digital tools – a new way to interact with the world (taik working papers f-35)

8/8/2019 Digital Tools – A New Way to Interact with the World (TaiK Working Papers F-35)

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WORKING PAPERS

University of Art and Design Helsinki

F 35

Digital Tools

– A New Way to Interact with the World

Blanca acuña & nuno correia (eds.)

Brenda castro

eirik Fatland

Xin li

Heli r antavuo

Joanna saad-sulonen

Mariana salgado

a nna salMi



Digital Tools, a New Way to Interact with the World

Publication SerieS, F 35


editorial boardYrjänä Levanto (editor-in-chief), Pia Sivenius, Susann Vihma

lay-out

Blanca Acuña

Further inFormation


Hämeentie 135C

00560 Helsinki

Tel. +358-9-75631, telefax +358-9-756-30433

Publications / Annu Ahonen, tel. +358-9-756-30213, e-mail: annu.ahonen@taik.

Research Institute / Pia Sivenius, tel. +358-9-756-30528, e-mail: pia.sivenius@taik.

ISBN 978-951-558-265-2pdf

ISSN 1455-8955

Helsinki 2008

Working PaPerS / työPaPerit



Contents

Blanca acuña and nuno correia: digital tools, a new way to i nteract witH tHe world..........................3

eirik Fatland and Xin li: tHe PuPPet ui: tools For nonverBal coMMunication in virtual e nvironMents......4

Heli r antavuo: Playing witH BroadBand: circulating digital s naPsHots....................................................12

Brenda castro: tHe virtual art garden:

a case study oF user -centered graPHical user i nterFace design..................................................................17

Joanna saad-sulonen: First stePs towards designing tHe “urBan Mediator ”................................................23

Mariana salgado and a nna salMi: use oF clay in tHe dialogue witH tHe visually iMPaired.....................27



3

This new Working Papers edition presents a se-

lection of projects, research, and educational

topics developed at the Media Lab, the School of

Digital Design of the University of Art and Design

Helsinki.

The topic developed in the current issue of MediaLab Working Papers focuses on theories and designissues related to tools within the digital domain. Sincenew media is such a novel and interdisciplinary eld,it offers a wide breadth of possible research lines inthe creation of such applications. The assorted ap-

proaches towards the topic developed by the authorsin this issue are a sample of the diversity and scope of

possibilities in the eld.

The digital revolution that spread with the use of personal computers and the Internet in the 80’s and90’s has grown at a vertiginous speed among thedifferent societies, attracting global attention to the

development and implementation of Informationand Communication Technologies around the world.These technologies have opened new possibilities for accessing digital information, obtaining knowledge,

building virtual worlds, and have also allowed peopleto be connected to several locations without restric-tions of time and space.

These digital possibilities are accessed by the useof tools, artifacts that act as mediators between hu-mans and technology. Tools have been around sinceearly times, when Humankind started trying to ‘re-cord’, ‘sign’, ‘communicate’, and ‘perform’. For ac-complishing this, men searched for ways to inventartifacts that could act as an extension of humanactivities. The search for such artifacts spread fromthe use of ints to mark changes of seasons; to themaking of pointed sticks for drawing on clay tabletsto sign animals and belongings; through tool makingfor hunting and helping on harvesting activities; tothe mass-production of household objects, electronicdevices for communication and entertainment; up tothe design and implementation of computer interfac-es that allow for interaction with digital systems.

This selection of essays is a sample of the researchand academic work developed in Media Lab. Some

of these essays are in the initial conceptual state, or have already designed the rst prototype; while oth-ers have by now implemented usability testing or are

part of a bigger research project towards a doctoral

dissertation work. Through different ways but withthe same goal, the following writers have been re-searching ways for developing solutions, which canimprove interaction and performance with the use of digital tools.

Fatland and Li, in their paper “The Puppet UI:Tools for Nonverbal Communication in Virtual En-vironments”, present tools as part of a larger ICT en-vironment, while a different approach is developed

by Rantavuo, in the paper “Playing with Broadband:Circulating Digital Snapshots”, where the analysis isfocused on the way visual material circulates withinmedia. Two of the writers propose projects wheretools are used within a community of interest: Castro,in the essay “The Virtual Art Garden: A Case Studyof User-Centered Graphical User Interface Design”,develops a concept based on collaboration and moti-vation within a community, and Saad-Sulonen, withthe text “First Steps Towards Designing the “Urban

Mediator”, conducts research on how to implementan interface for connecting citizens and city admin-istrators in the Helsinki area. Finally, the text by Sal-gado and Salmi proposes accessibility solutions inmuseum settings: “Use of Clay in the Dialogue withthe Visually Impaired”.

There is still plenty of research to be done on thedesign, development, and implementation of toolsthat could fulll this 21st century need for the ex-tension of human activities in the digital sphere. AsBergson states, “Intelligence, considered in what itseems to be its original feature, is the faculty of man-

ufacturing articial objects, especially tools for mak -ing tools” (Bergson quoted in Gassée & Rheingold1990, 225). The dossier Digital Tools, a New Way toInteract with the World, hopes to contribute to thesedevelopments with ideas, projects and academic re-search within the eld of new media.

BiBliograPHy

gassée J.r. & r Heingold M. 1990. “The Evolutionof Thinking Tools”. In B. Laurel (ed.): The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. Reading: Addi-son-Wesley Publishing, 225-227.

k ay, A. 2001. “User Interface: A Personal View”. In R.Packer & K. Jordan (eds.): Multimedia - From Wagner

to Virtual Reality. New York: W. W. Norton & Com-

pany, 121-131.

Digital Tools, a New Way to Interact with the World

“The notion of tool has always been a romantic idea for humankind –

from swords to musical instruments to personal computers (...)” (Kay 2001, 131)

Blanca Acuña (bacuna@taik.)Nuno Correia ([email protected])



5

• Social curiosity - building familiaritywith (and understanding of) people the

user cannot meet in the ofine world.

• Flirtation and virtual romance.

• Cybersex and sexually themed role-play.• Company, the satisfaction of the needfor human contact.

• Community, the satisfaction of the needto belong.

• Competitive game-play, pittingindividuals or teams against AI or other human opponents.

We can draw two conclusions from this list of

social Internet behaviours: All of these practices may,

to a greater or lesser degree, be aided by non-verbalcommunication. And they rely, to varying degrees,on hiding the actual user under the layer of the online

persona.

We can assume that current social users at present

nd text input at least minimally acceptable, or theywould not engage in social behaviour on the Internet.

Our goal is thereby to enhance the experience of those

users who nd the text input method lacking. Thesefall into two groups: those who make do with textinput, but would prefer a more expressive interface,and those who currently are not social users due to

the lack of support for nonverbal communication.A third group, social users who prefer the text

input method, fall outside of our target group. Suchusers might lack interest or skill in non-verbal

communication, or they might feel more comfortableand skilled in expressing themselves through text.

Many of the current social users, due to practice andfamiliarity, can be assumed to belong to this thirdgroup.

We are primarily interested in aiding the social

interaction of adult users, but do not exclude potentialfuture applications designed for children.

Design objectives

First and foremost, our ideal input method shouldfacilitate complex non-verbal communication

between users. Additionally, it should fulll four criteria that follow from the target user group:

1. Agency - the user should feel a greater sense of

presence and control in the virtual environment than

with the keyboard input method.

2. Learnability - no prior training or explanationshould be required for the user to master the basicfunctionality of the input method.

3. Flexibility - users should be capable of learning

or inventing gestures not envisioned in the original

design.

4. Feasibility - the input method or device should

be based on off-the-shelf, inexpensive technology.

Background: verBal and nonverBal coMMunication

Nonverbal signals

Nonverbal signals are essential to any kind of

interpersonal communication. As a “communicationcoding system” nonverbal signals play a key role in

impression formation, complex emotional expressionand conveying personality (Burgoon and Hoobler

2002, 241-299). Research has found that the majorityof humans are strongly reliant on nonverbal cues,such as body movements, gestures and appearance,in order to form initial impressions of others and

act upon those impressions. Burgoon and Hoobler describe seven classes of nonverbal codes in human

visual cognition and sound sensation:

• Kinesis: bodily movements, gestures,facial expressions, posture, gaze, and gait

• Vocalics or paralanguage: pitch,loudness, tempo, pauses, and inection

• Physical appearance: clothing,hairstyle, cosmetics, fragrances,adornments

• Haptics: use of touch, includingfrequency, intensity, and type of contact

• Proxemics: use of interpersonaldistance and spacing relationships

• Chronemics: use of time as messagesystem, punctuality, lead time, etc.

• Artifacts: manipulable objects and

environmental features that may conveymessages

In face-to-face communication, most of thesenonverbal cues are rich, visible, and relatively easy tograsp. In most situations, they co-exit with linguisticcues.

Colin Ware states that “gesture as linking devices” isthe most natural way to link verbal content and visual

imagery (Ware 2004, 309). He classies gestures as belong to three distinct classes, dependent on their relationship to the speech they accompany: deictic(indicating), symbolic (illustrating) or expressive(emphasizing). According to Ware, gestures providean additional, visual, cognition channel alongsidethe audible channel of speech. A similar observation



6

is made by Goldin-Meadow (1999, 422): “Becausegesture rests on different representational devices

from speech, and is not dictated by standards of formas is speech, it has the potential to offer a differentview into the mind of the speaker.”

Nonverbal signals in virtual worlds

Table 1 shows the degree to which these non-verbalcues are implemented in two of the most popular

virtual worlds – World of Warcraft (a MMO game)and Second Life (a multi-purpose virtual world).

Proxemics and Chronemics are possible to use as

non-verbal signals in virtual worlds, but the nature of such worlds decrease the power of these signals. Since

the user is not actually present in the virtual world, butobserves the avatars from an external point of view

(zooming in and and out at will), proxemics loosesome of their power. Lacking voice, and accurateinformation about the user presence, chronemics – too – loose some of their communicative power. If a user delays an answer, he/she may not be sendinga nonverbal signal but simply be preoccupied with

something other than virtual world interaction in her

real physical environment.

Haptics, the illusion of touch, pose large challengesin terms of technology and human factors, rather than design, and are therefore excluded from thisstudy. Tools that allow the users to modify and create

content, such as Second Life’s 3D building tools andscripting language, are already proving effective atallowing players to use appearance and artifacts as

nonverbal signals.

Our focus is on the two remaining classes of

nonverbal signs: kinesis and vocalics. These are,incidentally, the most commonly used and identiableforms of nonverbal signals.

The virtual worlds that are popular at present have

either no user control of avatar gestures, or implementan interface where the user can run commands – as

text or button-clicks – to initiate gestures or modify posture. In Second Life, for example, a “/dance”command will start the avatar dancing according

to a pre-dened animation. Users can replace suchanimations by uploading a custom animation of their

own design, but not improvise a new gesture on they.

