
Miriam SturdeeLancaster University | LU · School of Computing and Communications
Miriam Sturdee
PhD Computer Science
About
105
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
January 2019 - January 2022
September 2008 - June 2010
October 2013 - February 2017
Publications
Publications (105)
Visual data is an integral part of qualitative research, yet it is not always clear to researchers how to use or interpret it once gathered. Existing methods for qualitative data analysis largely rely on textual approaches such as thematic analysis, or grounded theory. Open coding is a term that is frequently used to describe a analysis that follow...
Why are icons important? Part of the joy of icons is their simplicity and their ability to convey meaning with great economy of line. Not only this but well thought out, simple icons can provide a means of communication without words. This chapter will guide you through the process of developing your visual practice and creating a library of go-to...
Mastering visual storytelling is a valuable skill. There are many ways to tell a story with pictures—or, in this case, sketches! You’ll hear this described in many ways: storyboard, comic, vignette, illustrated scenario, sketchnote, and so forth. In this chapter, we describe the basic process of telling a story with images as a ‘visual narrative’ b...
It is widely accepted in human-computer interaction (HCI) that usability lies in our interaction with a product, service, and environment, measured by observing performance, satisfaction, and acceptability. To this end, there is an overlap between usability and accessibility. Accessibility designates that digital products, services, and environment...
How can we ask others to sketch for us, what might we gain from this, and how can we analyse their sketched imagery? This chapter directly follows on from Chapter 11 and covers what information or resources to provide to people, best practices and ideas for gathering sketches, and other ways of working with sketching and people. We also provide adv...
Although we obviously advocate communicating visually with sketches, it is rare that a complex concept or page of multiple sketches can be fully described with the drawn line alone. If you are going to use your sketches as a form of communication or use them in your writing and research or studies, then it helps to title, annotate, and direct the v...
The world of meetings and lectures was turned on its head during the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns by various world governments. Rather than nipping along to your colleague’s office to ask a quick question, chat functions have become the norm, with organisations using digital suites to connect people. Online meetings spre...
Digital sketching still feels relatively new to many people although the technology has come on leaps and bounds in the past 15 years. Now, you might as well see someone taking out a tablet to sketch on as a piece of paper or sketchbook. Many artists made the leap as digital sharing became commonplace, and sketching directly into digital removed th...
We are both researchers, who not only specialise in teaching people how to sketch across human-computer interaction (HCI), UX, and computer science contexts but also use sketching in our own research. By exploring some of the work we have done, and places we have used our skills, hopefully, you can see the breadth of application for sketching both...
By now you will be familiar with the ease with which we can create, ideate, iterate, and explore any number of topics and thoughts using the power of the pen and pencil. You’ve got a good grasp of lines, objects, people, and storytelling with visual narrative. So naturally now is the time to start drawing things that do not exist. When we apply ske...
In geometry, a line is defined as one dimensional with undefined thickness (weight) or length. A line can overlap, run parallel to itself, and with a dash of experimentation, it can form shapes that are sometimes abstract—although most of the time, they represent something the sketcher has experienced, felt, or wished for. For those wishing to sket...
Although you have now finished the book, your journey will continue. We hope that you have found your feet, sketched them, and are ready to put your skills to good use in your work and for fun. The final chapter looks at resources, personal style, continued practice via observational sketching, and inspiration. We hope you find yours! We encourage...
Whereas the introduction describes our history and current stance on sketching, this chapter explores our future and what the sketch and sketching practice might become. How are computers, AI, and robotics changing the face of image creation, and what areas might come to the fore in the near or far future? We provide a position piece and speculativ...
Sometimes when we ask others to draw, we get asked “Are stick people ok? I can’t draw…” but sketching a stick person IS perfectly acceptable and can be a great precursor to sketching other types of people. If you add legs, arms, and a head, what you have created will be seen as a person, regardless if it is a blob. Children’s sketches are wonderful...
Visual methods have become increasingly vital in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research, particularly as we analyze and interpret the complex visual data that emerges from various interaction modalities. However, the methodologies for analyzing this visual data remain underdeveloped compared to textual data analysis. This workshop seeks to unite...
