The primary goal of this project is to create and explore the use of unobtrusive technologies that will enhance community care in a housing project in the north of England. The work poses large ethical and pragmatic questions - questions that IT developers, who are so often technology led, rarely consider.
The project employs ethnographic techniques in order to examine the social aspects of practical reasoning and action that take place in the housing project. Over the last decade, a branch of ethnomethodology that deals with the workplace has been employed increasingly in the design of IT systems, and one of its key features is the study of temporal rhythms. Once you have grasped the cyclic nature of an organisation, you understand not only what makes it tick, but where many of its vulnerabilities lie. Now, this is not news to many carers, whose job consists largely of upholding daily routines. And that is very much the case at the housing project, which is all about negotiating routines as a precursor to negotiating independent life. Therefore our research here didn't need to uncover information so much as establish a creative dialogue. To initiate dialogue with the carers, we have adapted an innovative method of inquiry called Cultural Probes, which was pioneered by our partners at the Royal College of Art. Probes take the form of disposable cameras, dictaphones, blank postcards and other media which may act to 'inspire' both the creator and recipient, and to minimise control (conscious or unconscious) over the ensuing dialogue by either party.Following our ethnographic studies and using the feedback from a small number of design workshops, we have developed an SMS Public Display application which has been running in both staff offices of the housing project since October 2002, and has proved robust and popular. The system enhances the coordination of the facilities by allowing staff and residents to send text messages from elsewhere, which then appear on a display. It is a simple solution to three nagging problems: phones which are often engaged, residents who dislike talking on the phone, and the scattering of ephemeral information through diverse media such as noticeboards, diaries, answerphones and pagers. By tailoring dependable technologies, we have built a novel yet utterly reliable communications tool. And we plan to further refine the system, through further discussion with the staff, in order to make it more flexible and more socially sensitive - for example, by enabling staff to hide text when a resident enters the staff office. |