Voice communication, a prerequisite for vocalicsignals, require voice rather than text communication.At present, voice communication in virtual worlds isonly available through third-party services such as

Ventrillo and Teamspeak, but not through the user

Kinesis Vocalics Appearance Haptics Proxemics Chronemics Artifacts

Second

Life

World ofWarcraft

Limited,

UC

Very

Limited,

SC

No

No

Yes

Partial

No

No

Possible

Possible

Possible

Possible

Yes,

UC

Partial,

SC

Table 1: Support for nonverbal signals in “Second Life” and “World of Warcraft”.UC= User Created Content, SC= System Created Content.

interface itself. Furthermore, speech through such

services has no effect on the properties of the virtualworld. When a user chats in Second Life, the avatar mimics keyboard-typing movements, but if he or shespeaks through voice-chat software nothing happens

to the avatar. Neither can the user’s voice be heard by

other users without the required software set to theappropriate channel.

Previous research

There are several examples of design research

approaching non-verbal communication in avatar-

based online environments. One of the earliest, Comic Chat (Kurlander et al. 1996, 225-236), representedusers as 2D avatars on a stage composed accordingto the conventions of comic strips. BodyChat

(Vilhjálmsson & Cassell 1998, 269-276) and Cursive

(Barrientos & Canny 2002, 151-152) automateavatar gestures by estimating the user’s intentions.

In BodyChat , intentions are explicitly input throughuser selection of events such as “greeting” and“farewell” but are modied by variables such as timeand distance between avatars. Cursive, designed for

pen input, allows avatar control through pen gestures,

and additionally interprets the user’s handwriting todetermine the avatars gesture and posture. Sentoy

(Paiva et al. 2003, 60-67) uses a physical doll as inputdevice for a virtual doll, in the context of a game



7

where the user would manipulate the doll through one

of six pre-set gestures corresponding to emotions.

PuPPets as interFaces

Learnability of hand puppets

Puppets and their interfaces come in a wide range of

complexity and required skill. Some puppet designs,such as the Balinese shadow puppet or the two-handed marionette of European puppetry, requireyears of practice to master. “Hand puppets”, whichare worn over the puppeteer’s hand, require minimalskill to manipulate. A child may pick up a hand

puppet for the rst time, and immediately be ableto use the puppet to mimic speech and for gestural

communication.The learnability of puppet models is largely an

issue of mapping and coordination. In the case of the

hand puppet the ngers of the puppeteer are mappeddirectly to the limbs of the puppet, providing instantfeedback and reducing the cognitive load of puppet

operation. Single-handed puppets further reduce

the need for coordination between the puppeteer’s

limbs. As such, hand puppets are ideal models for anavatar control method designed for end users with

no particular skill in puppetry. Additionally, single-handed puppet interfaces leave the puppeteer’s other

hand free for mouse or keyboard interaction.Most hand puppet designs fall into one of two

categories - they are “sock puppets”, where the puppeteer uses the thumb opposite the four remaining

ngers to control a puppet’s mouth movements, and“glove puppets” where the puppeteer manipulates thehead and arms of the puppet using the thumb, middleand little ngers. The anatomy of the human handmakes it difcult to move all ve digits independentlyof each other. Typically, a glove puppet will bemanipulated through the use of three digits: thethumb, the little nger and the middle nger. The

index and ring ngers may either be clutched againstthe palm, or (preferably) moved together with themiddle nger and little nger.

User study

We conducted an informal user study to observe how

ordinary people (not professional puppeteers) express

themselves through a glove puppet. As we sought tounderstand play behaviour, the experiments took placein a class room and a cafe, rather than in a laboratoryor studio. We did two different experiments: in the

rst experiment, we asked users manipulating a hand puppet to have a short conversation with another

person. In the second experiment, we ask users toexpress certain emotions, such as joy, sadness and

boredom, through the hand puppet. These experimentswere recorded to video and reviewed afterwards.

Findings from observation of the conversationexperiments (3 experiments):

• Users made larger and more visiblemovements when the puppet was

“speaking” than when it was “listening”.For example, users would move the

puppet in a small, nodding movement toindicate “I’m listening”. (much like two

people have a conversation)

• All three of Ware’s gesture classes(symbolic, deictic and expressive) wereused.

Findings from observation of the expression

experiments (4 experiments):• “Joy” was usually indicated by large,energetic, rapid movements with the

puppets head lifted upwards.

• “Sad” movements were usually slow,with the puppet’s head bowed down and

the hands held close to the face or eyes.

• “Boredom” movements were lessconsistent than the two others. Two out

of four users expressed this emotion by

making puppet leaning backwards.

• Although there are general trends for both happy and sad movement, eachuser’s movements were distinct and

unique.

Findings from both experiments:

• All users employed vocalizations, suchas laughs, whistles and sighs, to clarifythe puppet’s emotion. For example,rapidly twisting the puppet from left

to right might be interpreted in several

ways, but giggling sounds accompanying

it were used to express joy.

• Users often twisted the puppet around.Rotation of the head or whole puppet

along the vertical axis was the most

common form of twisting.

• A recognizable gure might not bean ideal puppet for a generic avatar. Our

puppet looked like a lamb, and so at leasttwo users tried to express the character of

a lamb rather than conveying their own

emotions and intentions.



8

PrototyPing PuPPet ui

Tracking

To emulate the interface of a glove puppet, our ideal input method needs to track three points – corresponding to the three ngers – in all threedimensions. Glove puppets only incidentally requirethe movement of the nger joints to operate – sufcient information can be obtained by trackingthe ngertips relative to the hand.

Rotation of the ngers relative to each other isnear impossible, and so tracking of nger rotation isnot necessary. However, hand puppet manipulation

requires rotation and movement of the whole hand.Our user interviews showed users twisting the puppet

from left to right in order to communicate a gesture of

refusal, or lifting it rapidly up and down in a jumpingmotion to communicate joy or anger.

An ideal hand-tracking device for avatar puppetry

will thus have the following requirements:

• Tracking of three points, correlated withngers, in 3 degrees of freedom (x, y andz axes) each.

• Tracking of whole hand rotation and

movement in 6 degrees of freedom - x, yand z plus rotation along all three axes.

This adds up to a requirement for a 15 degreesof freedom (DOF) hand-tracking device, a levelof tracking offered only by expensive high-end

datagloves. However, the interface method does notrequire precise data on hand location and rotation,as information about hand rotation along the x and z

axes can be inferred by comparing ngertip locationto the palm location. Additionally, the movement of ngertips is anatomically constrained, so that their

position along the z axis may – at least partially –

be inferred from their position along the x and yaxes. A minimal hand-tracking device for avatar

puppetry therefore needs only to meet the following

requirements:

• Tracking of the palm in two degrees of freedom (x,y).

• Tracking of three points correlated withngers, each along the x and y axes,relative to the palm.

• Tracking of hand rotation along the yaxis.

The minimal Puppet UI may therefore be made bytracking four points along two axes, and rotation of

the whole hand along one axis. The location trackingcan be accomplished through a 2D input device suchas a web camera, accompanied by colour or patterntracking software and calculation of the points’

position relative to each other. Hand rotation alongthe y axis is not easy to infer from a 2D capturedevice, but early prototypes can be done withouty-rotation tracking.

Additionally, certain events may need to be trackedwith additional precision:

• Two ngers touching, e.g. the case of anavatar clapping.

• Fingers touching the palm, the case of aclosed st.

These events may be inferred by the proximity

of tracked points – two ngertips overlapping can be interpreted as a “clap” event. Unfortunately,occlusion of a tracked point by another will yield the

same data even without the ngers actually touching.Ideally, touch sensors in the device will be able todetect such events.

Feedback

Glove puppets provide tactile feedback throughngertips touching each other or the hand, and through

Figure 1.



9

the properties of the material itself. The material

properties of the puppet are important constraints

on user manipulation - by making movements easier

or harder to perform, they constrain the puppet tomake certain gestures easier or harder to express. In

a well-designed puppet, the gestures that are easy toexpress will be the ones that make the puppet more

convincing. A Puppet UI may be designed along thesame lines – built to constrain certain movements,and make other movements simpler. This would also

provide the user with passive haptic feedback.

Active haptic feedback is desirable to the degreethat the avatar touches other physical objects in the

virtual environment. This may be the case, as withavatars shaking hands or wielding tools, but thecomplexity and expense of active haptic devices

means that this type of feedback is not feasible for

the Puppet UI project.

The primary feedback from the Puppet UI willthereby be visual. As the interface maps the user’shand to a 3D avatar, visual feedback may come from

both locations:

1.The user observing the avatar movements on the screen

2.The user observing his/her hand as it is being tracked

This leaves us with two options for further design.

If the screen is to provide all feedback, the inputdevice does not need to resemble a puppet. But if the input device, by itself, provides visual feedback

it may need to resemble the puppet to some degree.

We intend to explore both options through further

prototypes and user studies.

Working Prototype

To test our assumptions further, we built a roughworking prototype. The prototype was programmed

in Macromedia Director MX, using the TTCPro Xtrafor colour tracking. Our protoype input device was

a glove, with three coloured points on the ngertip,worn and held in front of a web camera. The software

would track the ngertip points, and map them to thelimbs of a 2D avatar. We tested two different formsof mapping. In our rst experiment, points and limbswere mapped directly to each other. If the user moved

her middle nger to the right, the avatars head wouldmove to the right. The second experiment limited the

avatars movements to trajectories – if the user movedher middle nger to the right, the avatar head wouldstay in the same location, but tilt towards the right.

The rst experiment, providing direct mapping between ngertips and avatar limbs, worked better than the second experiment, where the tracked datawas modied to better represent the movements of the avatar. Users reported a stronger sense of control,and viewers felt the motions of the simple avatar to be

more believable. These results indicate that immediate

feedback and direct mapping are necessary to sustain

user agency in this form of manipulation.

The lack of precision in colour tracking led the

avatar’s limbs to move even when the users hand

was still. The precision of colour tracking may be

improved through a better camera, better tracking points, and more control over the lighting. Still, thisindicates that the colour tracking method may not

work well enough for an end-user product.

discussion

Speech In 2.2 (above) we identied kinesis and vocalicsas the classes of non-verbal cues most suitable for

our purposes. The prototype Puppet UI exploresthe use of kinetic cues, but not vocalics – which areconveyed through verbal communication. Though

one might easily imagine a purely non-verbal virtual

environment, where communication occurs throughmimicry, the goal of our design is to enhance rather than substitute the user experience of current virtual

environments. Language therefore needs to be

considered for future iterations.

One option is to retain the text chat interface

currently used in virtual worlds. If the user is engagedFigure 2.



10

in using one hand for avatar control, the other handmight be used for text entry through a keyboard.

Keyboard text entry, while it may be done single-handedly, is signicantly faster when done with bothhands. Furthermore, users are generally accustomedto two-handed keyboard typing. In the typical desktop

computer set-up, one hand is also used for interactionwith a mouse or other pointing device.

