Research in the Wild. Paul Marshall
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enable communities to reduce their energy or increase their exercise). In other contexts, it can involve running a longitudinal study across geographical boundaries to determine how new tools encourage participation in different cultures, such as citizen science projects. The scoping will depend a lot on practical concerns, such as how much funding is available, the time of year, logistics and gaining the trust of and acceptance in a community in order to get people on board to see the potential value of a proposed technology.
A number of methods are typically used in RITW, including observation, surveys, remote logging of people’s use of technology (e.g., monitoring their activity), and engagement with community members in a variety of contexts through the use of focus groups, co-design sessions, and town hall meetings—in order to hear their opinions and let them voice their concerns. Data that is collected using different methods is typically aggregated to provide a combination of quantitative and qualitative results. However, collecting multiple streams of data over several months can quickly multiply the outputs, making it difficult to tease out what might be causing particular effects or why people behave (or not) in certain ways. Much skill is involved in making sense of the different kinds of data without jumping to conclusions. There may be many factors and interdependencies at play that might be causing the observed effects or observed phenomena.
Despite this increase in uncertainty and lack of control, what is discovered and interpreted from RITW can be most revealing about what happens in the real world (Rogers et al., 2007; Marshall et al., 2011; Hornecker and Nicol, 2012). A benefit of RITW is greater ecological validity compared with extrapolating results from lab studies. Most significantly, RITW studies can show how people understand and appropriate technologies in their own terms and for their own situated purposes. Accordingly, RITW is increasingly being used to show ‘impact’ in terms of how new interventions have made a difference to a community (e.g., Balestrini et al., 2017), or how in the wild findings can provide empirical evidence for changing behavior or policy in society.
Thought Box: Beyond the Interface
Even though many of us still struggle to get the proverbial photocopier to copy (indeed our computer science department was offering tutorials to all staff, from professors to Ph.D. students, earlier this year with the arrival of a new machine), the pressing problems HCI researchers are increasingly concerned with are how people interact with an ecology of interfaces. A core challenge is to enable people to be able to switch between multiple interfaces and multiple devices. This framing requires understanding the context for why and how someone moves between them. Rather than being concerned with how best to support X (where X might be learning, working, socializing) using an individual device (e.g., a laptop, tablet or smartphone) it is necessary to work out how to design across platforms so that people can fluidly use multiple tools and devices, as they go about their everyday lives—picking up one, putting another down, or using several together in unison, by themselves or when interacting with others (Coughlan et al., 2012). What might seem obvious to do in a lab setting may not be obvious and may even be counter-intuitive in a real-world setting. A question this raises is how to frame, and which methods to use, when researching such multi-device settings across time and place in the wild?
1.5 AIM OF THE BOOK
The aim of this book is to provide an overview of HCI research in the wild, illustrating how it can traverse theory, design, technology, and in situ studies. It covers the motivations, concerns, methods and outcomes. As part of this endeavor, it addresses the challenges of conducting RITW, including the questions asked, the expectations, the trade-offs, the uncertainties, the form of analyses adopted, the role of the researcher, and their conduct when in the wild settings.
The book is targeted at both students and researchers who are new to the field of HCI and more generally, research methods, or for someone who simply wants to learn more about research in the wild. It covers RITW by charting and critiquing the what, when, where, why and how questions. In subsequent parts of the book, it examines the tools, methods, and platforms that have been imported, adapted and developed to study user-interactions in the wild, and how researchers have grounded concerns, problems, and new opportunities through their framing. It also outlines the benefits, limitations, impacts, and advances that have resulted from research in the wild.
1.6 SUMMARY
One of the motivations for conducting research in the wild is to demonstrate how a technology intervention can engage a community in a participatory manner. Underlying motivations include enabling people to collaborate, connect with each other or join forces in order to raise awareness, and act upon an issue. Another rationale for conducting RITW is to deploy novel technologies in a setting in order to provoke a response (e.g., getting people to comment on a new display in a street), a new kind of interaction (exploring how one looks in an augmented public mirror) or social engagement (e.g., encouraging strangers to talk with one another in a public place). A further reason is to develop new understandings and theorizing about how people use technology in their everyday lives—based on the body of empirical work that demonstrates how behavior differs or is the same as when using “older” and other kinds of technologies. In summary, RITW is becoming more widely accepted as a de facto way of conducting research for HCI, complimenting but also questioning the validity of traditional lab-based research approaches.
CHAPTER 2
Moving Into The Wild: From Situated Cognition to Embodied Interaction
2.1 INTRODUCTION
The phrase “in the wild” first came to the forefront, in the late 1980s and early 1990s when anthropologists Lucy Suchman (1987), Jean Lave (1988), and Ed Hutchins (1995) began writing about cognition in the wild. Collectively, they critiqued the fledgling field of cognitive science, which was concerned with how the mind worked. The accepted theorizing at the time focused on information processing in the head, and the construction of rational models of behavior as the execution of plans. In sharp contrast to this classical view, they explain cognition—as observed in everyday practice—being distributed and situated in the moment. Moreover, in their respective books (see Figure 2.1), they cogently argue that cognition can only be studied in the wild. Their approach was to present a social anthropology of cognition and cognition in practice, respectively.
Figure 2.1: Suchman’s, Lave’s, and Hutchins’ classic “In the Wild” books.
2.2 PLANS AND SITUATED ACTION
The first in the wild classic was Lucy Suchman’s (1987) Plans and Situated Actions book. It took the fields of HCI and computer science by storm—and its insights were quickly adopted by a new generation of researchers and students. For many, it resonated with their discontent and worries about the limitations of traditional cognitive models. For others, it opened their eyes to new ways of thinking about human-machine interactions. The accepted view at the time was that scientific models were needed to explain how the mind works and that these should form the basis of user models used in machine-human dialogues. Folk theories or common sense explanations were dismissed as inadequate. Suchman, however, argued the opposite: common sense notions of planning should not be viewed as inadequate versions of scientific models of action, but taken as resources people use in their practical deliberations. To support her contrarian view of how to conceptualize and understand human behavior, she described how people use these resources along with various constraints in the environment in their everyday planning and action. Instead of developing so called scientific models to develop human-computer interfaces, developers should draw from accounts of how people act and react in their everyday lives.
Much of Suchman’s early research was to provide detailed situated accounts of the relations among people and between people and technology. One of her most cited examples is of a study she conducted of pairs of users trying to fathom out how to use a Xerox photocopier. While not an in the wild study (since it was conducted