Chris Speed

The University of Edinburgh | UoE

The Internet of Cars delivered a multi-site series of exhibitions, talks, and events curated by SCAN using data derived from traffic flow analysis using automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. Six artist projects were delivered alongside the results of the EPSRC Sixth Sense Transport project, involving 5 university partners, developing a...

This paper presents an annotated portfolio of projects that seek to understand and communicate the social and societal implications of blockchains, DLTs and smart contracts. These complex technologies rely on human and technical factors to deliver cryptocurrencies, shared computation and trustless protocols but have a secondary benefit in providing...

This paper presents an annotated portfolio of projects that seek to understand and communicate the social and societal implications of blockchains, distributed ledgers and smart contracts. These complex technologies rely on human and technical factors to deliver cryptocurrencies, shared computation and trustless protocols but have a secondary benef...

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) make it technically possible for digital assets to be owned and traded, introducing the concept of scarcity in the digital realm for the first time. Resulting from this technical development, this paper asks the question, do they provide an opportunity for fundraising for galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM),...

How can digitised assets of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums be reused to unlock new value? What are the implications of viewing large-scale cultural heritage data as an economic resource, to build new products and services upon? Drawing upon valuation studies, we reflect on both the theory and practicalities of using mass-digitised herit...

‘Creative Communities’ aimed to understand and explore ways in which the resilience of rural communities and the wellbeing of individuals can be enhanced if mental health issues were expressed, shared and addressed more widely. Lived experience was placed at the core of the programme, enabling ‘voice’ and visibility around the challenges in rural c...

This paper reflects upon the growing expectation for HCI research projects to collaborate closely with partners in industry and civil society. Specifically, we suggest that this type of engagement is often prefigured around the agendas, needs and capacity of diverse research partners, which researchers must then carefully negotiate. We explore this...

Recent work within HCI and CSCW has become attentive to the politics of data and metrics in order to highlight the implications of what counts and how. In this paper, we relate these discussions to the longstanding distinctions made between value and values. We introduce literature on 'Valuation Studies' and argue for understanding the politics of...

The OxChain project is investigating the design of blockchain applications in partnership with a large and traditionally trusted institution, Oxfam. We outline some of the potential opportunities that distributed ledger technologies could offer the charity and development sector as a whole, but focus on the challenges of undertaking co-design work...

Blockchain is a disruptive technology which has significantly challenged assumptions that underpin financial institutions, and has provoked innovation strategies that have the potential to change many aspects of the digital economy. However, because of its novelty and complexity, mental models of blockchain technology are difficult to acquire. Buil...

Obtaining meaningful user consent is increasingly problematic in a world of numerous, heterogeneous digital services. Current approaches (e.g. agreeing to Terms and Conditions) are rooted in the idea of individual control despite growing evidence that users do not (or cannot) exercise such control in informed ways. We consider an alternative approa...

Technologies such as blockchains, smart contracts and programmable batteries facilitate emerging models of energy distribution, trade and consumption, and generate a considerable number of opportunities for energy markets. However, these developments complicate relationships between stakeholders, disrupting traditional notions of value, control and...

Human interaction with computers is no longer clearly bounded and so our user expectations no longer fit the pragmatics of design. We are increasingly data subjects within a complex network of lifestyle devices that sense, monitor, and interpret our daily endeavours. When the form that these devices take belies their true nature, a series of social...

This short paper recovers the term ‘imaginaries’ which is often used in the social sciences to describe a meaning system that frames individuals lived experience of an inordinately complex world. The paper goes on to reflect on the extent to which design has the capability to disrupt imaginaries through the development of products in order for peop...

This paper reports on a co-speculative interview study with charitable donors to explore the future of programmable, conditional and data-driven donations. Responding to the rapid emergence of blockchain-based and AI-supported financial technologies, we specifically examine the potential of automated, third-party 'escrows', where donations are held...