A second option, then, is to use voice communication – which would also add vocalics to the array of non-verbal signals. By tracking the user’s voice input,especially if aided by a microphone that lters outambient noise, the avatar’s mouth or head can besynchronized to the spoken word. In our initial user

tests, we saw a clear difference in user behaviour depending on whether the puppet was made to speak

or not. A speaking puppet would be moved in large,dramatic gestures while a silent (listening) puppet

might make small, almost imperceptible movementsto communicate agreement, disagreement andattention. Tracking the user’s voice input can thus

confer the additional benet of modifying avatar behaviour to imitate this pattern.

However, voice in virtual environments is far fromunproblematic. The user’s real voice risks revealing

his/her gender, age, nationality, dialect or sociolect inways that text chat does not, limiting the anonymity

of the user and making role-play difcult. Practicessuch as gender-play, where a user of one gender plays an avatar of the opposite gender or some third

gender, are well-documented and pervasive in virtual

environments. The virtual world promises that “youcan be whoever you wish to be” – this might be partof the core appeal for current Social Internet users.

conclusions

The prototyping, benchmarking and user studiesdone in the rst iteration showed that the idea itself is viable. But it also showed that further iterations areneeded to rene and test this idea. Future iterations of the prototype should include audio transmission and

study how this effects user behaviour and perception.

The question of input device design, whether itshould ideally resemble the avatar or not, needs to beresolved through comparative user studies.

The current iteration of the Puppet UI captureshand and head movements well, but it is far less

precise when it comes to facial expressions. Users arelimited to moving and/or tilting the avatar’s head, andto underline head movements with arm movements.

Given the importance of facial expression in non-verbal communication, this may prove a disadvantage.This issue can be further explored by modifying our

input device to work as a facial control interface,mapping points to eyes and mouth movements rather

than head and hands, or by directly tracking the user’sfacial expressions.

It is possible that the puppet UI would not appeal tothe typical social Internet users. It would break with

already established practices regarding anonymity

Figure 3.



11

and textual meta-communication. We hope to test

whether a puppet UI might appeal to new users,whether it might enable new kinds of social Internet

practices, and whether such practices are interestingor powerful enough to replace text-based practices.

BiBliograPHy

Barrientos, F. & canny, J. 2001. “Cursive: A Novel In-

teraction Technique for Controlling Expressive Avatar Gesture”. In UIST 01. November 11-14, 2001. Orlan-

do: Florida, 151-152.Burgoon, J. & HooBler , G. 2002. “Nonverbal Signal”. In

M. Knapp & J. Daly (eds.): Handbook of Interpersonal

Communication. London: Sage Publications, 241-299.donatH, J. S. 1999. “Identity and Deception in the Virtual

Community”. In P. Kollock & M. Smith (eds.): Com-

munities in Cyberspace. Routledge: London, 29 - 59.

k urlander , D., skelly. T. & salesin. D. 1996. “ComicChat”. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference

on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques

SIGGRAPH ‘96 . New York: ACM Press, 225-236.Montola, M. 2005. “Designing Goals for Online Role-

Players”. In S. de Castell & J. Jenson (eds.): Changing

Views: Worlds in Play. Proceedings DVD of DiGRA

2005 Conference. Vancouver: Simon Fraser Univer -sity.

Paiva, A., Prada, R., cHaves, R., vala, M., Bullock , A.,a ndersson, G., & Höök , K. 2003. “Towards Tangibil-ity in Gameplay: Building a Tangible Affective Inter -face for a Computer Game”. In Proceedings of the 5th

International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces(Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, November 05- 07, 2003). ICMI ‘03. New York: ACM Press, 60-67.

goldin-Meadow, S. 1999. “The Role of Gesture in Com-

munication and Thinking”. In Trends in Cognitive Sci-

ences. Vol. 3, No. 11, November, 1999, 422.vilHJálMsson, H. H. & cassell, J. 1998. “BodyChat: Au-

tonomous Communicative Behaviors in Avatars”. InK. P. Sycara & M. Wooldridge, (eds): Proceedings of

the Second International Conference on Autonomous

Agents (Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, May10 - 13, 1998). New York: ACM Press, 269-276.

ware, C. 2004. Information Visualization: Perception for

Design (2nd edition). San Francisco: Morgan Kauf -

mann.

virtual worlds:

Second Life: http://secondlife.com/World of Warcraft: http://worldofwarcraft.com/



12

This article addresses information and communi-

cation technologies (ICT’s) as tools for the playful

and creative circulation of digital snapshots. Thepaper is based on interviews with sixteen Finnish

cameraphone and digital camera users in 2006,

and is part of a wider doctoral study. Through

examples of how the participants used ICT’s as

tools for playful snapshot circulation, I will sug-

gest that humour and playfulness were important

in creative ICT’s use and that mobile technologies

were less valued than computer-based ones. I will

also discuss why the photographers themselves

did not value their playful creativity.

FroM alBuMs to online circulation oF snaPsHots

Digitalization and the introduction of cameras tomobile phones have brought snapshot photographyinto close connection with broadband media. Whileinterviewing cameraphone users for my study, mostof whom also used digital cameras, it caught my at-tention that creative ways of using cameras and on-line communication channels were related to playfuluses of the snapshots. Thus the question that I willexplore in this paper is: How do ICT’s serve as toolsfor playful and creative circulation of snapshots? Iwill rst present the approach, methods, and the data

for this study. Next, I will show detailed examplesof how the participants in my study circulated snap-shots playfully. I will then consider how the personsevaluated and made choices in using the circulationtechnologies. Before concluding, I will discuss whythe snapshot photographers themselves did not valuetheir creativity in the playful circulation of photos.An underlying presumption behind this article is thatuser creativity in the eld of ICT’s is welcome andencouraged, and that more knowledge is needed onwhat invites it.

tHeoretical FraMework , MetHods, and data

The frame of reference for this paper is the eld of domestication and cultural studies. Particularly, re-

Playing with Broadband: Circulating Digital Snapshots

Heli Rantavuo ([email protected])

search that studies how people make sense of digitalmedia technologies in the context of the home or the

household, as opposed to the context of paid work.(See, for example, Bakardjieva, 2005; Berker et al.,2006; Lally, 2002; Peteri, 2006; Silverstone & Had-don, 1996; Uotinen, 2005). Relevant to my approachconsidering playfulness are British ethnographicworks on the internet and mobile media. They stressthese “as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces (...)” (Miller & Slater, 2001, 5) and astechnologies that are used to fulll “desires that arehistorically well established, but remain unfullled

because of the limitations of previous technologies.”(Horst & Miller, 2006, 6) Methodologically, my ap-

proach on cameraphone use is explorative and stress-es the user perspective. (Ito & Okabe, 2006; Okabe

et al., 2006)

Sixteen Finnish cameraphone photographers of whom fourteen also used digital cameras participatedin the study. The group of participants consisted of ve 17-18-year-olds, two girls and three boys; ve20-35-year-olds, three women and two men; andsix 35-53-year-olds, two women and four men. Theadult participants came from professional elds rang-ing from health care to the IT industry. None wereexperts in digital photography or mobile or internettechnologies. All participants resided in urban areas inSouthern Finland. The research period during which

the participants made notes of all of their interactionswith digital photos, and saved the photos as far as itwas possible, varied from two to three weeks in thespring 2006. Soon after, we met for the interview. Ianalysed the data by writing case studies and seekingfor signicant themes across the cases, and playfuland creative circulation of photos occured under allof these themes of interpretation. As a technical note:the quotes in this paper have been translated by theauthor from Finnish, therefore they do not apppear inquotation marks.

circulating snaPsHots PlayFully

Raimo’s, 53, stevedore, most frequent cameraphoneactivity was sending picture messages at work toother stevedores. At the port, there were matters that



13

the stevedores could not discuss in the radio frequen-cy phones because the managers were connected tothe frequency as well. As a solution, the stevedoresused their own, private cameraphones to communi-cate amongst themselves. The matters that needed to

be kept secret from the managers concerned, for ex-ample, the way the stevedores organised their work,or the selling of alcohol and cigarettes on the shipsin the port. Much of this communication was carriedout by a humorous exchange of photos. There was,according to Raimo, a practical reason for exchang-ing pictures instead of phonecalls, for example. Ste-vedores work outdoors or in unheated spaces. Thismakes it difcult to operate anything with your n-gers for long, and your glasses turn foggy when you

put them on. It can also be noisy at the port, whichmakes it difcult to speak on the phone.

Although Raimo stressed the practical reasons for

sending photos instead of text, it was clear that therewere other reasons behind it as well. The men hadfound a way to extend the verbal joking of the work-

place to a pictorial form of communication, using thecameraphones as tools for it. Most of the pictures thatthe stevedores exchanged were visual puns, whether they were related to tasks at work or to topics relat-ed to life outside the port. Raimo explained that the

photo messaging took the form of a question-answer pattern. In this exchange, it was important, rst, to beable nd a clever picture for the message, to be ableto react back with equal wittiness, and, a fundamentalfactor, to be able to understand the joke. Frequently,

Raimo would use a photo that he already had on his phone and that he may have had used many times before in other contexts. The pictures were generallyeither not accompanied by a caption or the captionwould not explain the picture but add to the joke.For example, when someone on the radio frequencyhad asked for the time, Raimo had sent him a photoof the coffee machine, knowing that the recipientwould show it to others around him. Another photothat Raimo told me had served as an answer to manykinds of questions was a picture of a glass of brandy(Figure 1). At the port, he had used it to answer ques-tions about his plans for the weekend, and I receivedthe photo while arranging the study with the mes-

sage: Doctor’s orders - three days sick leave.

Another area of playful and creative cameraphonesnapshot circulation was planning, making, andsending greetings. To send a birthday greeting to hisgirlfriend, Sami, 28, had cut out a heart of red paper,lit tealights, and taken numerous pictures to reach the

outcome he was looking for. (Figure 2)

Figure 2. Birthday greeting

Sami: Well, this was supposed to be, like, a pictureto Saara, what day was it again, yeah it was her birthday. A picture that would convey that candlesare burning. The problem was, well, there was some photographic technique problem-solving involved[smiles]. So, the problem was that if I took a photo

and it was too dark, you couldn’t make anything outof the picture. Although now that I uploaded themto the computer, it looks better. On the phone, itlooked much worse. And if I added too much light,you couldn’t see there were candles burning, [butyou could see] the whole background. So I was,like, looking for the perfect [smiles] picture thatwould be a nice birthday greeting. (...) I thought

I’d look for, like, a clichéd love feeling [emphasis

Sami’s] here, and what would be more of a clichéthan a candle and a heart.

The participants in my study who were creativewith their cameraphone photos, or used them play-

fully in their communication, did not restrict photomessaging to phone-to-phone exchange. In fact, mul-timedia messaging was a tool they normally soughtto avoid. The main reasons for this were the price thatwas regarded to be too high, and the technical prob-lems that people encountered when trying to send or receive the messages. As an alternative route, older adults preferred e-mail, while the younger genera-tion preferred chat and instant messaging. Whatever the tool, a common denominator to this circulation

became that it was no longer relevant whether the photos had been taken with the cameraphone or thedigital camera, or downloaded. (Generally, the par -

ticipants were often careful to separate cameraphonesnaps from other kinds of photos.)

