Jayne Wallace

Northumbria University · School of Arts and Social Sciences

This paper presents Dovetails, an intergenerational co-creative participatory design project, and explored ways of working with recipients of care through Craft methods leveraging reciprocity to support wellbeing and Citizenship. Working alongside older adults from Beamish Museum’s wellbeing community and a children’s charity, researchers supported...

Supporting one another’s self becomes challenging in contexts like dementia or death, when a person who has contributed to our growing sense of self is no longer doing this for whatever reason. There can be a dialogic void left in both directions - a desire to still feel our sense of who we are being nurtured and cocreated by and with the other per...

Since the early stages of the internet, online environments have provided new opportunities for coping with grief and interacting with the dead (Sofka, 1997; Roberts, 1999). This has led to a growing body of knowledge on Death Online (Gotved, 2014). COVID-19 has shifted these expressions from novel to the norm, particularly through the increase in...

Ethics are a system of moral principles and branch of knowledge enquiry defining what is good for individuals and society. Academic disciplines operate within publicly defined ethical parameters created to support researchers through complex dilemmas. However, paradigms in interdisciplinary research, a growing focus on emancipatory and participator...

Clair Aldington’s doctoral research is broadly about the role of making, gifting and co-creation within Restorative Justice processes. Within that, more narrowly, the research focusses on Interaction Ritual as applied to Restorative Justice (Collins, 2004; Rossner, 2013) and whether or not a gifted co-created artefact could become an object symbol...

In this paper, we present a method of Dialogical Sketching. We introduce the development of this method as a discursive aid to understanding design probe responses within participatory co-design engagements but also articulate its potential more broadly within participatory research. Situated within a research study into the potential of digital je...

This article details the development of a live design research project working with people who are bereaved, people who are living with dementia and people who are approaching end of life. The project aims to support people to continue bonds with others in anticipation of and following death. It centres on the idea of ongoingness and using art, des...

In this paper we focus on two bodies of work which used digital design and manufacturing technologies in their inception and production; one produced by an experienced digital maker (Marshall) and the other by a novice maker (Vannucci). We are proposing these sets of works as Pragmatic enticatypes (artefacts that sit between prototypes and provotyp...

Taking a research-through-design with craft sensibilities approach we present design propositions in the digital age that value the complexity and uniqueness of being human. We introduce exemplars of digital jewellery objects that offer alternative ways of connecting a person with personal anchor points, significant others and places. The pieces we...

Many participatory design methods are heavily reliant on the presence of communication skills, with approaches often focusing on verbal or written outputs. For people with communication difficulties it can often be difficult to engage with such approaches. This workshop aims to bring together researchers, designers and practitioners to explore shar...

HCI draws on a variety of traditions but recently there have been calls to consolidate contributions around the problems researchers set out to solve. However, with this comes the assumption that problems are tractable and certain, rather than constructed and framed by researchers. We take as a case study a Tumblr community of teen shoplifters who...

We describe the design of SelfReflector an internet-connected mirror that uses online facial recognition to estimate your age and play music from when it thinks you were 14 years old. The mirror was created for a specific shop (SPeX PisTOls optical boutique), within a research through design project centered on the high street as a space of vital s...

The contexts of prison and incarceration are under-explored from a HCI and Design perspective and information about actual everyday life in prison is scarcely available. Whilst some prisons have begun incorporating technology into prison life, this is still in its infancy in terms of prisoner access. This Special Interest Group will provide HCI res...

This article presents a number of perspectives on mortality in light of both Victorian mourning and memento mori jewelry and bereavement therapy and grieving. Both help to reveal valuable qualities for digital design. The article then illustrates how these qualities influenced the design of four digital lockets, examining how both Victorian and mod...

This reflective piece focuses on the practices of Scribes, a feature that was newly introduced to RTD 2015 and is envisioned to capture aspects of the highly discursive nature of this conference format. Scribing comprises drawing, writing notation, or mark making on paper to capture some essence of the discussions, dynamics, and atmosphere of the v...

Responding to challenges to better understand design research practice, its contributions to knowledge production and its value to HCI, our one-day workshop critically reflects on case examples of design research practice in interdisciplinary HCI projects. We invite position papers that offer personal perspectives on "critical incidents" in such pr...

Probes and variations of this method are seen as valuable tools in design research enabling rich insights into lived-experiences. Although they have been adopted widely, significantly less attention has been given to the environments in which probes are being introduced. This study describes the experiential qualities of using probes within liminal...

This paper argues that comics are a powerful and valuable medium for representing research through design. We review different formats for representing design including the academic paper, the photo-essay and the annotated portfolio. We argue that the comic book form can be better suited to representing various aspects of the design process includi...