Around 2019, a group of researchers working with a large international charity, developed an innovative system for 'programmable donations'. Riding a wave of hype related to blockchain technologies, they envisaged a way to support conditional and data-driven giving. The researchers realised that they could use 'smart contracts' to create digital es...

The OxChain project is investigating the design of blockchain applications in partnership with a large and traditionally trusted institution, Oxfam. We outline some of the potential opportunities distributed ledger technologies could offer the charity and development sector as a whole, but focus on the challenges of undertaking co-design work in th...

This little book is about creating value in the Internet of Things (IoT) within the digital economy. Based on our research for the Harnessing Economic Value theme of PETRAS Cybersecurity of the Internet of Things Research Hub, we explain why it is important to understand how the IoT will transform value creation and how we can use design to mediate...

Technologies such as distributed ledgers and smart contracts are enabling the emergence of new autonomous systems, and providing enhanced systems to track the provenance of goods. A growing body of work in HCI is exploring the novel challenges of these systems, but there has been little attention paid to their impact on everyday activities. This pa...

This article offers insights into how digital methods in cultural heritage settings can help evoke and illuminate the richness of visitor engagement and interpretation, especially in relation to expressions of ownership. Drawing on the Artcasting research project, which examined how galleries can inventively evaluate visitors’ engagement with art,...

The paper explores the potential for deploying blockchain within existing organisations to support value creation and capture. Drawing from the study of a charity retail organisation, the paper finds that within incumbent business models, blockchain's potential for value creation and capture arises from enabling more efficient transactions and from...

Computational systems and objects are becoming increasingly closely integrated with our daily activities. Ubiquitous and pervasive computing first identified the emerging challenges of studying technology used on-the-move and in widely varied contexts. With IoT, previously sporadic experiences are interconnected across time and space in numerous an...

Blockchain is an emerging infrastructural technology that is proposed to fundamentally transform the ways in which people transact, trust, collaborate, organize and identify themselves. In this paper, we construct a typology of emerging blockchain applications, consider the domains in which they are applied, and identify distinguishing features of...

Design and HCI researchers are increasingly working with complex digital infrastructures, such as cryptocurrencies, distributed ledgers and smart contracts. These technologies will have a profound impact on digital systems and their audiences. However, given their emergent nature and technical complexity, involving non-specialists in the design of...

This workshop aims to develop an agenda within the CHI community to address the emergence of blockchain, or distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). As blockchains emerge as a general purpose technology, with applications well beyond cryptocurrencies, DLTs present exciting challenges and opportunities for developing new ways for people and things to...

This one-day workshop explores how playful interaction can be used to develop technologies for public spaces and create temporal experiences.

This paper explores the use of mobile technology to enable lift-share in the leisure travel domain of camping tourism. Here mobile devices can connect a user community on the move undertaking non-routine trips and reveal temporal and spatial connections suggesting lift-share opportunities. Data were derived from a questionnaire survey (n = 339) adm...

Based upon a study of how to capture data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, this paper explores the challenges for data centric design ethnography. Often purchased to perform specific tasks, IoT devices exist in a complex ecosystem. This paper describes a study that used a variety of methods to capture the interactions an IoT device engaged in...

The chapter introduces the concept of temporal ubiquity to describe smartphones’ ability to enable users to travel across real and historical times. From applications that recover past events from our social media timelines, to cultural heritage projects that send messages from the dead, the novel use of software to connect us to the past is an eme...

We are surrounded by a proliferation of connected devices performing increasingly complex data transactions. Traditional design methods tend to simplify or conceal this complexity to improve ease of use. However, the hidden nature of data is causing increasing discomfort. This paper presents BitBarista, a coffee machine designed to explore percepti...

Loyalty cards are a form of tracking and recording technology (TRT) that enables retailers to collect data about their customers' demographic and purchase behaviours. As recompense for sharing their data consumers receive 'loyalty points' which they can redeem for exclusive discounts and rewards. The design of loyalty schemes, and TRTs more general...