Figure 1. Glass of brandy with many signications



14

Sami: Well, sending photos by e-mail might besomething a bit more ofcial, like if I, if I have hap-

pened to snap a photo related to work, it’s more for that. And the general use, which is not too commoneither, is, I don’t know, with Skype maybe, well atleast through Messenger (...) through them with

my friends (...) something a bit more humourous

[laughter] I’ve been sending to friends at times.

HR: Umm, well, how do you happen to send them,like, why do you send, how do you come to think of sending a photo to someone?

S: Well, it’s about what we have chatted aboutwhile instant messaging, for example, a mate (...)went back to Vancouver, and in December, when hehad gone back, we chatted and he mentioned he hadsome kind of a car there. It was pretty humourous,this chatting of ours, so I had to make fun of him a bit. I remembered I had a picture that I took when

I was interrailing in Greece in the summer. On one

of the islands there was a, you know, one of these bicycles with a motor installed on it. So I remem-

bered I had this photo, and I send it to him, say-

ing, you must have something like this, then. Andanother mate who happened to be in the same chat

(...) he sent something similar, a picture of a trac-

tor he had taken (laughs), in Spain, looking prettymiserable. So, like, I’ve sent pictures to mock other people [laughter].

Aaro, 52, had made a habit out of e-mailing cam -eraphone photos and digital video clips that he foundamusing to his friends, colleagues, and acquaintanc-es.

A: So, this mate is a head of research, or a professor ata physics lab, running some research project, and be-

cause [the licence plate] said FYS-1, it was logicallyrelated to physics, so I took a picture and e-mailed it tohim, like, is that your company car [laughter].HR: Yeah.A: And this, in turn, our estate manager is calledJalonen, well, there it is, so I, it’s related to that. So,this kind of pictures I take a lot. I mean, you can take a photo right there in the situation.

Because Aaro used a company phone, he couldnot send the photos directly from his phone. Firsthe had to transfer them to his computer, which hedid via bluetooth, to be able to send them out by e-mail. The tone of the messages and the effort related

to them resembled the e-mail spam trafc that took place among Aaro’s colleagues. While we were incontact, Aaro sent me all the spam he received or sent. The most popular themes had to do with sexualinsinuations, cars, or sports, and they were one-off visual jokes. Some of the messages were elaborateand time had been spent on constructing them. For example, a mail titled Trafc round-a-bout includeda Word document where photos had been added of around-a-bout in Great Britain that the author of thisle had found particularly confusing. He had addedtext, in fonts of different sizes and colours, to tell alittle story of the driver arriving to the crossroads and

becoming confused over how to drive through it.

The examples show that the participants were pre- pared to see some trouble for, rst, creating their play-ful messages, and second, for nding the most suit-able tool in each context to transmit their message.The participants considered their audience, thoughtabout tools at the audience’s disposal, the level of immediacy needed for the delivery of the messageand the response, and possible restrictions involvedat the recipient end. This way, they evaluated the op-tions that the ICT tools at their disposal provided for messaging. Sometimes, however, the evaluation leadto the decision of not to use information networks at

all but to simply show the snapshots to their desiredaudience from the camera, computer, or the phone.

evaluating tecHnologies For snaPsHot circulation

The most frequently cited reason for not using mobilemultimedia messaging was the cost of it. However,the participants were not in fact aware of exactlyhow much the messages would cost, but the imageof multimedia messaging as expensive comparedto other services persisted. Evaluations concerning

price were not, surprisingly, made against the qual-ity of the service. This was surprising because at thesame time, problems were frequently reported withthe service. It seemed that the active users were moreconcerned with the problems in the service than withthe price. Raimo, with the most experience in multi-media messaging, had for long debated problems inthe transmission of his messages with the operatorsand his mobile phone manufacturer. Sami reported

problems caused by having to often switch his SIM-card between two phones.

Sami: (...) I had to order [the missing settings] from[my operator] and so on, blah blah, install them.

Plus, as a side comment, for the [operator] ser -vice, you have to remember your user name and password that I didn’t remember either, and I canimagine how difcult it is for some Jack Smith

Figure 3. Aaro’s play with words



15

[laughter] to get the settings right on their phone

[laughter.]

Sami’s complaint highlighted a common prob-lem. Many users who would potentially wish to send

photo messages did not have an inkling on whether they had the right settings installed in their phone, or how they could install them if they did not. The sameconcerned the use of infrared or bluetooth. In other words, in the case of multimedia messaging, the lack of services, or the bad quality of them, was a commonreason for devaluing this tool among cameraphoneusers. Those who had other options and possessed theskills to nd a way around this problem, like Henri,17, relied on other tools. His statement also showsthat apart from technical or economic reasons, peoplesometimes decided not to use any kind of messagingtool due to the importance of shared presence whileviewing the photos.

Henri: Well, I think the last time I sent a picturemessage was at New Year’s, and I guess at Christ-mastime I sent one to someone. It’s rare that I

send picture messages, I tend to send e-mail if Ihave pictures that I want to send. (...) If I want to

transmit or send a photo, I do it directly from the phone with the infrared or bluetooth connection, or by e-mail or the Messenger. Sending picture mes-

sages, it’s, like, if you don’t have someone’s e-mailaddress, or you know that they never read it, the picture message is a more sure way to get the mes-

sage through right away. If you want to, say, wishsomeone happy birthday, you might send a mes-

sage with a picture. But I don’t, if I take a photo of something, I don’t usually send it to anyone.HR: Why?Henri: I do it on the computer, with the Messenger.Because of the cost. Well, it’s not so expensive, butit’s just not my thing. I’d rather say, come onlineand you’ll get a few photos, like. Much easier. Neater.

PlayFul circulation oF snaPsHots as “Just Playing”

In association to being playful, during the study, I no-ticed a contradiction between the way that the playfulmoments or messages were played down in words,and the manner in which they were told. Being play-ful with the cameras and photos was mentioned in

passing, and as a response to further questions, the participants convinced me it was “just playing”, noth -ing important to discuss at length. The playfulness,however, always took place between people whowere very close to each other, and I sensed a feelingof joy and enjoyment whenever I was told about theseevents in the interviews. The moments and messag-ing were also remembered very well. However, the

participants never explicitly acknowledged them asimportant, memorable, or even simply “fun” withoutany reservations. Cameraphone use in its totality, forexample, was often called “just playing.” The par-

ticipant wanted to show that she or he was aware of the fact that looking at the photos on the phone, forexample, was not useful. Cameraphone use was thus judged by the average Western notion that morally justied use of computers and other ICT’s is goal-ori-

ented and purposeful use where tasks are performed(see, for example, Hartmann 2005, 141-158). What Iwish to bring forth is that while the notion of the cre-ative use of ICT tools, and the value of such creativ-ity, may be obvious to researchers in the eld, it is notalways that to the users – at least when associated to

playfulness. As circulating snapshots in both privateand public internet messaging increases, however,ICT’s may gain new roles and increased value in the

process as tools for fun. The proliferation of internet picture galleries for social networking, for example, point to this direction.

conclusions

The examples of humourous and playful circulationof snapshots show that ICT’s can be tools for creativeand surprising communication in workplaces, in inti-mate relationships, and among friends. It seems thatthe users of chat and instant messaging services werethe most satised with the support that these applica-tions provided for their communication and creativ-ity. Even e-mail, which potentially involves a longdelay in delivering the message, was seen as a moreconvenient medium than the mobile multimedia mes-sage for circulating humorous messages.

Mobile multimedia messaging entails several problems from the perspective of enabling the user’screativity in photo circulation. First, it has the imageof an expensive service. Second, there is a contradic-tion in providing an easy user interface for sendingthe messages, on one hand, but making it difcult tomanage the settings needed for sending pictures, onthe other. Furthermore, without a reaction from therecipient, the sender is unaware whether the messagehas been delivered. It is also easier, and cheaper, toinclude multiple recipients to the message in onlinethan in mobile environments, and the pace of the ex-change of messages is quicker in the former than inthe latter – both important elements in the instancesof playful communication with pictures online thatwere reported in my study.

Apart from technical issues, there are cultural andsocial issues that potentially encourage or restrict cre-ative uses of ICT’s. The cameraphone, for example,is still seen by many as a gagdet, without the same ca-pacity to fulll the tasks and desires of its user as thepersonal computer is seen to have. Among the youthin my study, this seemed to lead to valuing the cre-ative use of online internet applications more than thecreative uses of the cameraphone and mobile mes-

saging, which were downplayed as “just playing.”



16

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kokemus ja kertomus. Joensuu: Joensuun yliopisto.



17

This paper describes the methodology used to

design a tool that aims at motivating virtual com-

munities of art education or related elds of studyto share visual material and work collaboratively.

The Virtual Art Garden is a Graphical User Inter-

face (GUI) that provides information about visual

works (or artworks) which are the practical out-

comes of students of art and design.

In the interface of the Virtual Art Garden, the art-works are represented through a map view in the com-

puter screen through a web-based system. Throughthe interface of the Virtual Art Garden, the user groupgenerates the visual aspect of the interface by orga-nizing freely the images that conform it, as well as bylinking artworks together with connecting lines. Thisfreedom of structuring a view map makes it possiblefor the users to adjust the categorization of the visualinformation depending on their needs.

Motivation

The decision to consider the doability of this projectis based in personal interests on the elds of Arts andDesign to be integrated efciently in virtual programsof study. The project is grounded in needs analysisand user observations from a community of virtuallearning in the eld of Art Education at the Universi-ty of Art and Design Helsinki. The basic needs deter -

mined in those studies were: improve collaborative practices and motivate participatory learning throughvisual based interfaces and through the building of shared identities.

The user group is that of virtual groups of art edu-cation. In this community, the use of virtual environ-ments and of visual communication are recurrent andone can nd good possibilities of taking advantageof emerging tools for online communication. Thedesign process began with different approaches con-sidering the advantages and weaknesses of mobiledevices, web applications, and virtual tools for the

The Virtual Art Garden:

A Case Study of User-centered

Graphical User Interface Design

design of those concrete needs detected. In this paper the focus is the nal outcome of the design process,

which is a web-based tool for sharing artworks andcommunicating around them.

designing tools in virtual coMMunities

Tools, in general terms, have the functionality of making tasks easier to perform. Nowadays, the needof performing tasks is very much related to informa-tion and communication: today’s society has the needto constantly produce knowledge and to communi-cate it in order to apply it in practical environments.The design of the tool that is described in this paper is meant to facilitate tasks related to organization and

communication of objects of information. The objec-tive is to propitiate knowledge building after an ad-equate visualization of these objects of information.

Knowledge building, a term which refers to theway societies learn in a world of information reach-able through pervasive media (Scardamalia 2003), isa result of a selective gathering of data and its appli-cation into real situations. Knowledge is created fromsocial needs and therefore it results on the basis of social development. The process of creating knowl-edge is nowadays strictly related to digital media: theway communities emerge and evolve over systems of information and communication.

