Design and the Digital Divide. Alan F. Newell
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focussed on how the needs of older people could be included within current design methodologies such as “user-centred design”. Our UTOPIA (Usable Technology for Older People Inclusive and Appropriate) project—in collaboration with Glasgow, Napier and Abertay Universities—investigated the most effective ways of including older people in the design process. We were also commissioned to act as consultants to Fujitsu, who were developing a portal for older people for the Department for Education. The research in this project formed the basis for the government’s “MyGuide” website for older people. The lesson from this project was that we had to look for very powerful ways of raising software and human interface designers’ awareness of characteristics of older people: not only their sensory and motor characteristics, but also the effects of their up-bringing and their relationship with new technologies.
1.9 THEATRE FOR AWARENESS RAISING AND REQUIREMENTS GATHERING
It was essential that powerful communication techniques be used for awareness raising, and we thus began a fruitful collaboration with Maggie Morgan, a script writer and theatre director (then artistic director of the Foxtrot Theatre Company and now of MM Training) who had a background in Forum Theatre and the use of Interactive Theatre in training and community consultation, and a film maker David Goodall (of Soundsmove). In collaboration with these, and other theatre professionals, we used theatre both for requirements gathering for projects to support older people and for raising designers’ awareness of the characteristics, needs and wants of older people. A particular use of theatre within a research framework was part of the Inclusive Design Educational Network of academic and industrial researchers that was aimed at producing a research agenda for this field. In parallel with developing a research agenda, this group briefed a film maker, who illustrated the research agenda developed by this project by a narrative film. “Relatively PC” and other examples of the use of theatre in this field can be seen at:
www.computing.dundee.ac.uk/acprojects/iden.
In 2006, I became an Emeritus Professor, and, in 2009, Vicki Hanson, formerly the Accessibility Manager of IBM, based in New York, joined the School as a full professor. Together with other research projects, she is a Principal Investigator for the Newcastle and Dundee Universities £ 13M Inclusive Digital Economy Hub funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The School thus continues to go from strength to strength in this field of research.
1.10 PUTTING ONE’S FAITH IN STORIES
A vital part of research is communicating results—both to fellow researchers and to the public, and I have investigated ways of trying to increase the impact of one’s results. I have come to the conclusion that, although data is vital, the power of the message in the data can be greatly increased by presenting a story, if possible with a personal narrative. Such stories are often denigrated as “simply anecdotes”, but a good story—particularly one with some humor and/or conflict—which effectively illustrates the message behind the data, can be a very powerful tool.
1.11 SUMMARY
“Hold fast to dreams. For if dreams die, Life is a broken winged bird Which cannot fly”. (anon.)
This monograph essentially follows an historical perspective of research in the fields in which researchers at Dundee University’s School of Computing were operating, together with lessons learned from this journey.
Chapters 2–7 focus on research into the use of information technology to improve human-to-human communication.
Chapter 2 highlights the development of VOTEM—the speech-operated typewriter for physically disabled people, the Palantype Transcription System for deaf people, and the Talking Brooch, the first system we developed for non-speaking people. Chapter 3 describes the work on television subtitling for hearing-impaired people. This includes research into both the style of captioning, and the development of efficient captioning systems for both pre-prepared and real-time captions.
The Talking Brooch led to sustained research in the AAC field. This included word prediction (Chapter 4), and its importance not only for reducing key-strokes, but also for improving literacy. Other software for dyslexia is also described in this chapter, as is research that led to disambiguation techniques. Systems based on this research are now included in most mobile phone texting systems: possibly the most ubiquitous example of research for disabled people leading to a mainstream product.
Even with word prediction, AAC devices still produced speech at very slow rates, thus other speed increasing techniques were developed. Chapter 5 examines the influence of Conversational Analysis research on the AAC field. This led to the concept of reusable conversation, and an examination of the relative importance of pragmatics and semantics in conversation. A number of systems based on this concept are described, together with the conflicts that arose from these developments.
The ultimate instantiation of “reusable conversation” is stories: these are very important for personal development and building relationships. Because of their length, however, AAC users rarely relate stories. Chapter 6 describes systems that were developed to encourage non-speaking people to relate stories.
Chapter 7 relates the lessons that the team at Dundee learned from this research and recommends ways in which the efficacy of research in this particular field can be increased.
Towards the end of the 20th Century, demographic trends clearly indicated an increasing percentage of older people in the population. People were living to an increasingly old age, and were exhibiting physical, sensory and cognitive decline. In general, information technology had not designed for such people and a “digital divide” was developing between younger people and the majority of those over 65. Chapter 8 describes a range of computer-based systems that have been designed particularly for older people, including those with dementia. Although older people may have disabilities, their general characteristics were different from those of younger disabled people. Chapter 9 describes these differences and how they relate to design challenges in Information technology and Human Computer Interface research. Chapter 9 lays out a range of methods for including older people in the design process.
The differences between older and disabled people and young able-bodied people, however, are less than might at first appear to be the case—particularly in relation to the design of IT products. Chapter 10 introduces the concept of Ordinary and Extra-Ordinary Human Computer Interaction as a way of bridging this gap, and of encouraging mainstream designers to consider the needs and wants of currently excluded populations of users. Chapter 11 suggests “User Sensitive Inclusive Design” as an expansion of “User-Centered Design” to include disadvantaged users. The philosophy behind this is described and a number of suggestions made as to how this can be implemented, and how the concept of Designing for Dynamic Diversity provides a framework for interface design that responds to the changes in users as they grow older.
It is vital for designers and users to relate to each other, and this is particularly important where there are age and cultural differences between these two groups. There is evidence that design rules and guidelines are not sufficient, and Chapter