The present technical focus of the project is on the development of facilities using the X-box and public display systems. The use of familiar technologies such as the X-box games console allows us to explore a number of important issues including the extent to which such devices can be configured or tailored to perform a dual role. Also, we hope to gain an understanding for the extent to which the roots of the device as a games console facilitate its acceptability as a technology to be placed in a domestic setting. We intend to augment the facilities provided by the X box with additional situated display technologies that may perform a more peripheral display function. In particular, we intend to utilise self contained interactive displays, such as the 'HERMES' system developed at Lancaster. By using this combination of technologies we hope to explore appropriate mechanisms for sharing applications across a variety of situated displays in a domestic setting. The initial set of requirements for the devices and situated displays envisaged as part of this project were obtained from an interactive design workshop which involved both developers and members of staff from the Croftlands charitable trust and were also based on experiences of developing and evaluating the situated office door displays which form part of the 'HERMES' system. Based on these early requirements an Xbox unit has been tailored (using both hardware and software modifications) to run the SPAM application and therefore communicate with the SPAM units currently deployed at the staff rooms of two of the Croftlands Trust residencies. To date, a single tailored Xbox device has been deployed in the home of one of the members of staff. Initial feedback from the user of the deployed Xbox was reasonably positive but he did suggest a small number of 'tweaks' to the application and commented that the reliability of the system could be ‘improved’. We have responded to these requests for improvement and a more reliable ‘version 2’ of the Xbox device was deployed in his home in July. Such feedback from users is invaluable to our work. Indeed, by deploying systems such as the Xbox in a domestic setting we are in effect exploring the potential of the device as a technology probe. Furthermore, the project therefore adds to our understanding of the process of 'co-production' or 'co-realisation' of technologies. In this way we look beyond design as an activity associated with a specific, usually initial, phase of technological development to the means by which design emerges and develops as part of the ongoing struggle to make a particular technology work for particular users in a particular context. In order to explore the potential for deploying ‘useful’ situated display technology at the residential care facility we held a design workshop in Carlisle with staff members of Croftlands Trust during June 2004. This workshop was facilitated by a visiting researcher from the University of Melbourne – Connor Graham (www.dis.unimelb.edu.au/staff/connorg/) – whose visit to the UK was jointly supported by Equator and a Melbourne Abroad Traveling Scholarship (MATS). In common with our previous design workshops, this workshop involved the exploration of a small number of scenarios in small groups containing a mix of both researchers and staff from Croftlands. A very small exert of the transcript for the workshop is available here which illustrated one of the scenarios and the whiteboard notes that were produced during our brainstorming around the given scenario. Further details of the design workshop and the work leading up to the design workshop is available here. During his extremely productive 6 weeks in the UK, Connor gave several presentations on the Digital Care project and how it related to his PhD work – an example of the presentation given by Connor in July to the HCI group at the University of Bath is available here. Connor also helped analyze and extract themes from the logs generated from the deployed messaging systems and co-author a paper ('Smart Mobs' and Technology Probes: Evaluating Texting at Work) describing our use of technology probes within the digital care project – this paper was recently presented at the 11th European Conference on Information Technology Evaluation. |