The possibilities of virtual environments make of modern knowledge an undeniably community basedexperience (Capurro 1986). Virtual communitiesdetermine the hermeneutics of society as a collab-orative process of selecting information and build-ing meaning out of it, in relation to the diversity thatcomprises those communities. Innovative tools arecore in the transformation of cultures. Today, digitalonline tools that provide means of communication ina global scale not only transform cultures that existindependently from each other; they propitiate nexus

between communities that are almost anywhere and

Brenda Castro ([email protected])



18

lead to a conceptualization of a global society, basedon access to information through digital technolo-gies.

The “global informational society” (Castells 2000)

is transforming all the time around forthcoming tech-nologies. The design of technological tools shapesvery much this transformation; in the way that thetools provide elements that guide the way peopleinteract with the available information. Diversity

between members of communities –– and betweencommunities –– that interact pervasively is very richfor positive transformations in the informational so-ciety.

In order for a tool to be efcient, in general terms, itought to provide visible benets to the users througha simple and self-explicit mechanism (Shneiderman1998; Hix & Hartson 1993). This applies to tools of

all kind of technologies, both to physical (e.g. a pen-cil) and to digital (e.g. a word processor). When atool is efcient and it manages to be attached to acommunity, it inuences social transformations and

becomes a symbol that represents certain character-istics of the community, the users and their whole so-cial, historical, and economical environment. Groupsof people create, accept, adjust, and (sometimes) de-

pend on innovations; efcient tools are innovative ar -tifacts that determine the productivity and growth of a community: coexistence, common understanding,and similar aims.

The constant development of tools and people’sadopting and adapting those tools to their daily lives,make society dynamic, always transforming throughthe new ways in which tasks are performed. Peopleevolve with the impact of the tools they commonlyuse, and so, they also modify those tools as a processof understanding their benets (Krippendorff 2006).In that sense, tools become a representation of thecommunity using them, they become objects of iden-tity.

The Virtual Art Garden is conceptualized as a toolthat approaches the user group through identity. Theevolution of identities within a virtual community is

a collective process of participatory behavior. Onlinecommunities shape throughout internal activities andthe way in which members interact to perform thoseactivities is very much inuenced by the virtual en-vironment, by its symbolic and its functional char -acteristics. The interaction design of the Virtual ArtGarden intends to determine the feasibility of partici-

patory behavior.

seMiology oF tHe virtual art garden

Communication processes happen through symbolic

systems that cannot be separated from the culturalcontext in which they take place. Visual communica-tion is always coded and those codes allow commonunderstanding in society (Kress & Leeuwen 1998).Understanding means de-codifying and re-codifying

existing information into personal mental representa-tions.

Through a process of association, new concepts in-tegrate with assimilated ideas to construct new inter-

pretations. This conforms a set of both, abstract andconcrete mental representations that can be trans-formed into language –– spoken, written, or graphic

–– through the use of universal conventions (signs).This is fundamental to consider in the design of in-teractive systems, where communication depends onthe user’s actions over a digital interface, which hasto be understood, learnt, and identied by the user.

A visual interface works as an object of interactionthat gathers information from a group of users (andsometimes from other sources) and (re)presents it ina codied way. An interface is something that acts “in

between”: between people, between individuals and

information; and this aspect of being in between is atthe same time path and barrier. Through its main char-acteristics of interactivity, dynamics, and autonomy,an interface in the context of computers and virtualenvironments tend to amplify users’ mind (Krippen-dorff 2006). When designed for learning communi-ties, graphical user interfaces must act as a simpliedsymbolic system of information-communication thatenhances participation of the community and opens

possibilities of achieving personal and common cog-nitive results.

The use of interface design that enables visualiza-tion of hierarchies and categorization of informa-tion under a codied structure is necessary in virtualnetworks. The fact that categorization depends or ismanipulable by the users can also work as a factor of motivation in the process of building knowledge andof creating a meaningful virtual environment whereinformation is constantly evolving, dynamically or -ganized, always accessible, and productive.

user -centered design

The Virtual Art Garden aims at experimenting andintroducing the following statement: Learning prac-

tices in virtual communities can be improved by us-er-centered interfaces that consider the importance of social identities to encourage the cognitive develop-ment of individuals as part of a social system.

Designing tools by having a specic user group inmind can bring more benets than the usual interestof solving concrete needs. By studying the commu-nity that will be using the tool, it is expected to comeup with a design solution that can be easily accepted

by the users and incorporated to their daily practic-es. Further more, it allows the possibility of ndingcommon interests or behaviours that experimentingwith interfaces arise.

“User-centered design consists in more than ob-serving and interviewing the users” (Hix & Hartson1993, 30); getting to know the users in a deep way



19

leads to creative and innovative design solutions.User studies certainly require a complex of humanresources to get a clear and precise set of informa-tion out of the user group. Understanding user tasks,capabilities, and preferences (Preece 2000) are key

to develop the right tools that an online communitydemands.

MetHodology

The evolution of this project encompasses severalstages: from the determination of the user group anduser observation and analysis, to the sketching of the different approaches of the concept idea, and tillthe resolution of the nal concept and its progresstowards a hi- prototype. The last stages of the de-sign process consisted on the interaction design for user-user and system-user experiences, and on the vi-sualization of the tool from a functional approach (byconsidering tasks and features).

The methodology used for the design process con-sidered the premise that virtual environments must beexperimental rather than expectant. This means thatthe user must have certain freedom of interaction. Toachieve this, the interface should provide a set of ob-

jects of information that members of the communitycan freely decide how to use. Needs and motivationsare changing constantly and designs have to be adapt-able to the practical experiences of human-computer interaction.

A set of metaphors were sketched and analyzedduring the concept design as a process of brainstorm-ing. These metaphors were the result of the user studies. The most determinant ndings from that

brainstorming phase were then considered in a nalmetaphorical approach of the design solution, there-fore the title of this work is strictly related to the useof those metaphors.

MetaPHors

An approach of digital technologies through effec-tive use of metaphors as models implies natural inter-action between man and machine: “The use of visualmetaphors (...) informs the design process as muchas it enables users’ understanding” (Krippendorff

2006, 99). The role of rhetoric in designing digitalmedia solutions is not anymore that of persuadingas in Aristotelian times, neither that of illustrating inorder to magnify the importance or the beauty of anidea; in digital media design, rhetoric is about the use

of appropriate tangible phenomena as a ground (asa model) to create understanding between users andtechnologies.

By using situations, words, pictures, and metaphorsthat are natural and known to most users, a user’s ex-

pectations about an interface are supported, and cog-nitive directness is increased (Hix & Hartson 1993).Thinking of metaphors in the eld of mediated com-munication and interaction design helps to create anatural approach to human needs, thus, by generatinga spontaneous association between the new artifactthat is being designed and common places that areimmediately identied by the users as human beings

living in certain context.

Metaphors are very much related to artifacts, in thesense that natural phenomena has inspired technolo-gies and served as a model in the designing of tools.Richard Coyne sees this inspiration as a two sideseffect: “technologies are described biologically and

biology is sometimes understood in terms of technol-ogies” (Coyne 1995, 280). It is a human nature to usesigns as an understanding of phenomena, to explainsomething through examples and comparisons. Theuse of rhetoric in this sense, in the context of inter -

face design, relates to the purpose of nding naturaland ergonomic associations between the medium andthe human action.

tHe virtual art garden

The selected metaphor refers to the title of this paper,the Art Garden, and is a direct result of the user stud-ies. The initial association of the project with a gar-den comes from the idea of sharing a place that startsas an empty eld and can be grown in beauty and

harmony with combined effort and commitment.

This metaphor is grounded in the idea that each art-work is a very particular piece of creation, as a plant,

Figure 1. Illustration of the methodology used after the user studies.



20

that even if it belongs to a specic category it willnever have an exact replica. Plants are seed and needto be taken care of so they can grow nice and pretty.A plant little by little changes its form, and it contrib-utes to the ourishing and transformation of the gar -

den as a whole. As in a eld owned by several experi-mental gardeners, they can always grow more or theycan even cut, but with the understanding of sharing acommon space that has to become a complex experi-ence besides that of the of each single element.

Figure 2. First sketch. Each square represents a different art-work, connected with paths of selected width and color.

In the garden interface, paths follow patterns of identity and personal interests. Different paths can

be drawn between artworks to express emotional or technical associations. A garden, as a natural envi-

ronment immersed in the urban space gives us cer-tain feeling of relief as a small way out from rushand stress. The Virtual Art Garden should work in asimilar way, as a place for enjoyment after fulllingthe duties of studies. From a basis of intrinsic moti-vation, a place like this can be used for stimulatinglearning activities in a social, friendly way.

The main characteristic of the digital garden is thatit enables the collaborative building of identities by agenerative visual environment. Like in the architec-tural design of a botanic park, paths become essential.If one artwork is left alone without any path leadingto it or way out from it, the artwork will be less vis-

ited, and therefore, less commented. On the contrary,a work that has many ways in and out will be morevisited and thus, will receive constant feedback.

The Art Garden should act as a place where users participate freely and interact around a joint creativ-ity. Following a metaphorical approach, the aspectof identity and collaboration is searched through agraphical user interface taking advantage of web-

based technologies and of the association with acommon physical space.

concePt aestHetics

A visual element (as almost anything related to hu-man perception) is perceived differently from one

person to the other depending on individual mentalassociations and on the cultural context that the in-dividual is immersed on. Aesthetic perception is anindividual experience but seeks always a universalagreement (Kant 1987). Aesthetic experiences, that

ever since Plato have been discussed in relation to beauty and perception, refers to the emotional reac-tion that an individual has after an object or a repre-sentation of an object. It is an interactive experience

between the individual and the object, or more likely,the “interdependence among the elements of an ob-

ject” (Moynihan & Mehrabian 1981, 323).

From the motivational perspective, the aspect of aesthetic plays an important role, as it is strictly relat-ed to human emotional activity; which is subjective

but at the same time aims at being shared. From theway the virtual art garden works, a common buildingof a visual interface represents the aspect of moti-

vation that is propitiated through aesthetics. Tryingto avoid the cliché of design that represents beauty,the graphics are clean enough to let the user createtheir own aesthetics, or to experience their own ideaof beauty, ugly, serious, funny, etc.

To motivate the community, the interface featuresa common visualization created from individual im-ages as a result of collaborative work. Aesthetic ex-

periences are individual but are determined socially;in this sense, participants of the Virtual Art Gardenare expected to react emotionally to the visual inter-face that is generated within a context. Through these

experiences, a visual interface inuences the activityof the group members and this is understood in termsof social learning as a factor of motivation. The waythe Virtual Art Garden approaches aesthetics is bythe interaction of the users with the interface, or mostlikely, with the users themselves through the inter-face. This is comparable to the vision of aesthetics

proposed by Krippendorff; which focuses in the aes-thetic experience as an interaction of the user withthe artifact (Krippendorff 2006) that is external to theexpressive purposes of the designer.

eXPected contriButions tHrougH tHe

virtual art garden

The concept of the interface is based in two mainideas: identity and motivation; which are used interms of the hypothesis to improve learning practicesthat are virtual and community based. The elementsof identity are mostly the artworks appearing in theinterface as a map. The artworks alone are the objectsof information; they carry feedback and other data.The placement of these artworks is also an object of information on itself, in the sense that they act as a

pattern of recognition within the community. The placement in the map is visual information about the

community, its identity and activity.

