Phil Turner

• Doctor of Philosophy
• retired

Imagination has never received the sustained attention it merits and (consequently) is typically treated as either related to the creation and manipulation of mental imagery or as a synonym for creativity. Yet, as we shall see, neither of these attributions are sufficient to account for all that imagination can do. As Johnson (1987 p. 172) puts it,...

While recent years have witnessed an “aesthetic turn” in HCI, we are still awaiting the arrival of an agreed “digital aesthetics”. However, it is widely recognised that aesthetics have an important role in the overall experience of digital technology and that they may also be the single most important factor in deciding which (say) mobile phone to...

The central thesis of this book is that imagination is important to HCI and where better to begin this discussion than with the design of a digital artefact? When we design a new piece of technology (or engage in any design-related activity) there is an expectation that our imaginations will be at hand to generate ideas with respect to what the tec...

This final chapter is concerned with two kinds of “what-if” questions. The first of these focus on the speculative questions which have realisable answers, so an example would be: what if we could interact with our TV (or any other home technology) by simply speaking to it or gesturing at it? These first kinds of questions have received our attenti...

We have been using tools and technology to achieve our goals for millions of years, reaching back from the earliest tools of stone or wood or bone artefacts to the latest 3D printed parts or microfabricated semiconductor. Our use of these tools is based, in part, on our ability to formulate a goal and to imagine a technological solution (that is, t...

Imagination is difficult to define, particularly in the absence of any consideration of its application and we argue that it is essential to understanding what it is used for, so, let us begin there. A farthing (fēorthing) means a fourth part or a quarter in the Old Northumbrian (an ancient dialect of English) so we propose dividing imagination int...

Imagination is highly valued and sought-after, yet elusive and ill-defined. Definitions range from narrowly cognitive accounts to those which endow imagination with world-making powers. Imagination underpins our ability to speculate about the future and to re-experience the past. The everyday functioning of society relies on being able to imagine t...

This chapter discusses our involvement with digital products. Donald Norman tells us that he coined the term “user experience” (UX) to refer to “all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products” (NNG website, nd).

Interest in user experience (UX) became apparent in the mid-1990s when its advocates proposed that the design and evaluation of digital technology should be extended beyond the purely instrumental to include the broader range of experiences which it offers.

This chapter discusses our affective relationships with digital technology. These are regarded by some to be most important aspect of any experience and have been described as, “the most central and pervasive aspects of human experience” (Ortony et al. 1988, p. 3). Despite this, affect barely receives any attention in the definitions of UX.

This chapter extends the theme of involvement with technology which we introduced in Chaps. 1 and 2 and discusses some of the consequences of living “up close and personal” with technology.

This book has presented a psychology of user experience and in doing so we have adopted a philosophical perspective to frame at least some of the ways in which we interact or use or otherwise employ digital products.

This chapter is concerned with our aesthetic experience of digital products. This is the third component of our account of user experience but unlike the other two elements (involvement and affect), there is no readily available psychology of aesthetics to draw upon.

The rubber hand illusion (RHI) is a body ownership illusion whereby congruently stroking a fake rubber hand and a subject's hidden hand while observing the rubber hand produces the illusion of them feeling the touch on the rubber hand and experiencing the rubber hand to be part of their own body. The parameters of the RHI have not been fully define...

It is well-established that while cognitive psychology provides a sound foundation for an understanding of our interactions with digital technology, this is no longer sufficient to make sense of how we use and experience the personal, relational and ubiquitous technologies that pervade everyday life. This book begins with a consideration of the nat...

The appearance of the programmable digital computer was to have significant and long lasting consequences not only for just about every detail of our everyday lives but also for how we thought about our cognition. As we were learning about the power of newly invented information processing devices, it was proposed that the brain could be thought of...

As the vast majority of our mental lives are unconscious, it can come as no surprise that much of our everyday use of interactive technology is not under conscious control too. We describe this as coping – we cope with the world and we cope with interactive technology. This chapter reviews the evidence that our use of interactive technology – by de...

The body has long been ignored in discussions of cognition. After all, there is a simple and intuitive division that the brain does the thinking and that the body simply carries the brain about. This chapter revisits this position and makes the case for the corporeal as having a significant role in how we deal with the world – including our use of...

Activity Theory is an excellent candidate for a theory of human-computer interaction (HCI) and has been proposed as such by a number of people. This chapter covers familiar ground in describing the origins and development of Activity Theory with respect to HCI but, for the purposes of the book as a whole, focuses on the role of mediation. From this...

