Margot Brereton

Queensland University of Technology | QUT · School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

We offer the idea of world machines as a new archetype for systems that draw together computational powers to connect, sense and infer with a social agenda of cross-world collaboration. This archetype builds on existing socio-technical systems with global reach, to raise the profile of tools that maintain a collaborative agenda and resist a tendenc...

A prototype "messaging kettle" is described. The connected kettle aims to foster communication and engagement with an older friend or relative who lives remotely, during the routine of boiling the kettle. We describe preliminary encounters and findings from demonstrating a working prototype in morning tea gatherings of people in their 50s-late 70s...

This paper explores an emerging paradigm for HCI design research based primarily upon engagement, reciprocity and doing. Much HCI research begins with an investigatory and analytic ethnographic approach before translating to design. Design may come much later in the process and may never benefit the community that is researched. However in many set...

A carer or teacher often plays the role of proxy or spokesperson for a person with an intellectual disability or form of cognitive or sensory impairment. However, simple functioning interactive design prototypes enable people with cognitive or sensory impairments to try out the prototypes and participate in a process of design in use or design afte...

Self-authored video- where participants are in control of the creation of their own footage- is a means of creating innovative design material and including all members of a family in design activities. This paper describes our adaptation to this process called Self Authored Video Interviews (SAVIs) that we created and prototyped to better understa...

Nature connection fosters children's healthy development, and long-term sustainable behaviours. Most research into children-nature connection has focused on positive experiences. However, theories of constructive hope suggest that as well as imbuing a love of nature we should also help children understand environmental challenges. Computational thi...

A growing number of HCI researchers investigate how technologies can be designed to support people with dementia. In this article, we are particularly interested in technologies that might enhance relationships between a person living with dementia and their carer. Based on a thematic analysis of posts from an online community, we investigate the c...

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) such as the Internet and mobile devices and applications hold much promise for supporting people with intellectual disabilities to actualize their aspirations and needs (e.g., by facilitating their access to information, skills learning, community participation and inclusion). However, there is limi...

Nature connections in early childhood are being lost due to increasingly urban and managed lives. Yet, emerging research is signalling the usefulness of digital technologies in reconnecting children with the natural world. This review scopes the last ten years of research reporting child-nature-technology interactions to identify: (1) methods, (2)...

This paper presents nature fictions, a co-design approach that seeks to highlight relations between people and nonhuman stakeholders in the process of imagining sustainable futures. The work was situated in gardens, to explore nature relations in gardener’s immediate surroundings and to imagine ways of combating the adverse effects human activities...

The application of Artifcial Intelligence (AI) across a wide range of domains comes with both high expectations of its benefts and dire predictions of misuse. While AI systems have largely been driven by a technology-centered design approach, the potential societal conse- quences of AI have mobilized both HCI and AI researchers towards researching...

Understanding and relating with nature is increasingly important in design as we aim to address the risks posed by anthropogenic climate change. Design methods are often human-centered and provide us with opportunities to reshape existing methods to foreground nature. Inspired by phenology, the study of cyclic biological events, this paper presents...

Purpose This study explored the current and desired use of web-search, particularly for health information, by adults with intellectual disability. Design/methodology/approach The authors surveyed 39 participants who were in supported employment or attending day centers in Australia. The survey, delivered through structured interviews, increased p...

Background Young people with learning disabilities use many digital technologies to undertake meaningful and social activities in their everyday lives. Understanding these digital activities is essential for supporting their digital participation. Including them in exploring their digital activities can be challenging with conventional qualitative...

We propose a new research framework by which the nascent discipline of human-AI teaming can be explored within experimental environments in preparation for transferal to real-world contexts. We examine the existing literature and unanswered research questions through the lens of an Agile approach to construct our proposed framework. Our framework a...

Namibia, a southern African country with an Ubuntu culture that emphasizes interrelations, generally displays a low reading culture. In this study, we explored a social approach to reading to engage Namibian primary learners. Inspired by promising reading approaches, such as shared group reading enhanced by embodied actions, we created Spin Da Bott...

People with intellectual disability access innovative technologies in disability community centres in Australia, under the guidance of support workers. This paper investigates the perspectives of 15 support workers and 5 managers across four community centres on the introduction and use of technology like tablets, video games, 3D printing, virtual...

