October 2010 Update

The research plan till the end of Jan:

• first 4 weeks on workshop 3 design specifications
• the rest on primarily (subject to advances in workshop design) 14page long paper to be submitted to Interact conference.

- Workshop 3 design specificatations will be done as to following tentative decisions:

1. • The aims of the workshop
     • to experiment the remaining 5 configurations
     • to develop and test strategies of sensitivities for agency sensitive design
   • Workshop 3 will deal with sensitivities in production and use of technologies/interfaces
     • in production phase, researcher will be involved only (the previous decision on this item changed, because of limited benefits in terms of research contributions)
     • in use phase, participants will also be involved (they will have more freedom and authority on how to interact)
     • workshop 1, workshop 2, workshop 3 and workshop 4 are all considered as a big production phase for the final wearable environment system, which will host a use phase involving a performance. However, there are sub production and use phases in each workshop, where production was done by researcher and use was done by participants. The participants' contribution and in a sense production are realized through negotiations, ongoing reconfigurations and design-in-use activities.
   • Decision of focusing of only one aspect of sensitivity, which is awareness.
   • General assumption of the research at his stage is that: (this is also the result of focusing )
     
     • An increase in awareness of participants towards themselves, other participants, other artefacts and finally processes between them is useful to accomodate different forms of agency (to be exemplified) and can facilitate the emergence of new capacities to act.
     • Increasing Awareness -> Accomodate (different forms of agency) + Facilitate (new forms of agency)
       • Need to consider the counter examples where higher levels of agency and awareness are not desirable or useful.
       • Some critical questions to be answered soon!
       1. How do we understand if awareness is increased or not? (may be only by asking as we did previously)
       2. How do we know or observe whether the agency exhibited is different or new?
       3. Do we need to define prior(existing) agencies and then seperate them from after(emerging) agencies?
       4. How can we develop sensitivities for agency without knowing/defining what those agencies are? (through awareness?)
   • Research to be done on
     
     • social network analysis
     • quantifying agency, (ways to decompose it contextually and then assess..)
     • awareness models
       • infrastructure awareness
       • context-awareness

- the long paper might cover

• brutalism (in art, architecture and design)
• making the invisible visible
• awareness models
• relational agency and design (answer to why we need an explicit consideration of agency in design)
• agency sensitivity and its resonances in other critical design approaches
• when do we need lesser and higher agency, (high performance systems vs creativity & complexity involved systems, ) increased agency -> lost of control..
• when don't we need higher levels of awarenes? and also awareness vs privacy
• Brutalism and Design working sheet..
• Annotated bibliography of Agency

- List of Conferences