This chapter is concerned with how we think with things. This is not merely a matter of mediation but how all manner of tools, technologies and representations form a larger cognitive system. Distributed cognition recognised that to pilot a ship into port required, in practice, the combined efforts of a number of sailors, their charts and navigatio...

This final chapter argues that there is something really quite big missing from how we have treated cognition in human-computer interaction. Jerome Bruner has argued that cognition exists in two forms, the paradigmatic and the narrative. The former provides us with scientific and rational accounts of the world – just as we have outlined in the prev...

In this chapter we present the proposal that make-believe has an important though unrecognised role in human-computer interaction. We argue that make-believe is a form of thinking with things (as discussed in Chap. 5) but here the product of this activity is not the completion of a task but the creation of fictional, possible or “whatif” worlds. Th...

The enactive account of cognition is the most mysterious strand of current thinking in this area. At its heart lie notions of embodiment, self-organisation, the environment and the proposition that we enact the world. As interesting as this is, enaction comes into its own when we discuss episodic memory, mental time travelling and niche creation. T...

The proposal that our use of interactive technology is “situated” has proved to be one of the most significant challenges to the traditional information processing accounts of cognition within human-computer interaction (HCI). This chapter describes how the appearance of situated action in the 1980s involved the recognition that our use of technolo...

This is a demonstration of a Minecraft facsimile of Jupiter Artland, a sculpture park on the outskirts of Edinburgh. With the cooperation of primary school children we developed a mixed reality game employing Minecraft. Our aim is to investigate attachment to virtual space and the use of make-believe to manage this.

A current concern in human-computer interaction lies in understanding how we experience virtual reality (VR). This chapter proposes that the VR experience relies on make-believe. The necessary decoupling from the real world to the make-believe world is costly in terms of the cognitive resources required but VR offloads some of the computation cost...

The acts of pretending and make-believe are almost exclusively studied in the context of child development and child psychology. This study was therefore an exploratory investigation of these functions in adulthood. Ten Foley artists were interviewed about the role of pretending and make-believe in their occupation, and the results supported our pr...

Human computer interaction (HCI) was originally a product of an ad hoc conjunction of the cognitive sciences and computing. Its original aim, which was to make interactive technology both usable and accessible by the non-specialist, has long been extended to reach very many aspects of our everyday lives. As the remit of HCI has extended, so too has...

This book explores the role of cognition in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) assessing how the field has developed over the past thirty years and discusses where the field is heading, as we begin to live in increasingly interconnected digital environments. Taking a broad chronological view, the author discusses cognition in relation to...

Make-believe plays a far stronger role in both the design and use of interfaces, games and services than we have come to believe. This edited volume illustrates ways for grasping and utilising that connection to improve interaction, user experiences, and customer value. Useful for designers, undergraduates and researchers alike, this new research p...

We propose that pretending is a cognitive faculty which enables us to create and immerse ourselves in possible worlds. These worlds range from the veridical to the fan- tastic and are frequently realised as stories varying from the fictional to the scientific. This same ability enables us to become immersed and engaged in such stories (which we may...

The appropriation of digital artefacts involves their use, which has changed, evolved or developed beyond their original design. Thus, to understand appropriation, we must understand use. We define use as the active, purposive exploitation of the affordances offered by the technology and from this perspective; appropriation emerges as a natural con...

Our sense of presence in the real world helps regulate our behaviour within it by telling us about the status and effectiveness of our actions. As such, this ability offers us practical advantages in dealing effectively with the world. It is also an automatic or intuitive response to where and how we find ourselves in that it does not require consc...

This chapter is intended to be both theoretical and a little speculative. It draws upon psychological, neuro-dynamic and philosophical sources to create an account of what happens when we experience presence, that is, when we become aware that we are present. This chapter also offers an alternate treatment of the work of Riva and his colleagues wit...

A principal, but largely unexplored, use of our cognition when using interacting technology involves pretending. To pretend is to believe that which is not the case, for example, when we use the desktop on our personal computer we are pretending, that is, we are pretending that the screen is a desktop upon which windows reside. But, of course, the...

Engagement is important to the success of applications, systems and artefacts as diverse as robotics, pedagogy, games, interactive installations, and virtual reality applications. Yet engagement has proved to be remarkably difficult to define as it can take many forms, so many that it is difficult to isolate what these different instantiations have...

There are numerous rules and well-established guidelines to help designers with the visual appearance of interactive technologies. In contrast, when it comes to the use of sound, there is a paucity of practical information regarding design for euphony, excepting musical composition. This paper addresses this hiatus by describing a theoretically bas...