Disaster victim identification (DVI) entails a protracted process of evidence collection and data matching to reconcile physical remains with victim identity. Technology is critical to DVI by enabling the linkage of physical evidence to information. However, labelling physical remains and collecting data at the scene are dominated by low-technology...

We present a long-term study of use of the Messaging Kettle, an Internet of Things (IOT) research prototype that augments an everyday kettle with both sensing and messaging capability and a beautiful light display in order to investigate connecting geographically distant loved ones to their family through the routine of boiling the kettle. Connecti...

Disaster victim identification (DVI) entails a protracted process of evidence collection and data matching to reconcile physical remains with victim identity. Technology is critical to DVI by enabling the linkage of physical evidence to information. However, labelling physical remains and collecting data at the scene are dominated by low-technology...

Ability-based design is a useful framework that centralizes the abilities (all that users can do) of people with disabilities in approaching the design of assistive technologies. However, although this framework aspires to support designing with people with all kinds of disabilities, it is mainly effective in supporting those whose abilities can be...

Genomic research emerges from collaborative work within and across different scientific disciplines. A diverse range of visualisation techniques has been employed to aid this research, yet relatively little is known as to how these techniques facilitate collaboration. We conducted a case study of collaborative research within a biomedical institute...

Wildlife calls are the best witnesses to the health of ecosystems, if only we know how to listen to them. Efforts to understand and inform restoration of healthy ecosystems with environmental audio recordings languish from insufficient tools to learn and identify sounds in recordings. To address this problem, we designed and playtested the Bristle...

This paper investigates how making activities and participation in makerspaces supports the wellbeing and empowerment of women, particularly in making domains that are typically male-dominated. We spent six months undertaking participant observations in a women-only makerspace that runs workshops aimed at teaching women skills in using power tools...

Acoustic sensing has been hailed as a game-changer for detecting furtive wildlife, but uptake has been constrained by the laborious process of reviewing resultant torrents of audio data. To inform the design of interactive interfaces for reviewing audio recordings, we explored how people interact with aural and visual media about birds. We observed...

Ecoacoustics draws together computer scientists and ecologists to achieve an understanding of ecosystems and wildlife using acoustic recordings of the environment. Computer scientists are challenged to manage increasingly large datasets while developing analytic and visualisation tools. Ecologists struggle to find and use tools that answer highly h...

Young adults with intellectual disability are keen users of social media. However, there is little understanding about how their skills and participation in social media might be leveraged to support further skills development. Employing a participatory approach through workshops with eleven participants and interviews with eight parents, we invest...

Online peer-to-peer car sharing services are increasingly being used for enabling people to share cars between them. However, our body of knowledge about peer-to-peer car sharing is still limited in terms of understanding actual use and which opportunities and challenges present for those who use them. In this paper, we investigate peer-to-peer car...

An increasing variety of technologies are being developed to support conservation of endangered wildlife; however, comparatively little attention has been devoted to their design. We undertook three years of ethnographic fieldwork and design research with the recovery team of an endangered Australian bird (the Eastern bristlebird) to explore the te...

Stories on the home materialize in many different ways. Simple design scenarios of more efficient smart homes exist alongside more articulated design fictions narrating complex domestic futures. IoT toolkits can be used in co-design to narrate design stories together with people. However, there is little attention on the stories captured in the co-...

As recent scholars have noted, there is little discourse amongst the HCI, interaction design, and UX communities on topics of AI and their relationship to design practice, a gap this workshop aims to address. Bringing together practitioners and researchers from a variety of backgrounds, this workshop sets out three goals: (1) identify case studies...

People with cognitive or sensory impairments (CSI) often have abilities, needs and desires that are not catered for by conventional service provision. This presents opportunities for volunteer makers to help co-create alternative futures with them. We describe a codesign process with people with CSI, their caregivers and family members, design rese...

The increasing loss of species globally calls for effective monitoring tools and strategies to inform conservation action. The dominant approach to citizens engagement has been smart phone and platform-centric, tasking crowds to collect and analyze data. However, many critically endangered species inhabit remote areas, characterized by sparsely pop...

We introduce the IoT Un-Kit Experience, a co-design approach that engages people in exploring, designing and generating personally meaningful IoT applications and that also serves as a means to explore IoT kit design through in-home workshops. Un-Kit represents a seemingly uncompleted set of sensors, actuators and media elements that have a deconte...

