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2 Moving Into The Wild: From Situated Cognition to Embodied Interaction
2.5 Embodied Interaction Approaches
2.6 Current Theorizing within RITW
2.7 Conclusion
3 Approaches to Conducting Research in The Wild
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Participatory and Provocative Approaches to Research in the Wild
3.2.1 Participatory Approaches
3.2.2 Provocative Approaches
3.3 Design Methods Used for Research in the Wild
3.3.1 Designing on the Fly during Research in the Wild Studies
3.3.2 Designing for Appropriation: How to Invite and Guide the General Public
3.4 Technologies Developed in the Wild
3.5 Methods for Conducting In Situ Studies in the Wild
3.5.1 New Ways of Collecting Data
3.6 Summary
4 Case Studies: Designing and Evaluating Technologies for Use in the Wild
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Case Study 1: The Ambient Wood Project
4.2.1 Background
4.3 Case Study 2: The Clouds and Twinkly Lights Project
4.3.1 Background
4.3.2 Theory
4.3.3 Design
4.3.4 Technology
4.3.5 In Situ Study
4.4 Case Study 3: The Physikit Project
4.4.1 Background
4.4.2 Theory
4.4.3 Design
4.4.4 Technology
4.4.5 In Situ Study
4.5 Overall Summary
5 Practical and Ethical Issues
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Practical Challenges
5.2.1 Managing Expectations
5.2.2 Identifying and Resolving Tensions
5.2.3 Dealing with the Unexpected
5.2.4 Overcoming the Novelty Effect
5.3 Ethics: Consent, Data Collection, and Permission
5.4 Publishing Research in the Wild
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Eva Hornecker, Jesper Kjeldskov, and Erik Stolterman for their insightful comments on an earlier draft. We would also like to thank all our colleagues at Sussex University, Open University, and University College London who collaborated with us in our forays into the wild.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
1.1 RESEARCH GONE WILD
It is now quite common to see the phrase “in the wild” inserted into the title of a human-computer interaction (HCI) paper. Examples include “Doing innovation in the wild” (Crabtree et al., 2013a), “Being in the thick of in the wild” (Johnson et al., 2012), and “A robot in the wild” (Williams et al., 2014), as well as abbreviated versions such as “Leaving the wild” (Taylor et al., 2013) and “Calls from the wild” (Cappadonna et al., 2016). Besides attracting eyeballs (“the wild” sounds more intriguing than the more prosaic “An in situ study of…” or “An Investigation into…”) this trend reflects a shift in how research is being carried out in HCI. Increasingly, researchers are going into people’s homes, the outdoors, and public places, to study their reactions to, use, and appropriation of a diversity of technologies that researchers have provided them with or placed in that location. Examples include exploring the co-creation of a street graph depicting changes in electricity consumption for a community (Bird and Rogers, 2010), the use of mobile devices for tracking people’s health (Consolvo et al., 2008), and exploring how robots can assist the well-being of visitors in hospital wards (e.g., Dahl and Bolous, 2014). In addition, researchers are working and participating more with communities, designing and deploying technologies in situ that address the latter’s concerns or needs. Theory has also been rethought in terms of how it can inform, extend, or develop accounts of behavior that is situated in naturalistic settings and in the context of socio-technical practices.
Research in the wild (RITW) is generally considered as an umbrella term to refer to how, what, and where research is conducted in naturalistic settings (Crabtree et al., 2013b). Its overarching goal is to understanding how technology is and can be used in the everyday/real world, in order to gain new insights about: how to engage people/communities in