Users will be adding images and linking them witheach other creating intentionally or non intention-



21

ally an object of their own. This is the main aspectwithin identity matters; the way the interface growsand evolves is through a process of participants’ rec-ognition in which the users become represented as acommunity.

Motivation is the second basic purpose of the proj-ect. The interface itself should work as a motiva-tional element by inuencing the participants to getinvolved in the evolution of the visual space. Other elements that are directly related to the artworks, asfeedback comments, work as motivation factors aswell. Paths opened from artwork to artwork are alsoa means of motivation.

conclusions

Designing technologies, technological tools and applications, imply transforming thinking processes and behavior, which demand, as a result, new thinkingand understanding of those technologies. Designingsuccessful tools for digital media can be approachedas an iterative design process that makes use of ex-

ploratory behavior. An iterative method of practi-cal experimentation that allows, and even expects,continuous reshaping of a tool. The design of virtualtools can take advantage of experimenting with ideasthat can be reshaped by the users or with direct users’feedback.

The presence of the user in the design process isnow almost a requisite. Following and reinterpretingwhat Eskelinen and Koskimaa (2002, in Introduc-

tion) describe as functional theory of media, concep-tual designers do not need to consider how a mediumworks or what are its limitations, but rather how it is

practically used an how it is integrated to people’s

emotions, body, and daily activities; something thatis done by the individuals themselves, through realexperiences with the technology.

Collaborative processes are more than ever taking

the advantage of cultural and knowledge diversity,and are integrating developers and users of tools ina joint development, where “the aim is to progress ina collaborative way towards a global sustainability”(Himanen 2004, 19). The project of the Virtual ArtGarden is grounded in the aspect of collaboration asan aim in the user experience, but the design itself isalso a collaborative process: experiences and knowl-edge from people in different elds, mainly those of

Art Education who have been involved as user group,have been inuencing the design process through allits phases.

A diversity of knowledge and experiences are

gathered in this project from the beginning, until it isnally shaped as a prototype in an interesting collab-orative implementation taking place through virtualmeans between two people located at more than tenthousand kilometers away. This aspect can be used asan example to demonstrate the possibilities of collab-orative processes that can be achieved through vir-tual environments breaking distance boundaries andmerging cultural interests.

BiBliograPHy

caPurro, R. 1986. “La Hermenéutica y el Fenómeno dela Información”. In International Conference on Phe-

nomenology and Technology (Updated version 2002).

Figure 3. Next page. Schema of the possible progress of the visualinterface with users’ activity.



22

http://www.capurro.de/herminf.html. Free translation

by the author. (Last reviewed March 2007). New York:Polytechnic University.

castells, M. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. Ox-

ford: Blackwell.coyne, R. 1995. Designing Information Technology in the

Postmodern Age, from Method to Metaphor . Cam-

bridge: MIT Press.MoyniHan, C. & MeHraBian, A. 1981. “The Psychologi-

cal Aesthetics of Narrative Forms”. In H. I. Day (ed.): Advances in Intrinsic Motivation and Aesthetics. New

York. Plenum, 323 - 340.eskelinen, M. & k oskiMaa, R. 2002. (eds.): “Introduction:

Towards a Functional Theory of Media”. In CyberText:

Yearbook 2001. Jyväskylä: RCCC University of Jyväs-

kylä, 7 - 12.HiManen, P. 2004. Challenges of the Global Information

Society. Helsinki: Committee for the Future Parliamentof Finland.

HiX, D. & Hartson, H. R. 1993. Developing User Interfac-es: Ensuring Usability through Product and Process.

New Jersey: Prentice Hall.k ant, I. 1987. Crítica del Juicio. Oviedo: Losada.k ress, G. & leeuwen, T. 1998. Reading Images. The

Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge.k riPPendorFF, K. 2006. The Semantic Turn. A New Foun-

dation for Design. Boca Raton: T&F.Preece, J. 2000. Online-Communities: Designing Usabil-

ity, Supporting Sociability. London: Wiley.scardaMalia, M. & Bereiter , C. 2003. “Knowledge Build-

ing”. In Encyclopedia of Education (2nd ed). Cam-

bridge: Macmillan Reference.sHneiderMan, B. 1998. Designing the User Interface:

Strageties for Effective Human-Computer Interaction.

London: Addison-Wesley.



23

This paper reects on the very rst steps takenby our multidisciplinary research team to address

the design of what we have called “Urban Media-

tor”; an open framework and specic tools for

building connections between citizens and city

administrations, making all knowledge mutually

accessible.

i ntroduction

The design of Urban Mediator is part of the work theARKI [1] Icing research team will produce for theIcing research project. Icing, an acronym for Innova-tive Cities for the Next Generation, is a 6 th framework

programme EU funded IST (Information SocietyTechnologies) project, scheduled to run from January2006 to June 2008.

According to the project’s ofcial description onwork, Icing’s goal is to “research concepts of e-Gov-ernment based on a multimodal, multi-access ap-

proach to a ‘thin-skinned City’ that is sensitive to thecitizen and to the environment, using mobile devices,universal access gateways, social software and envi-ronmental sensors.”

The project partners include city councils, univer -sities and telecom operators from Barcelona, Dublin

and Helsinki. The Finnish partners are the City of Helsinki and the University of Art and Design Hel-sinki.

new tools For city-citizen interaction

Digital technologies have enabled the development of new tools for citizen participation. Until now, Inter -net-based services for citizens have been at the heartof various local and European e-government and e-

participation projects (Saad-Sulonen 2005). Thereis however, growing interest in considering multi-modal and multi-access concepts for e-participation,

with special interest in potentials presented by mobile technologies. Mobile devices have become com-monplace for urbanites around the world: we carryour mobile phones with us and use them everywhere.

Technology developers are already loading personalmobile devices with ubiquitous, pervasive, proxim-ity and locative technologies; making it possible toalso interact with the everyday physical environment.Urban space is becoming a new locus for digitallymediated entertainment and information sharing. The

potential is also open for these new technologies tooffer new interaction modes for citizens and city ad-ministrations.

Icing’s goal is to explore these new possibilities by bringing forth real-time and “in-situ” interaction possibilities for knowledge exchange: ofcial knowl-edge about the city and citizens knowledge that is

built through their everyday experience of the city.

urBan Mediator – First tHougHts

Urban Mediator is the key concept to be developed inHelsinki’s test-bed of Arabianranta. It is to be devel-oped as a prototype for the Icing project.

The initial ideas for the concept of the Urban Me-diator are that of a system and an interface that wouldfacilitate interaction between citizens and city au-thorities and channel this interaction to existing cityservices. The idea is therefore not to create yet an-other interaction channel, like the various websites,

portals or discussion forums, but rather come up witha system that would help citizens know of the exist-ing channels and services and help them decide inwhat way they’d want to interact with the ofcialcity. Urban Mediator would make it possible for peo-

ple to send information, questions, complaints, andremarks regarding their neighborhood, linking themto existing interaction channels, as well as receive

both ofcial and non-ofcial information. Citizens,residents associations as well as various city admin-istrations are plugged to the Urban Mediator, makingit easier for them to reach the information they needregarding the city, when they want it and where theywant it.

Integrating the interaction possibilities with loca-tive technologies extends it also to the experiencedspace of the city itself. The Urban Mediator extendstherefore existing web-based citizen-authorities

First Steps Towards Designing the “Urban Mediator”

Joanna Saad-Sulonen (joanna.saad-sulonen@taik.)



24

bridge into the urban space as experienced everyday by different people - in a way, extend the interface for citizen participation and involvement, to the every-day experience of urban life.

The rst ideas linked to the idea of Urban Media-

tor therefore reect both the framework of the Icing project – a IST project addressing objectives of Pri-ority 2.4.9 ICT research for Innovative Government[2] – and the research and design interests of the re-search team – understanding how “social” factors aswell extending the interface for citizen participationand involvement to the everyday experience of ur-

ban life could invigorate eGovernment services andeParticipation. Ideas for what design areas would

be linked to the development of the Urban Media-tor were therefore the following: interactive maps for information representation and interface possibilities(tools for city administration and planners), locativetechnologies for interaction in urban space and social

software for citizen-driven, collaborative construc-tion of the information space.

MetHodology

The design process initiated to develop the initial“fuzzy” Urban Mediator concept into a tangible de-sign solution starts with gathering ethnographic ma-terial as a way of understanding the needs of the mainstakeholders; citizens (residents) and city ofce em-

ployees, as well as engaging them, from the very startof the design process, as active actors in the design

process. The second step is building a series of sce-

narios that are grounded in the ethnographic ndingsand also provide a set of tools to help put forwardfurther design tasks and technological features inves-tigations.

i nitial Background etHnograPHy

Two areas in Helsinki were chosen to conduct eth-nographic studies in: the Icing test-bed area of Ara-

bianranta as a well as the area of Malminkartano atthe north-west edge of the Helsinki municipal area.The area of Malminkartano was chosen in additionto the ofcial testbed area of Arabianranta because,contrary to Arabianranta, it is an old established resi-dential area and can give insight on issues that mightrise in Arabianranta in the future.

The initial round of ethnographic studies consistedof a series of interviews with employees from variouscity ofces (Helsinki City Planning, Public Works,Social Services, Health Services), with resident com-munities and with key gures in the two areas. Fur -thermore, a small neighborhood documentation ex-

periment and workshop was organized with a specicgroup of residents in Arabianranta, the moderators.[3]

This round of ethnographic studies provided a gen-

eral understanding of how residents and city ofceemployees address and understand the areas of Ara- bianranta and Malminkartano, and what kind of city/citizen interactions possibilities exist, are success-

ful, are missing or would be needed. This rst back -ground ethnography also laid the ground for engag-ing the stakeholders in the design process, early on.

scenario Building

The following step was to gather and analyze the eth-nographic material collected so far and extract fromthem themes with most potential to be used, as ingre-dients for building scenarios.

Through building scenarios, we try to bring to-gether the relevant information for building a com-mon understanding of what Urban Mediator would

be. Scenarios also act as the reference material for our internal team of social scientists, designers andsoftware developers.

Scenarios are also tools of “reection in action”(Schön 1983, Carroll 1999). They can help identify

elements of the envisioned system the way these ele-ments translate social features.Coming up with a series of scenarios also helped

keep the holistic view of the envisioned system inmind, the various stakeholders and their differentneeds as well as the different possible modes of in-teractions.

Scenario 1: State of the Arabianranta Park

This scenario was inspired by pictures and commentssent by a moderator who volunteered to take part inthe neighborhood documentation experiment that

took place in February 2006.

Lilja (35) is a resident of the newly developed area

of Arabianranta in Helsinki. She is walking her dog in

the morning, by an area that is supposed to be a park.