This paper focuses on interaction across and between the physical/digital divide. We use blending theory to design for these situations, otherwise known as conceptual integration. Initially, this paper offers a discussion of the literature around blends. From this literature, we applied Benyon’s (Benyon, 2014) proposition of conceptual integration...
When thinking of arts in HCI, one might be tempted to keep one’s eyes focused on prominent realms such as sketching for UX Design and design probes from participants. A closer look shows that practices go beyond this, involving a variety of arts-based expressions by researchers, the researched and third parties, e.g. graphic facilitators. Inspired...
Student employability is a key goal of a computer science undergraduate education. A soft skills gap has previously been reported between employer requirements and the skills graduates offer, suggesting that educators are inadequately preparing students for their future careers. It is important to identify the links between educators and the materi...
Security vulnerabilities are present in many software systems, putting those who entrust software with their data in harm's way. Many vulnerabilities are avoidable since they are not new and are well-described. Despite this awareness, they remain widespread. One hypothesis for their persistence is that they represent software blindspots, problems t...
Software engineering skills are broad and varied, encompassing not only technical abilities, but cognitive and social dimensions as well. Previous research establishes soft skills as being central for software engineering, e.g., teamwork, communication, and problem solving, but the relationship between these skills and how higher education prepares...
Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPG) allow the player to immerse themselves in a world where anything can happen – within the rules. You can become someone new, fight demons, play out exciting and speculative storylines, all with the help of your party. This ability to place yourself in the life of another person (or ethereal being) resonates with p...
Software development is a complex process requiring aspects of social, cognitive, and technical skills. Software engineers face high levels of uncertainty and risk during functional and security decision making. This preregistered study investigates behavioural measures of cognitive reflection, risk aversion, and optimism bias among professional fr...
We apply a social and cognitive psychological approach to better understand software developers’ perceptions of secure software development. Drawing upon psychological theories of social identity and cognitive processing, we illustrate how software developers’ self-defined social identities affect their approaches to development. We also point to b...
The standard definition for “physicalizations” is “a physical artifact whose geometry or material properties encode data” [ 47 ]. While this working definition provides the fundamental groundwork for conceptualizing physicalization, in practice many physicalization systems go beyond the scope of this definition as they consist of distributed physic...
The technologies we use in everyday contexts are designed and tested, using existing standards of usability. As technology advances standards are still based on planar displays and simple screen-based interactions. End-user digital devices need to consider context and physicality as additional influences on design. Additionally, accessibility and m...
Technology is changing, which means the design processes supporting it must also change. Digital tools for user experience and interaction design are vital in enabling designers to create appropriate, enjoyable and functional human-computer experiences, and so will necessarily evolve alongside our technological development. This workshop aims to su...
Existing work on personality traits in software development excludes game developers as a discrete group. Whilst games are software, game development has unique considerations, so game developers may exhibit different personality traits from other software professionals. We assessed responses from 123 game developers on an International Personality...
Sketching is recognised as an important tool in the journey of research and practical processes of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and User Experience Design (UX). However, it is not always included in higher education curriculum, in which HCI and UX is often a single module in one year group amongst more “traditional” approaches in computer scien...
Embodied cognition is a concept that has been extensively explored by scholars within the Child-Computer Interaction community. However, there is a lack of a synthesis of this research to clarify the field’s benefits and drawbacks. This paper presents a survey of articles published between 2010 and 2020 in the Interaction Design and Children (IDC)...
Since the 1980s, we have observed a range of cyberattacks targeting Industrial Control Systems (ICS), some of which have impacted elements of critical national infrastructure (CNI). While there are access limitations on information surrounding ICS focused cyberattacks, particularly within a CNI context, this paper provides an extensive summary of t...
The arts and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) have a lot in common. As part of computer science HCI is ground breaking, interdisciplinary and focused on the interactions that form part of our everyday world. As part of the arts, HCI is a lens on technology, showing us spaces where there is room to interact and create new and meaningful blended expe...
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...
Millions of people use mobile map applications like Google Maps on a regular basis. However, despite these applications' ubiquity, the literature contains very little information about how these applications are used in the real world. As such, many researchers and practitioners seeking to improve mobile map applications may not be able to identify...
Creating visual imagery helps us to situate ourselves within unknown worlds, processes, make connections, and find solutions. By exploring drawn ideas for novel technologies, we can examine the implications of their place in the world. Drawing, or sketching, for future inquiry in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) can be a stand-alone investigative a...
