstbildung” is what I believe allows one to feel embodied and embedded with and within the environment in which it relates to the self.

Meaning-Making through Learning to Play

Going back to Lum’s “ever-evolving field” of media ecology, and the concepts of affordances and selbstbildung, I believe it is necessary to approach it from a production pedagogy and “attend to verbs” — by taking action to disrupt the inertia of the environment to “incite critical engagement and thought, unseating our concepts and disorienting our percepts” as McLuhan puts it (de Castell et al., 2014). Mumford argues what makes human species unique is not tools, industry or labor, rather, language, art and play. Therefore, echoing the notion of de Castell et al. (2014, p. 90), I would like to add the element of “play” as the foundation of “learning” extending to the intentional act of “designing” as the process of meaning-making.

Play disrupts the current equilibrium to question what is known, and provides momentum to give rise to creation. To create and “engage in building” in a controlled, perhaps methodological way is to learn how to “mediate interconnectively between and among agents both human and not” such that “education is a practice of building“. To build sustainably is to create a “system that produces its own future capacity”, and reiterates the “active, situated, knowledgeable and skillfully productive” act of education to create an “ecology that demands the inhabitants to learn themselves, how to maintain it” such that it reaches equilibrium until it is disrupted again and again, over and over, with its every iteration and evolution. To continue this natural recursion is to allow the world to affect and envelope us in the ways that it does, and to entwine ourselves into the curves of the landscape, to fully feel its embrace and to embrace it back with just as muchness, unequivocally.

References

Task 7: Mode Bending

For this assignment, I have created a soundscape, which seems to be a deviation from “what is in my bag” but I wanted to approach it in a somewhat more “abstract” way , so… hear me out (hehe).

Before continuing reading, please take a listen and see if you can piece together the “narrative” and what the soundscape is about!

This soundscape was created from found sounds that I pieced together to form a more cohesive “narrative” of my commute to work — taking the bus, transferring via Skytrain and walking to school and unlocking the door to my office.

A soundscape can be a combination of sound that forms or emerges from an immersive environment, including sounds from nature, natural elements, and sounds created by humans. It can also include the listener’s perception of sound of “how the environment is understood by those living within it” (Truax, 2001).

Most of the sounds are of the (man-made) environment; the alarm of the doors closing, the beeping at the entrance gates, the movement of the trains.

Another big majority of the sounds are made by people; incoherent conversations on the phone, squeals from children, my own humming.

There are also some sounds that I make as I take out and use the things I have in my bag; unzipping my bag to take out my wallet, my headphones booting up, fumbling for my keys.

Designs of Meaning

Immediately, I introduce the ‘design” of the soundscape — a commute on public transportation. Now knowing the context of this immersive experience, one can assemble the “order of discourse” and the conventions that come with using public transportation, which can be culturally dependent.

This can be inferred through the alarm that sound as the doors are about to close on the bus, a mumbled “sorry” as people try to squeeze onboard, and the beeping of the fare card.

It is further reinforced by the announcements on the train. One can know a lot about the people, culture and history through the languages spoken over the announcement system. In Vancouver, the Skytrain announcements are in English only. In Taipei, the MRT announcements are in Mandarin, English, Taiwanese and Hakka. On my recent trip to San Francisco, the MUNI announcements included English, Spanish, Cantonese and Tagalog, which I found really interesting.

I am unsure where the “designing” and “redesigning” processes take part in this entire experience… I hope that through engaging in the New London Group paper and re-contextualization of What’s In My Bag Task, the process is on its way!

On Changing Public and Private Lives

I wanted to do a soundscape of public transit, as I believe it is a very embodied way of experiencing the socio-cultural-anthropological landscape of an environment. One can catch a glimpse of an individual’s private life in this public space, which I find very fascinating

If each individual is considered a “vessel” (or “bag” in this case), then the subcultural differences –gender, ethnicity, generation, sexual orientation, etc. — can be considered the “contents” that they carry with them, as they traverse through the multiple lifeworlds they are members of, in which their identities are in complex relation to each other.

This ties into the necessity of having skills to navigate through the cultural and linguistically diverse civic pluralism that resulted along with the shift of global geopolitics, especially when it comes to regional, ethnic, class-based dialects, cross-cultural discourses and code-switching amongst them (The New London Group, 1996)

The concept of civic pluralism mentioned in the paper really resonated with me, especially seeing that in the context of public transit.

Civic pluralism changes the nature of civic spaces, and with the changed meaning of civic spaces, everything changes, from the broad content of public rights and responsibilities to institutional and curricular details of literacy pedagogy.

Public transit in some ways depicts civic pluralism on a smaller scale, and it is apparent how diverse and divergent the boundaries between public and private are. It also blurs the boundaries between the multiple lifeworld each individuals carry along with them on their journey, which creates more autonomy and space for them to move more transiently between them.

References

Soundscape (n.d.) Wikipedia. Retrieved July 6, 2022 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundscape

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. (Links to an external site.) Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.

Truax, Barry (2001). Acoustic Communication. Ablex Publishing Corporation. pp. 11. ISBN 9781567505375.