This paper presents co-design fiction as an approach to engaging users in imagining, envisioning and speculating not just on future technology but future life through co-created fictional works. Design fiction in research is often created or written by researchers. There is relatively little critical discussion of how to co-create design fictions w...

Existing co-design methods support verbal children on the autism spectrum in the design process, while their minimally-verbal peers are overlooked. We describe Co-Design Beyond Words (CDBW), an approach which merges existing co-design methods with practice-based methods from Speech and Language Therapy which are child-led and interests-based. These...

Existing methods for researching and designing to support relationships between parents and their adult children tend to lead to designs that respect the differences between them. We conducted 14 Position Exchange Workshops with parents and their adult children, where the child has left home in recent years, aiming to explicate and confront their p...

This case study presents "TechShops", a collaborative workshop-based approach to learning about technologies with Young Adults with Intellectual Disability (YAID) in exploratory design research. The "TechShops" approach emerged because we found it difficult to engage YAID in traditional contextual interviews. Hence, we offered a series of "TechShop...

This paper challenges the position that design is a future oriented discipline, and rather turns an eye to the past as potential material for re-design. We claim that what we call 'the past' is far from static, monolithic, immutable, and is rather subjective, fluid, and constantly renegotiated. People constantly engage in re-designing the past by r...

Students on the autism spectrum have unique learning needs which teachers may find challenging to adequately support. This can be an ongoing concern for teachers in rural and remote communities due to geographical isolation and a lack of professional learning opportunities. To meet the learning needs of students on the spectrum in these regions, te...

This study explores how to move towards designing technologies to enrich the parent-adult child relationship after adult children leave home. This time is a turning point for adult children as they establish an independent life, while it marks a change in responsibilities and freedoms enjoyed by parents. We conducted interviews with 7 parents and 6...

This paper ¹ presents lessons learnt from the first stage of participatory and iterative design of an application to support people with intellectual disability to use public transport in a large city. We first present an initial prototype inspired by existing literature, available data and accessibility guidelines. We explored this initial prototy...

Acoustic sensors offer a promising new tool to detect furtive animals; however, sifting through years of audio data is fraught with challenges. Developing automatic detection software still requires a large dataset of calls that have been accurately annotated by experts. Few studies have explored how people identify species by vocalisations in the...

Current surgical procedures need to be properly understood before designing robotic platforms for surgery, so that the strengths of robotic systems can cover and enhance the capabilities of the surgeon, which will create better patient outcomes. The aim of our research is to explore the potential of robotic assistance in arthroscopic knee surgery,...

People with intellectual disability are keen users of information technology, but the need for spelling and typing skills often presents a barrier to information and media search and access. The paper presents a study to understand how people with intellectual disabilities can use Voice Activated Interfaces (VAIs) to access information and assist i...

Audio recordings are playing an ever more important role in environmental conservation, however as many of these recordings can be thousands of hours long it becomes impossible for a human to listen to them. There already exist several methods of visualising this long-duration data, and each of these methods has advantages and disadvantages that ma...

Young Adults with Intellectual Disability (YAID) are interested in participating in social media as it offers opportunities for their social participation and inclusion. However, the literature remains incomplete on the nature of participation across popular social media sites by YAID, and how different social media sites fulfil their participation...

Despite mounting evidence that standardised tests and diagnoses are often not appropriate to recruit and describe participants with intellectual disability while acknowledging their diversity, designers have few tools to describe their participants when reporting in academic literature. More importantly, most clinical language about intellectual di...

The Talking Book is an audio technology for sharing knowledge about health and agriculture among oral cultures in rural settings. As a technology, without a display or mouse; navigation is through audio instructions and buttons labelled with icons. This paper presents the iterative Participatory Design (PD) approach employed in redesigning the icon...

Literacy and power are closely entwined, and not all literacy practices are equally supported and recognised within dominant discourses and political structures. Technology design offers new possibilities for supporting culturally-diverse literacy practices, including the preservation and maintenance of endangered languages. While literacy is an in...

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...

Digital technologies to support children on the autism spectrum often offer predefined content for modelling, communicating and training. However, children may not relate to the content, and it may not match their own personal interests and motivations. This paper investigates the use of MyWord, an interest-based, child-led technology, as an explor...

We report on a participatory design project that explored the use of child-created Personas to enable child designers to empathize with other children thereby contributing multiple divergent perspectives. The ongoing project aims to promote reading and creative writing skills among young children in Namibia. For decades libraries worldwide have bee...