Digital technology has become a defining characteristic of modern life. Almost everyone uses it, we all rely on it, and many of us own a multitude of devices. What is more, we all expect to be able to use these technologies "straight out the box." This lecture discusses how we are able to do this without apparent problems. We are able to use digita...

Presence research can tell us why we feel present in the real world and can experience presence while using virtual reality technology (and movies and games) but has strikingly less to say on why we feel present in the scenes described in a book. Just how is it that the wonderful tangible detail of the real world or the complexity of digital techno...

We report a pair of repertory grid studies that explore the attachment people have for digital and non-digital artefacts. In the first study we found no clear distinctions between emotional attachment to digital and non-digital artefacts: people are attached to their mobile phones in much the same way as to a childhood teddy bear. There was also ev...

Human-computer interaction as a rationalistic, engineering discipline has been taught successfully for more than 25 years. The established narrative is one of designing usable systems for users, some of whom have been described as “naïve”, safely installed behind their desktop personal computers. But the world is changed. All aspects of society use...

This paper reports on establishing whether listeners have the same listening experience as the person who designed the sound. Surprisingly, there is little or no evidence as to whether what is designed to be heard is what is actually heard. The study reported here is a qualitative study into these two experiences. Research approach -- A repertory g...

Motivation -- How can we account for the apparent easy with which we cope with the wide range of digital technology and the complex knowledge-rich environments we encounter everyday? An answer to this is that we rely a variety of fixes, workarounds (and so forth) which we may collectively describe as epistemic interaction. We employ epistemic inter...

Human-computer interaction as a rationalistic, engineering discipline has been taught successfully for more than 25 years. The established narrative is one of designing usable systems for users, some of whom have been described as "naïve", safely installed behind their desktop personal computers. But the world is changed. All aspects of society use...

This paper presents a discussion of an everyday ontology of witnessing drawing on the writings of Martin Heidegger, cognitive science and presence research. We begin by defining witnessing: to witness we must be present; and that which is witnessed must be available. Witnessing is distinguished from perceiving in that it implies and requires a reco...

This study took as its starting point the premise that a high degree of realism is not a necessary condition for the creation of a ‘sense of place’ in mediated experiences such as those presented through virtual reality. A sense of place is the sense of being present somewhere in particular. We report on the usefulness of an intentionally low fidel...

This paper illustrates a method for the early evaluation of auditory displays in context. A designer was questioned about his expectations of an auditory display for Heavy Goods Vehicles, and the results were compared to the experiences of 10 listeners. Sound design is essentially an isolated practice and by involving listeners the process can beco...

Motivation -- To understand what everyday use of technology entails. Research approach -- A qualitative study. Findings/Design -- Highlighting the importance of everydayness in the design of interactive technology Research limitations/Implications -- to redefine what is meant by the everyday use of technology. Originality/Value -- Highlights the im...

Motivation -- to explore the nature and dimensions of attachment to digital and non-digital artefacts and explicate any differences in emotional attachment between digital and non-digital artefacts. Research approach -- Repertory grid based study Findings/Design -- no clear distinctions between attachment to digital and non-digital artefacts Resear...

User representations are central to user-centred design, personas being one of the more recent developments. However, such descriptions of people risk stereotyping. We review the genesis and application of personas and kindred representations, and discuss the psychological roots of stereotyping and why it is so powerful. It is also noted that user...

Motivation -- The work described in this paper investigated the potential of a low fidelity desktop application using the metaphor of the 'tourist gaze' in conveying a sense of place. Research approach -- An exploratory study was used, in which an application was developed and evaluated by 25 participants. Findings/Design -- The results suggest tha...

Motivation -- Definitions and theories of user experience are vague and conflicting. This paper suggests that an account based on engagement is a more useful approach. Research approach -- An account of engagement is presented which is based on an ontological description of everyday experience. Findings/Design -- The account has three distinct but...

This paper describes a soundscape mapping tool, and provides an illustration of its use in the evaluation of an in-car auditory interface. The tool addresses three areas: communicating what people are listening to, showing how soundscapes can be visualized, and demonstrating how the approach can be used by a designer during the evaluation of an aud...

Triangulation is the means by which an alternate perspective is used to validate, challenge or extend existing findings. It is frequently used when the field of study is difficult, demanding or contentious and presence research meets all of these criteria. We distinguish between the use of hard and soft triangulation—the former emphasising the chal...