This comic reveals multilayered details and insights about the design and making of Paper Street View, a suite of artefacts that allow groups of older people in care environments to navigate Google Street View using a paper map. In creating the comic we wanted to account for material thinking in design. We show that comics can be used as a dynamic...

This paper describes the challenges and lessons learned in the experience-centered design (ECD) of the Spheres of Wellbeing, a technology to promote the mental health and wellbeing of a group of women, suffering from significant mental health problems and living in a medium secure hospital unit. First, we describe how our relationship with mental h...

Over the last decade, the explosion in research and Development associated with nanoscalar materials has continued apace. In parallel with this has been the rapid rise of both sustainable materials and, as a consequence, Natural, Cellular and Responsive material systems. Many of these originate from inorganic, inorganic-organic hybrid composites an...

We describe the use of design probes to study the circumstance of living in residential care. We worked closely with a single care home in the United Kingdom with the aim of building deeper relationships with a small number of residents. We structured our visits as creative sessions for which probes were specifically designed. The sessions took pla...

Context: Practice-based design research is becoming more widely recognized in academia, including at doctoral level, yet there are arguably limited options for dissemination beyond the traditional conference format of paperbased proceedings, possibly with an exhibition or "demonstrator" component that is often non-archival. Further, the opportuniti...

To date, HCI for mental health has primarily responded to challenges in the treatment of mental illness, with a focus on therapy access and engagement. However, approaches to improving and protecting people's mental wellbeing have received less attention. Prompted by recent discussions in Western Healthcare and Psychology, we argue for a more holis...

Moving home in later life is an experience born of necessity for many older people. Yet, although a good deal of research has considered how to support "ageing in place," relatively little attention has been given to the transition of moving to a new home, or how a feeling of belonging is accomplished once there. We present findings from two studie...

Jayne Wallace reflects on key people, projects and influences that have enabled her to develop her craft and research practice as a digital jeweller. She describes a selection of projects that relate to the body’s extended agency through jewellery objects and how she attempts to reconcile bringing jewellery and digital technologies together whilst...

We consider the role of making in current HCI design practices and how it may affect the wellbeing of those who participate in these processes. Through an exploration of psychological concepts of wellbeing and their connection to making experiences, we suggest that making can facilitate and support both hedonic and eudemonic facets of wellbeing. We...

The role of empathy has come to prominence in HCI as the community increasingly engages with issues in medical, health and emotionally charged contexts. In such settings empathizing with others is crucial in understanding the experience of living with specific conditions, or in being sensitive to the concerns and emotions of potentially vulnerable...

HCI has started to explore the positive roles that technology can play in improving the lives of people facing cognitive, emotional, physical, and socioeconomic challenges. Despite this encompassing a large percentage of the population, an overarching characteristic that people facing such challenges likely share is that society considers them vuln...

We report on our on-going research in designing interactive technology for female patients in the forensic services of a U.K. hospital. These women represent a very vulnerable group due to the severity of their mental health problems, extremely challenging behaviours, and their motivational difficulties in engaging in therapeutic treatment. This ca...

TimelyPresent is a single purpose information appliance for asynchronous messaging to connect three-generation families whose members need to keep in touch across large distances and in different time zones. The touch screen devices are used in pairs situated in the homes of family members. A user at one end can create a short video clip that is re...

Projects focusing on preserving cultural heritage are most usually instigated by a researcher. Yet, the question arises 'whether such projects are beneficial for the studied communities?' This paper describes the first part of a co-reflective, design research case study exploring through design the dynamics of the disappearance of culture heritage....

Jayne Wallace, a reader in design at Northumbria University, reviews interaction design, heritage and the self. She terms heritage as a resource for interaction design that taps into local culture and the role that it can play for persons with dementia, but also what we are, in terms of heritage, ourselves. Heritage is more than the recollection or...

On Heritage aims to offer and promote a rich discussion at the intersection of art, performance, and culture that expands the boundaries of HCI while broadening our understanding of how things of the past come to matter in the present. Elisa Giaccardi, Editor

Probes have been adopted with great enthusiasm in both Design and HCI. The heterogeneity with which they have been used in practice reflects how the method has proved elusive for many. Originators and commentators of probes have discussed misinterpretations of the method, highlighting the lack of accounts that describe in detail the design of probe...

Ubiquitous technology, coupled with a surge in empirical research on people that engages people with multiple challenges in their lives, is increasingly revealing the potential for HCI to enrich the lives of vulnerable people. Designing for people with vulnerabilities requires an approach to participation that is sensitive to the risks of possible...

In the field of mental health care technologies, very limited attention has been given to the design of interventions for individuals who undergo treatment for severe mental health problems in intense care contexts. Exploring novel designs to engage vulnerable psychiatric patients in therapeutic skills practice and expanding on the potential of tec...