Shape-changing interfaces use physical change in shape as input and/or output. As the field matures, it will move from technology-driven design toward more formal processes. However, this is challenging: end-users are not aware of the capabilities of shape-change, devices are difficult to demonstrate, and presenting single systems can ‘trap’ user-t...
We investigate engaging a computer science conference audience in sketching responses to the event as it occurs. In particular, we explore the response to inviting those present to engage in what is essentially an off-line, co-located, attendee-sourcing experience. Sketchnoting is a popular practice for documenting events, but these sketched record...
Freehand sketching is a valuable process, input, output, and tool, often used by people to communicate and express ideas, as well as document, explore and describe concepts between researcher, user, or client. Sketches are fast, easy to create, and - by varying their fidelity - can be used in all areas of HCI. Sketching in HCI will explore and demo...
Sketching is universal. It enables us to work through problems, communicate complexity, work with people who have diverse needs, and document work processes we employ within Human-Computer Interaction. Increased interest in sketching as a methodology within HCI has led to increased attendance of interactive courses, meet-ups, and discussion groups,...
Providing data visualization authoring tools for the general public remains an ongoing challenge. Inspired by block-printing, we explore how visualization stamps as a physical visualization authoring tool could leverage both visual freedom and ease of repetition. We conducted a workshop with two groups---visualization experts and non-experts---wher...
The Interactions website (interactions.acm.org) hosts a stable of bloggers who share insights and observations on HCI, often challenging current practices. Each issue we'll publish selected posts from some of the leading and emerging voices in the field.
Smartwatches are highly portable, ubiquitous devices, allowing rich interaction at a small scale. However, the display size can hinder user engagement, limit information display, and presentation style. Most research focuses on exploring ways in which the interaction area of smartwatches can be extended , although this mainly entails simple fold-ou...
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...
Fiction has long been important to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research and practice. Through familiar tools such as personas, scenarios and role-play, fictions can support the exploration and communication of complex psychological, social and technical requirements between diverse collections of designers, developers and end-users. More recen...
Actuating, dynamic materials offer substantial potential to enhance interior designs but there are currently few examples of how they might be utilized or impact user experiences. As part of a design-led exploration, we have prototyped (Wizard-of-Oz) an actuating, dining table runner (ActuEater1), and then developed a fully-interactive fabric versi...
Hand-drawn sketches are an easy way for researchers to communicate and express ideas, as well as document, explore and describe concepts between researcher, user, or client. Sketches are fast, easy to create, and -- by varying their fidelity -- they can be used in all areas of HCI. The Applied Sketching in HCI course will explore and demonstrate th...
Almost all research output includes tables, diagrams, photographs and even sketches, and papers within HCI typically take advantage of including these figures in their files. However the space given to non diagrammatical or tabular figures is often small, even in papers that primarily concern themselves with visual output. The reason for this might...
Sketching is of great value as a process, input, output and tool in HCI, but can be confined to individual ideation or note-taking, as few researchers have the confidence to document events, studies and workshops under the public gaze. The recent surge in interest in this sometimes-overlooked skill has manifested itself in courses, workshops and li...
Shape-changing interfaces are a novel computational technology which incorporate physical, tangible, and dynamic surfaces to create a true 3-Dimensional experience. As is often the case with other novel hardware, the current research focus is on iterative hardware design, with devices taking many years to reach potential markets. Whilst the drive t...
Shape-changing interfaces are a novel computational technology which incorporate physical, tangible, and dynamic surfaces to create a true 3-Dimensional experience. As is often the case with other novel hardware, the current research focus is on iterative hardware design, with devices taking many years to reach potential markets. Whilst the drive t...
Shape-changing interfaces are physically tangible, interactive devices, surfaces, or spaces that allow for rich, organic, and novel experiences with computational devices. Over the last 15 years, research has produced functional prototypes over many use applications; reviews have identified themes and possible future directions but have not yet loo...
Shape-changing interfaces are tangible, physically dynamic devices which enable user-experience beyond 2D screens. Within Human Computer Interaction, researchers are developing these from low-resolution, low-fidelity prototypes, toward a vision of a truly malleable world. The main focus is in producing and testing hardware, and basic user interacti...