New digital technologies such as Blockchain and smart contracting are rapidly changing the face of value exchange, and present exciting new opportunities for designers. This one-day workshop will explore the implications of emerging and future technologies using the lens of Distributed Autonomous Organisations (DAOs). DAOs introduce the principle t...

Smartphone technology can help identify current and anticipate future patterns of behaviour and, with its social networking capabilities, allow users to imagine and organise collaborative travel opportunities, such as lift share. This has led to the development of collaborative apps designed to enable activities like lift sharing. Such apps require...

Digital technology is changing, and has changed the ways we create and consume narratives, from moving images and immersive storyworlds to digital long-form and multi-branched story experiences. At the same time, blockchain, the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, is revolutionizing the way that transactions and exchanges oc...

Things2Things was a one-year-long project of the 3TU Industrial Design programs in the Netherlands. The project brought together a community of almost 50 professional designers and design researchers to explore the role of design thinking in creativity and innovation within the field of the Internet of Things. This book has been purposely designed...

Drawing from a study of everyday home practices from a material objects’ perspective, this chapter examines the potential that a thing perspective holds for both design and anthropology. In doing so, the chapter challenges anthropocentric assumptions about the world, and opens up ways of understanding relationships among people, objects and use pra...

Mobile connectivity enables the adoption of new ways to connect with social networks which are changing how we might, and could, seek support. In the tourism domain we increasingly blend online and offline presence to engage with social networks in the spatial location, at a distance and across time. This paper explores the forms of community that...

Designers are increasingly paying attention to problematic experiences of time. From a critique of acceleration to an urge to frame present actions within more extended futures, designers have been analysing how different temporal perceptions may influence practices and how they can be influenced by design. In this paper, we argue that in order to...

Drawing from a study of everyday home practices from a material objects' perspective, this paper examines the potential that a thing ethnography holds for both design and anthropology. In doing so, the paper challenges anthropocentric assumptions about the world, and opens up ways of understanding relationships among people, objects and use practic...

Theme, Goals, background and motivation This workshop focuses on Data as Design Material for connected products and services. It brings together HCI researchers, ethnographers, industrial designers, data scientists, tool developers and others interested in Designing with Data.

Introduction In this chapter, we examine a contradiction in contemporary regeneration between a discourse of putting communities in control and creating policy instruments that disempower the poorest. Our focus is the Neighbourhood Plan, introduced as part of the Localism Act 2011, which epitomises this contradiction. The localism agenda apparently...

The growing capabilities of smartphones have opened up new opportunities for travel coordination and transport is a fertile area for app development. One stream of development is apps that enable colla-borative travel, either in the form of lift sharing or collaborative shopping, but despite growing interest from governmental agencies, there is lit...

This contribution from an interdisciplinary team of academics offers an attempt to support communities in ‘shouting a little louder’ within policy making. It models its own aspiration in reflecting the importance of bringing together different forms of expertise: in planning, interface design, engaging communities. The contribution focuses on the d...

The shift to pull economies demands that designers think about less linear value models. The designers have to realize that the value of products and services mutate and evolve throughout their life span according to the shifts within value constellations. Value constellations allow designers to anticipate and respond to shifts, identify opportunit...

This paper is an output of a two day ‘Festival Lab’ held at the Future Everything Festival, Manchester, UK, March 2015. The Festival Lab invited a team of academic researchers to develop a model of public engagement during the festival that would explore specific research questions around mobility, data awareness, and civic engagement. From this br...

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are challenging the way we perceive money. No longer are banks or governments the mediators of currencies with the power to divest or invest to dictate the flow of value within society. The invention of the blockchain, a globally stored and collaboratively written list of all transactions that have ever taken place...

Blockchain, an innovative public ledger of transactions that underpins digital currencies such as Bitcoin, has the potential to open up and offer radical alternatives to civic life, democracy and society. Yet there is currently only a small, technically savvy section of society who understand its principles. Therefore in order to work through and r...