Broadly, there are two mutually exclusive accounts of how people (non- specialist users) reason about and conceptualize in teractive technology. The first is based on classical cognitive psychology and is char acterized by the term mental model . The second, drawing on concepts from social cogniti on, observes that people often anthropomorphize tec...

The teaching and perhaps more importantly the practice of ethnographic techniques has become increasing important within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). But ethnography is also synonymous with in situ data collection over extended periods of time making it difficult to teach. This paper reports a study of the use of auto-ethnography by a group of...

This chapter considers the role of sound, and more specifically, listening, in creating a sense of presence (of ‘being there’) in ‘places’ recreated by virtual reality technologies. We first briefly review the treatment of sound in place and presence research. Here we give particular attention to the role of sound in inducing a sense of presence in...

This paper describes a method for teaching interaction design in a school of computing setting. Practical Interaction Design is something of a hybrid incorporating elements of both 'pure' interaction design and human-computer interaction (HCI) to convey some of the flavour of the former with the tool-rich practicality of the latter. Practical Inter...

Heidegger describes familiarity as the readiness or preparedness to cope with the world, the equipment it comprises and other people. However, and more usefully for the current discussion, Dreyfus extends this and argues that familiarity comprises "know-how" and involvement which is a proposition susceptible to empirical testing. In our qualitative...

We are fundamentally social animals: we are geared to understanding each other; to gauging each other's moods and states of mind; and we are very adept at judging each others personalities. This ability to judge personality can also be generalized to a range of interactive technology including web sites. We present evidence that judgments of person...

Intuitive systems are usable systems. Design guidelines advocate intuitiveness and vendors claim it - but what does it mean for a user interface, interactive system or device to be intuitive? A review of the use of the term "intuitive" indicates that it has two distinct but overlapping meanings, namely intuitiveness based on familiarity and intuiti...

How people learn to use an interactive device has always been an important field of research in human–computer interaction (HCI). The theoretical bases of which have ranged from the traditional cognitive perspectives through situated learning to collectivist – social perspectives. Each of these has treated learning to use interactive devices in a t...

Recent years have witnessed a number of initiatives to develop technology ("memory prosthetics") to enhance and extend human memory. Typical of these is "Memories for Life," which is one of the Grand Challenges in Computing identified by the British Computer Society in 2004. So far, the emphasis has been on the development of psychologically inform...

This chapter considers the role of sound, and more specifically, listening, in creating a sense of presence (of "being there") in "places" recreated by virtual reality technologies. We first briefly review the treatment of sound in place and presence research. Here we give particular attention to the role of sound in inducing a sense of presence in...

The emerging study of technology in space has been shaping human interaction with physical, social, and technological worlds. Drawing upon a wide range of information technology disciplines, this field is now grabbing the attention of many, including computer scientists, anthropologists, and psychologists craving for more on this intriguing new fie...

The use of sound to create or enhance the sense of presence is well recognized and the measurements of which have focused on hearing, e.g. "were you able to identify a particular sound?", "how well could you localize the sounds". To this treatment of audition we now add, listening. Listening is active, directed, intentional hearing. This aspect of...

Purpose This paper sets out to highlight conclusions from computer‐supported cooperative work (CSCW) research, which are relevant to e‐learning environments, in this case, WebCT. Design/methodology/approach The paper analyses the CSCW literature and identifies the main findings relating to the use and acceptance of collaborative technologies. Thes...

We present a qualitative study, undertaken over a period of nine months, of older people facing the challenges of learning to use interactive technology, specifically personal computers (PCs) and the internet. We examine the range of causal explanations (attributions) voiced by the group in accounting for their difficulties with it. A discourse ana...

Cognition has long been a central conceptual pillar for human- computer interaction (HCI) but with the current emphasis on interaction design and user experience, this position may now be in doubt. This workshop considers whether cognition still has relevance for the "post experience" generation.

The aim of Universal Design is to make interactive artifacts usable by the broadest possible range of users and how best to achieve this lies at the heart of human-computer interaction (HCI). HCI relies on a variety of tools, techniques and a number of theoretical bases but it is specifically the use of metaphor which is of interest here. HCI has m...

Re-creating real places - as distinct from virtual spaces or environments - using virtual reality technology raises a series of significant challenges. Fortunately there is a large body of existing research into the experience of place which might reasonably contribute to our understanding of the task. This paper reviews key aspects of the 'place'...

Casey, 1997:ix This chapter argues that our bodily experience of place may provide a key to achieving a contextualised sense of presence in virtual environments. We begin by briefly reviewing current practice in evaluating virtual environments. The evaluating of these environments hinges on measuring our sense of being there. This is treated as our...