Lilja notices the poor state of this park area (it is just

an empty plot of land) and thinks that it’s really unfor-

tunate that nothing is being done to make it better. The

bad condition of this plot of land only attracts drunken

people and youths who have no other places to go now,

especially in the evenings. Lilja thinks: “When is this

going to be taken care of?”

Lilja wants to react in real time, on the spot: she

wants to know why the situation of this park is like

that and what are the plans for the future regarding

this park?

Lilja uses her mobile phone to access the Urban Me-

diator for her area. The system recognizes her loca-

tion. She then types the keyword “park” and gets links

to discussions and information related specically to

parks in the area she’s in. She nds out that the Public

Works Department had responded to residents’ ques-

tions regarding the park and had explained that noth-

ing can be done before one year. She also nds out that

a group of residents had documented the rubbish left

in the “park”.

Lilja decides to contact the other residents: “This

park problem can’t be left for one year! Why can’t we,the residents, propose an alternative solution for the

next year?”



25

Scenario 2: My Parking-spot Info

This scenario was inspired by pictures and commentssent by a moderator who volunteered to take part inthe neighborhood documentation experiment that

took place in February 2006, as well as by observa-tions done by the research team members in Arabi-anranta.

Because of the construction work going on in Ara-

bianranta, things change unexpectedly: for example

the bus stop locations might shift because of new con-

struction work, or parking spaces can become illegal

because they’d interfere with the works.

Lasse has a car and decided to subscribe to informa-

tion about the legal parking spots around his building

block. By subscribing, he gets information, to his email

or to his mobile phone about any plans or changes that

might affect the parking spots, for example informa-tion about construction work that will “remove” some

spot (when the work will starts and when it is sup-

posed to end), or information about the dates when the

snow plough will come and therefore the parking spots

should be emptied etc.

Lasse also subscribed to a residents group initiative

that let them negotiate “sharing” parking spots in re-

lation to their schedule for car use.

Scenario 3: Planner interested in people’s local

knowledge

This scenario is inspired by comments made by aHelsinki city planner, during a meeting / interview inFebruary 2006.

Sari is a planner from the City Planning Ofce. Cur -

rently, Sari is busy, working on the planning of a new

residential area. Even though this is a new area, she

always wants to stay informed about what inhabitants

of the area think about their living environment and

what are the current issues in the area. Sari believes

that it is important for a planner to build a overall un-

derstanding of the area she works on, especially that

she has only been two years working in that area. Sari

uses the interactive map of the Urban Mediator systemof this area to get a quick overview of what are the

main issues of concern for the inhabitants right now.

She likes it that she can quickly see on the map see

which areas as well as which topics are “hot”. She can

also directly link to the discussions and the messages.

She sometimes answers residents’ questions using

this channel, but she does that voluntarily. She knows

many other planners who don’t do that because they’re

afraid that people will harass them with further ques-

tions. The formal way to interact with inhabitants is a

bit different: the interaction planner follows the area’s

Urban Mediator and channels questions to the specic

planners if needed.

Scenario 4: Social worker and pre-emptive social

care

This scenario is inspired by comments made by aHelsinki city planner, during a meeting / interview in

February 2006.

Antti is a social worker working in the greater Ara-

bianranta area. He’s been in charge of the pre-emptive

social care experiment in the area. He tries to nd out

about possible problems before they get very big. He

looks into the sociotope map of the Arabianranta area

and sees that there are a lot of complaints about the

high school kids of the area spending their weekends

drinking in the park. He remembers hearing parents

in the area being concerned about there not being any

supervised spaces (youth centers etc) in the area.

He looks at another layer of the map -- the layer of

the department of real estate- to get information about the owners of some possible buildings where a youth

center could be placed.

neXt stePs

The initial ideas for using interactive maps, locativetechnologies and social software can already be tak-en a step further and be represented in the followingfashion, as per Fig 1.

The four scenarios developed by our research teamalready give an idea of relevant directions for designeffort:

• provide citizens with the possibility to re-quest for location-specic information, on thespot (see scenario 1)• provide citizens with the possibility to sub-scribe to location-specic information (sce-

nario 2)• provide a way to “harvest” existing local in-formation (scenarios 1, 3 and 4)• provide city ofce employees, for examplecity planners or social workers, with tools thatfacilitate their access to local information,helping them in taking decisions (scenario 3and 4)

Figure 1. Urban Mediator



26

These themes will be explored further through thecontinuing ethnographic information gathering pro-cess addressing various communities. This processwill however become more clearly part of the itera-tive co-design process for developing Urban Media-

tor. Co-design workshops and meetings will be de-veloped and then organized to involve the differentstakeholders in the development process of the UrbanMediator, building up on the themes gathered fromthe scenarios.

These stakeholders will consist of active participants that have expressed interest in collaborating indeveloping the Urban Mediator during the prelimi-nary ethnography rounds. Parallel to that, public in-teractive experiments open to the general public willalso be organized in Arabianranta and Malminkar -tano, also as a way of working out the design themesand involving people in the co-design process, aswell as opening up the Icing project ideas to the gen-

eral public.The co-design process will eventually help the

design team to identify and further develop relevantdesign building blocks for the Urban Mediator, toeventually come up with a working prototype.

notes

[1] The ARKI research group (http://arki.uiah.) atthe Media Lab/School of Digital Design of the Uni-versity of Art and Design Helsinki is a multidisci-

plinary research group that focuses on understandingdigitalization in society; the potentials as well as thedrawbacks it creates in the context of everyday life.

[2] The focuses of Priority 2.4.9 that Icing addressesare: 1) Innovative ICTs for democratic involvement,in particular eParticipation, 2) Intelligent, inclusiveand personalised eGovernment services, 3) Adaptiveand proactive eGovernment support systems (Infor -mation Society Technologies portal 2004)

[3] A moderator is a resident of a building thatvoluntarily takes up the job of moderating the build-ings web pages. There are 20 residential buildings inArabianranta that have a moderator moderating their

building’s own web pages. These web pages are setup and hosted by the Helsinki Virtual Village Portalof Arabianranta. This portal also offers specic ser -vices for registered users, residents and companiesin the area.

acknowledgeMents

The research work for the period of January 2006 toMay 2006 was done through a group effort, involvingthe following ARKI research group members: TainaRajanti, Iina Oilinki, Tommi Raivio, Roman Suzi, Jo-

anna Saad-Sulonen.Taina Rajanti, Kari-Hans Kommonen and JoannaSaad-Sulonen have been the main contributors to

provide the text describing the University of Art and

Design involvement in the Icing project, during theinitial phase of project building for approval by theEU.

BiBliograPHy

carroll, J. 1999. “Five Reasons for Scenario-Based De-

sign”. In Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International

Conference on System Sciences (January 5-8, 1999).Maui, Hawaii, 3053-3054.

i nForMation society tecHnologies Portal. 2004. 2.4.9

ICT research for innovative Government [online]

http://www.cordis.lu/ist/workprogramme/wp0506_ en/2_4_9.htm, accessed 25.04.2006

saad-sulonen, J. 2005. “Interactions at the Boundaries:a Design Research Exploration Around Urban Space,Digital Media and Public Participation”. In Proceed-

ings of the Life in the Urban Landscape. International Conference for Integrating Urban Knowledge & Prac-

tice (May 29-June 3 2005). Gothenburg, Sweden. [CD-ROM] Gothenburg: Formas.

scHön, D. 1983. The Reective Practitioner: How Profes-

sionals Think in Action. New York: Basis Books.



27

Use of Clay in the Dialogue with the Visually Impaired

Mariana Salgado (msalgado@taik.)Anna Salmi (asalmi@taik.)

The topic of this paper is the tools used for de-

signing accessible solutions in the context of mu-

seum exhibitions. The paper focuses on the use

of clay pieces during two participatory design

workshops held in Ateneum Museum in 2005. In

addition we explain how we use cards and afnity

diagrams for analyzing the results. Based on the

diagrams produced we describe some features

that are relevant for visually impaired people in

exhibitions.

The analysis of the clay pieces together with the participants’ oral interpretations is an exploration intovisually impaired people’s perceptions in the contextof museums. Emotions and space were the central

topics that came up from this process of organizingthe workshops and making sense of the material wecollected.

From this analysis we develop preliminary sug-gestions for planning future dialogues with visuallyimpaired people in this particular context.

i ntroduction

As part of our process in the design of an interactivetool for the visually impaired people’s communitywe posed some questions: how to engage with thiscommunity in order to understand their needs in thecontext of a museum visit? How to clarify questionsabout accessibility that deal with emotions?

In an attempt to look for these answers we orga-nized two workshops during 2005 in Ateneum ArtMuseum, The Finnish National Art Gallery, in Hel-sinki. The workshops were based on ParticipatoryDesign methodologies. Researchers such as Hult-crantz and Ibrahim have been using workshops of this type in order to evaluate future concepts (Hult-crantz & Ibrahim 2002, 344-348). Our workshopswere based on the model that Taxén proposed for

introducing participatory design in museums (Taxén2004, 204-213). Taxén describes methods for evalu-ating museum exhibits and for developing exhibitionconcepts.

Two workshops were organized as part of the re-search activities of the project Äänijälki [1].This

project consists of an interactive audio service for museums that allows the exchange of commentswithin present, past visitors and museum staff. Thesecomments relate to the pieces in the exhibition andthe navigation inside the museum.

Äänijälki is an interactive audio service for muse-ums that allows the exchange of comments within

present, past visitors and museum staff. These com-ments relate to the pieces in the exhibition and thenavigation inside the museum. “Äänijälki will beused for sharing hints about the experience of goingto and being in an exhibition. The goal is to motivate

visually impaired people to visit museums by provid-ing a tool to get information about museum spacesand exhibitions, with their ‘comments.’ ” (Salgado& Kellokoski 2005, 10-17). It is now in a prototypestage.

Participants did not get to use the actual ÄänijälkiPDA application in the workshops. They were in-formed about the concept and basic functionality. Inaddition the workshops are an attempt to gather re-search material that can be useful for the project andto obtain inspirational ideas for making museums ac-cessible for the visually impaired people’s communi-ty. The aim of the workshops is to enable us designersto create a thorough understanding of the users’, their opinions, emotions and the challenges that they facewhen visiting museums.

descriPtion and coMParison oF tHe situations

The workshops were planned in order to use the au-dio material produced in them as part of the contentof Äänijälki. We have video and audio documenta-tion of both workshops.

We organized these two workshops in different

ways. In the case of the rst one we sent a letter through a mailing list of visually impaired peopleadvertising the workshop and invited the people wewere in touch with. In the rst workshop we had six



28

persons, only one was a sighted person and she wasthe wife of one of the participants. Two of them kneweach other well before and one of them was an ac-quaintance that by chance met the others in the work -shop. Three were women that were around 70 years

old and three were around 40 years old.