Writers and practitioners in dementia care have invoked personhood to offer potential for preserving the agency of people living with dementia. In this context we use personhood to explore how relationships bring agentive potential to experience-centered design through a co-creative, design-led inquiry with Gillian, a woman living with dementia, an...

Writers and practitioners in dementia care have invoked personhood to offer potential for preserving the agency of people living with dementia. In this context we use personhood to explore how relationships bring agentive potential to experience-centered design through a co-creative, design-led inquiry with Gillian, a woman living with dementia, an...

This two-day workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers, designers and practitioners who are interested in the topic of wellbeing in the field of interaction design. Wellbeing is defined as positive mental health, and not only the absence of mental illness, but also the presence of positive psychological functioning. The...

Design and digital technologies to support a sense of self and human relationships for people living with dementia are both urgently needed. We present an enquiry into design for dementia facilitated by a public art commission for an adult mental health unit in a hospital in the UK. The interactive art piece was informed by the notion of personhood...

We present an experience-based approach to designing a collaborative interactive performance, humanaquarium. Our research explores public interaction with digital technology through the practice-based inquiry of an inter-disciplinary team of interaction designers and musicians. We present a method of designing experience from within, literally situ...

We present the Lovers' box, a digital artefact designed to engage romantic couples in reflections on their relationship. By adopting perspectives from social psychology and interaction design, the work examines the role of reflection through the use of a non-traditional digital artefact that acts as a site for enduring attachments of personal emoti...

humanaquarium is a movable performance space designed to explore the dialogical relationship between artist and audience. Two musicians perform inside the cube-shaped box, collaborating with participants to co-create an aesthetic audio-visual experience. The front wall of the humanaquarium is a touch-sensitive FTIR window. MaxMSP is used to transla...

humanaquarium is a mobile performance space which draws upon the traditions of busking and street performance to engage audiences in collaborative, creative play. We describe how the conceptual and physical nature of the performance space affected the way we composed the audio/visual performance content in Phantasmagoria, an interactive art piece b...

humanaquarium is a self-contained, transportable performance environment that is used to stage technology-mediated interactive performances in public spaces. Drawing upon the creative practices of busking and street performance, humanaquarium incorporates live musicians, real-time audiovisual content generation, and frustrated total internal reflec...

We describe a new application of interactive participatory performance in interaction design. Our pragmatic strategy permits us to use performance as an investigatory tool in the exploration of user behavior. By taking a holistic view of the evaluation of the interplay between the designed artifact (the performance content) and the people who inter...

We present an alternative view of family communication that foregrounds both the emotional lives of family members and that which is of personal significance to them. Through the reflections of our participants, and our design response to these, we have used the design of digital jewellery as a window on the family as an emotional entity. In doing...

The aesthetics of human-computer interaction and interaction design are conceptualized in terms of a pragmatic account of human experience. We elaborate this account through a framework for aesthetic experience built around three themes: (1) a holistic approach wherein the person with feelings, emotions, and thoughts is the focus of design; (2) a c...

The aesthetics of human-computer interaction and interaction design are conceptualized in terms of a pragmatic account of human experience. We elaborate this account through a framework for aesthetic experience built around three themes: (1) a holistic approach wherein the person with feelings, emotions, and thoughts is the focus of design; (2) a c...

In this paper, we demonstrate how craft practice in contemporary jewellery opens up conceptions of ‘digital jewellery’ to possibilities beyond merely embedding pre-existing behaviours of digital systems in objects, which follow shallow interpretations of jewellery. We argue that a design approach that understands jewellery only in terms of location...

Ubiquitous computing technologies are defining an emerging cultural fabric that is becoming interwoven into everyday life and giving form to ‘digital culture’, through which human meaning and communication derives from the potentials of such technologies. As the pervasive and ambient computing agendas move forward, the possible augmentation of both...

Improving user experience is becoming something of a rallying call in human–computer interaction but experience is not a unitary thing. There are varieties of experiences, good and bad, and we need to characterise these varieties if we are to improve user experience. In this paper we argue that enchantment is a useful concept to facilitate closer r...

When designing interactive devices or environments the role of human experience is crucial to the depth and sensitivity of that interaction. Increasing attention is being paid within the fields of HCI and Interaction Design to the importance of human experience, how we can learn to gain an understanding of experience and how to use this to inform t...

This paper draws on practice-centred research combining craft practice and digital technology to illuminate the role of beauty in facilitating the engagement with digital complexity. In a climate where digital technology is increasingly prominent in our everyday lives, the role of beauty is seen frequently as an extravagance. As digital technologie...

The digital divide refers to the gap between technology rich and technology poor communities. The usual method of closing the divide is to make the poor richer through better design, accessibility of existing technology, and training programmes to increase technology awareness and literacy. On the Bespoke project we are exploring an alternative app...