This paper discusses the development of a smartphone app, MapLocal, which seeks to empower residents to gather spatial data about their neighbourhood. Responding to the new Neighbourhood Planning powers offered within the Localism Act, 2011, a pilot scheme was undertaken with 50 participants across two neighbourhoods in Birmingham, UK. The app allo...

Secondhand retail in the UK charity sector plays a number of important social and economic roles: charity shops are community focal points; money is generated for good causes; and goods are re-circulated that might otherwise be discarded as abject and unwanted. However, like much of the UK high street, the prosperity of charity shops is under signi...

This paper explores the potential of a pervasive user experience to inspire, provoke and support creative thinking amongst participants in an intensive ideation workshop. The pervasive experience used a iPad-based virtual narrator to guide groups of participants around a physical and digital environment. It took place towards the start of a three-d...

A data-driven life is increasingly possible, yet research and previous workshops have tended to focus on the utility of personal informatics -- especially for behaviour change -- rather than 'lived informatics' as experienced. This workshop proposes to engage participants in conversation, scenario building and conceptual design that deeply and crit...

This paper reports on the development of a smartphone app designed to give drivers and managers in a charity organisation greater visibility of transport, donation bank and shop stock in time and space. Trials of the app with samples of drivers and shop managers across three counties in the UK showed that users' understanding of vehicle activity an...

In the current Internet of Things (IoT) environment, objects are tagged with sensors without a clear understanding of people’s individual and collective patterns of behaviour. We argue that designers can create more meaningful and effective networked objects through collaborating with ethnographers and Machine Learning (ML) experts. In this paper,...

During DIS 2014 Experience Night, conference attendees experienced a thought-provoking set of interactive systems, artworks, and techno-crafts. We selected interactive works that explore the reemergence of craft in the design of interactive systems, the role of craft in democratizing design, and the role of makers in interactive technology design....

This interactive multidisciplinary one-day workshop brings together researchers and practitioners interested in exploring the ethical, economic, and material entanglements constituted by incentivisation. Points of departure will involve discussions of, on the one hand, designs projects which endeavour to explore incentivisation and, on the other ha...

Design as a tool for innovation has developed rapidly in recent years, resulting in methods and processes such as strategic design, design management, service design and design thinking. When applied within a business context Design is an important driver for innovation, through processes such as knowledge transfer and exchange, codesign and ideati...

Secondhand retail in the UK charity sector plays a number of important social and economic roles: charity shops are community focal points; money is generated for good causes; and goods are re-circulated that might otherwise be discarded as abject and unwanted. However, like much of the UK high street, the prosperity of charity shops is under signi...

Robots have a long history as a tangible platform through which designers and artists can explore human and social experiences. From Pierre Jaquet-Doz's Automatons from the Eighteenth Century, to Dunne & Raby's technological dreams of non-anthropomorphic robots that assist our lives [1], robots have been a rich form of technology that artists and d...

While a timely conceptual innovation for the digital age, the "map" proposed by Bentley et al. would benefit from strengthening through the inclusion of a non-clock-time perspective. In this way, there could be new hypotheses developed which could be applied and tested relevant to more diverse societies, cultures, and individuals.

The aim of this paper is to present an overview of two case studies, the RememberMe and RememberUs digital art installations created by the Tales of Things and Electronic Memory (TOTeM) research group, during the Future Everything Festivals 2010 and 2011. Ethnographic research methodologies were employed in both studies to interpret the impact on r...

Collection costs associated with servicing a major UK charity's donation banks and collecting unsold goods from their retail shops can account for up to 20% of the overall income gained. Bank and shop collections are commingled and are typically made on fixed days of the week irrespective of the amounts of materials waiting to be collected. Using c...

Remote sensing technology is now coming onto the market in the waste collection sector. This technology allows waste and recycling receptacles to report their fill levels at regular intervals. This reporting enables collection schedules to be optimized dynamically to meet true servicing needs in a better way and so reduce transport costs and ensure...