What are the concerns of those who investigate spatiality across domains and across media? What is significant in these concerns – particularly for the design and evaluation of technology? How are these concerns presented and represented? Can discourse from one domain inform work in another? These are some of the questions addressed in this volume....

The concept of affordance is relatively easy to define, but has proved to be remarkably difficult to engineer. This paradox has sparked numerous debates as to its true nature. The discussion presented here begins with a review of the use of the term from which emerges evidence for a two-fold classification—simple affordance and complex affordance....

This paper discusses the introduction of a wireless network of personal digital assistants into a specialist unit of a hospital in Edinburgh. All of the technology has been used off-the-shelf and out-of-the-box. While we are able to report that the heterogeneous elements of this implementation have been integrated, work well together and that the u...

separated by the exigencies of the design life cycle into another compartment, that makes invisible the (prior) technical work of engineers that is not directly pertinent to the application work of practitioners. More recently (and notably after the work of Greisemer and Star) the black box has been opened and infrastructure has been discussed in t...

We present the results of an exploratory study investigating the feasibility of using multimedia software to teach life skills to adults with learning difficulties. As a precursor to determining whether the clients would benefit from the software, we needed to address the issue of realism in visual displays, to discover if photorealistic images of...

In this chapter we introduce activity theory, describing its origins and its principal researchers and thinkers. We stress its descriptive power and its usefulness in defining uniquely a unit of analysis for work. We contrast its development with that of task analysis. We conclude with a brief demonstration of this descriptive power by using it as...

This paper presents an investigation into how sound can be used to create a sense of place (that is, the sense of being in that particular place). In the study, people were asked to speak aloud and tell us what they could hear. The analysis of these concurrent verbalizations is a particular focus of this work. We also demonstrate the usefulness of...

We report on the identification, creation and use of narrative patterns to create an interactive cartoon. We have undertaken an analysis of an American 1950-60's interactive television cartoon - Winky Dink and You, which gave the illusion of interaction. Winky Dink offered an engaging and enjoyable experience of a type not currently available on in...

This paper draws on concepts from narratology to explore aspects of the role of stories in the small group design process. A brief review of relevant narratological concepts is provided. Their application in an analysis of case study data from a team designing taxonomic software is then reported. It is concluded that narratology, and in particular...

In this paper, we describe a pilot study of the clinical use of a wireless network of personal digital assistants (PDAs). We describe how we are dealing with the concerns of the clinicians with respect to maintaining the security of patient records and the potential interference which wireless devices might cause critical medical systems. Beyond th...

We report an empirical study into the creation of, and response to, a soundscape of a computer centre. We contrast the use of presence questionnaires, as means of assessing the sense of being-there, against a more phenomenological approach. We conclude that we have been able to create a strong sense of place but uncovered a number of experimental /...

Researchers in Information Systems have produced a rich collection of metaanalyses and models of factors influencing the uptake of information technologies. In the domain of CSCW, however, these models have largely been neglected, and while there are many case studies, no systematic account of uptake has been produced. We use findings from Informat...

We introduce our initial investigations into the phenomenology of place as part of the BENOGO project. BENOGO is concerned with giving people the experience of 'being there without going there'. Employing a state-of-the-art mixture of photorealistic, real time rendered images, three-dimensional soundscapes and augmented reality to create a sense of...

Researchers in Information Systems have produced a rich collection of meta-analyses and models of factors influencing the uptake of information technologies. In the domain of CSCW, however, these models have largely been neglected, and while there are many case studies, no systematic account of uptake has been produced. We use findings from Informa...

Researchers in Information Systems have produced a rich collection of meta-analyses and models of factors influencing the uptake of information technologies. In the domain of CSCW, however, these models have largely been neglected, and while there are many case studies, no systematic account of uptake has been produced. We use findings from Informa...

A consideration of eventual context of use is crucially important for the success of virtual environments destined for real-world organizations, yet it is frequently absent from accounts of the design of such applications. We describe how contextual requirements have influenced the design of a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) to support the...

Researchers in Information Systems have produced a rich collection of meta-analyses and models to further understanding of factors influencing the uptake of information technologies. In the domain of CSCW, however, these models have largely been neglected, and while there are many case studies, no systematic account of uptake has been produced. We...

A proper respect for eventual context of use is crucially important for the success of virtual environments destined for real-world organisations, yet is frequently absent from accounts of the design of such applications. We describe how contextual requirements have influenced the design of a CVE to support the delivery of safety-critical training,...