In the case of the second workshop we invited the people through Arla Institute, a vocational trainingand development centre, where we went to give anintroduction about our project: Äänijälki. Seven par -ticipants were visually impaired and the rest were as-sistants or teachers. All of them participated in theworkshop in equal terms. In this group there were

people of different ages, from 16 to 50 years old,and from different backgrounds (for example: craftor masseurs students). In this workshop the totalamount of people present in the workshop was 17: 12

persons came from Arla Institute, two persons were

Ateneum Museum staff, one person was in chargeof documenting and two researchers conducted theworkshop.

The program of the two workshops varied for some parts. In the second one we added a tour in the mu-seum and the whole workshop lasted one hour morethan the rst one.

clay Pieces

The aim of the rst task of the workshops was to

shed light on the factors that for the visually impairedmake up a good experience in the museum. In therst workshop the rst hands-on task was to describethe features of an ideal future guide for museums. Itcould be a person, a dog or a device. In the second,the task was to describe features of a good exhibition.In both workshops clay was used as material for vi-sualizing thoughts. We chose clay because it utilizesvisual medium, essential in design, for conveyingideas and also because neither of us knows Braille.We also thought that the familiarity with the materialand the connection of it to childhood memories couldfacilitate the task. Participants were asked to make a

piece for each aspect they wanted to present.The pieces were placed in the middle of the table

one by one, in the order of being nished. Partici- pants modeled the clay and spoke about their ideas.After the participant explained the clay piece weasked some questions related to the issues that rosefrom the explanation. In many cases the question washow the person connects the piece with the topic of future exhibitions.

After this activity, we asked the participants to startdividing the pieces into groups. The task was, rst,to classify the objects according to some commonal-ity and then to give each group a title. We partici-

pated in the classication task as facilitators. Collab-oratively with the participants we went through the

pieces on the table one by one repeating the title andasking suggestions for grouping them. Together with

the participants we formulated titles for each group.At the end of the task we conrmed that everyoneagreed with the titles given. This activity was basedon the technique of making an afnity diagram (Bey-er 1998). Most often such a diagram is put together

on a wall using e.g. Post-It Notes. The aim of build-ing the diagram is to organize individual notes into ahierarchical structure that reveals the common issuesand themes in the subject that is being studied (Beyer 1998).

The clay pieces are unique small sculptures, madefor the purpose of communicating participants’ ideasin the context of the workshop. They were a tool for stimulating discussion and an aid for rememberingwhat was discussed. The tangibility of the pieces keptthe meaning attached to them in a concrete shape.

a nalysis oF tHe clay Pieces

Cards

“Pictorial montages show their seams, whereas theimages produced by words fuse into unied wholes”(Arnheim 1969, 253). Based on this statement, wedecided that our interpretation would focus on boththe images and the oral descriptions that accompa-nied them in the situation. To isolate these two sidesof the same coin from each other would have led tomisinterpretations.

Figure 1. A card shows the title, a clay piece and the explanation.

In the process of analyzing the clay elements thatthe participants had made we created cards. Eachcard had a picture of the particular clay piece (digi-tally color-corrected), a title given by the participantwho made the piece and a fragment of the oral infor-mation chosen and translated by the researchers. Inthis process of manipulating the cards some of theinterpretations took shape. These cards were bound-ary objects for the analysis.

This process of converting the clay pieces into

cards was time consuming but it facilitated meaning-ful discussion in our group and it helped to familiar-ize with the material. First there is the fact that the

pieces lost their tangibility aspect the moment we



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started working with pictures and not any more withthree-dimensional objects. Second the fact of choos-ing a small piece of text that describes the piece isarguable. Since some times it was not in this pieceof description where meaningful hints appeared but

in the discussion that follows. Also, in some casesother participants were adding features or commentsto the piece and we chose to leave attached in thecard only the comments made by the author of the

piece. We know that all these decisions inuencedthis analysis.

We gave pseudonyms for the workshop participants. Participants described themselves, their inten-tions and their personalities through these pieces. For example, Hanna associated the small cat with love(Figure 2). For her it was important that the work of guiding was done with love, with an interest in the

job and activity that was performed. The piece also

showed the ability of the person to make a small, precise cat out of clay. Moreover, seeing the cat asa representation of love was a personal construction,not a straightforward connection.

Figure 2. ”Cat”.

The picture above depicts one possible connection between clay pieces and the oral speech that accompa-nied them. There are a variety of relations that appear in these cards. A cube, for example, has a perceptualand cultural liaison with the semantic meaning of thecube. Everybody understands the cube as a simpleform. Anniina put a cube on the stage, adding that for

her the cube means clarity. Anniina chose one char -acteristic of the cube and associated it with the mes-sage she wanted to give. On the other hand, the cardwith the “Cat” shows a personal connection betweenthe metaphor chosen and the explanation.

Diagrams

With the purpose of making an interpretation of the pieces, we did two diagrams that describe the resultsfor each workshop. First of all, after the workshop,we made an afnity diagram using the cards with theaim of answering the question of what is a good guide

like. Based on our diagram (Figure 3) we found somecharacteristics that visually impaired people foundimportant: presentation skills, emotional or humanfeatures and awareness of the context in which theguide is immersed.

Figure 3. Diagram 1.

The presentation skills are related to the fact that aguide “has to be clear”, manage the complexity andthe shortages that an exhibition might have, and beable to explain one piece in connection with others.

The guide has certain emotional characteristics as

“love for the thing she is explaining” [2], interested-ness, humor, personality, presence in the moment andsubconsciously connection with the theme. Another

point was the notion that the guide has to be able tomake connections between knowledge and experi-ence.

The issues undertook in the workshop concerningthe situation of being in a museum guided tour werethe importance of the dialogue between the guide and

the person, the exibility of the guide in talking aboutdifferent topics related to the exhibition, “even abouttechnical description that someone could be inter-ested in”. This exibility is connected to the idea thatthe guide should not have a xed speech but couldchange it according to the audience. Another pointconcerning the situation was that the conformation of the group of listeners shapes the visit, and thereforenaïve questioning is either exhibited or inhibited.

There were other features that came out in the dis-cussion, features specically related to the exhibition.These were represented in some of the clay shapesas well. A guide could also address these problemsalthough they were not direct characteristics of theguide herself. For the participants the artist’s pres-ence in the exhibition and the connection between theartist and the piece were relevant issues. Moreover,the participants highlighted the importance of havingsome touchable elements that could be explored in anexhibition. Finally, they added that sometimes theyhave an unconscious assumption that they are notable to move, so they avoid going and even trying.For representing this idea, Kalle used the metaphor of the threshold.

In the case of the second workshop the rst re-

grouping of cards produced a thematic diagram.In this diagram we identied four groups. We alsofound pieces out of the context of the workshop, or not addressing the question asked.



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A) Accessibility issues were divided into two sub-groups: the kinesthetic accessibility (relating to mov-ing around, including the body actions in the exhibi-tion) and the sensory accessibility. In the sub-groupthat related to kinesthetic accessibility they proposed

as features of a good exhibition: absence of obstacles, possibility of movement even with wheelchair, moti-vation for body movements as hanging, swinging andtouching and clarity of the exhibition’s route. In thesub-group of sensory accessibility touch and smellwere highlighted as important factors in the enjoy-ment of an exhibition.

B) Atmosphere and emotions. They pointed outthat the whole atmosphere in the exhibition inuenc-es emotions. They suggest that the ideal atmospherefor a museum is cozy. Other topics such as shame,security and having enough energy for visiting thewhole museum arose in the discussion.

C) Concrete ideas such as having an exhibition that

includes moments of relaxation and moments of ex-treme experiences.

D) Positive experiences in other museums such asthe Natural Science Museums and the Provincial mu-seums.

Secondly we did another regrouping of the cards(Figure 7). This time we had the relationship betweenthe clay pieces and the oral descriptions in mind. Weseparated the cards between sensory and arbitraryfeatures. Ware denes these concepts in the follow-ing way: “The word sensory represents symbols andaspects of visualizations that derive their expressive

power from their ability to use the perceptual process-ing power of the brain without learning. (…) On theother hand, arbitrary denes aspects of representa-tion that must be learned, because the representationshave no perceptual basis.” (Ware 2004, 10). One ex-ample of a sensory piece is “Cat” and an example of an arbitrary piece is “Talking heads”. (Figure 4)

Figure 5. “Funny and with personality”

In contrast, in others there was a direct connectionas in the “Right hand”. (Figure 6)

Figure 6. “Right Hand”

Moreover there were some cases where there wasno literal relation between the metaphor chosenand the description. This is the case of the “Horn of Wealth”, a piece that has certainly cultural connota-tions.

There are other cases in which pieces and meaningsattached to them were not so straightforward. Someof them are used as metaphors, as in the case of the“Brush and palette”. Jouko said that the piece repre-sents “the presence of the artist” in the exhibition.

In the case of the second workshop most of the clay pieces were sensory material and within this group

there is a majority of metaphors used as a way to present their ideas.

discussion

Participants found that they could make the pieceseasily and could express their ideas through them.They told us that in some cases the pieces appearedrst and then they tried to connect it with the ideathey had.

Some of the participants opened themselves up, pre-

senting emotions. We would seldom have imaginedsuch issues as loneliness, shame, position in the soci-ety, religion and spiritual issues to come up in groupsof people that have not necessarily met before.

Figure 4. “Talking Heads”

In the case of the cube, the relation between the piece and the oral description works smoothly. More-over, there are other meanings implied, but not ex-

plicitly shown like simplicity and easiness.

Within these two groups we found that some of the pieces have a personal and innovative way of asso-ciating the oral description with the pieces. See thecase of “Funny and with personality”. (Figure 5)



31

Material encourages people to talk, and works asan inspiration for thought. We have still some openquestions that we would like to explore in the future:How thought and physical activity interact in thesecases? How emotions become visible through mold-ing, or working with materials?

Clay as medium was a good choice because itgave enough exibility and made it possible to pass

pieces around. In this way all the group memberscould touch them, enabling sharing and understand-ing. Passing around the pieces was only applied inthe second workshop. This generated a lot of small

side conversations within the group, since the person passing the piece was explaining the piece to the per-son receiving it.

The atmosphere was quite different since in therst workshop the participants were more engagedinto a common discussion. In the second one therewere constant side conversations. This might be dueto the amount of the participants and the workshop’s

program and atmosphere.

Participants were concerned to leave a piece, andmake a valuable contribution but were not commit-

ted to listen to the rest of the group. This caused thatsome objects were overlapping in their meaning.This means that eventually there were two differentobjects standing for the same meaning. Even someobjects were repeated, such as the boats or the men.That resulted in two objects representing the same

but standing for different things.

Something that was particular for the second work-shop was that there were some clay pieces and com-ments that were not at all connected to the question.We constantly asked the participants how do theyconnect their piece to the museum exhibition, and insome cases we did not get a clear answer.

In the case of the second workshop we also felt thatthere was lot of interesting insights that could not beundertaken in depth because of lack of time. We per-

ceived the second workshop group as too big andheterogeneous. The participants had different age,

background, visual impairment degree and other dis-abilities. How did their identity dene their participa-tion? We think that we need a long-term engagementwith this group in order to understand their needs notonly as visually impaired persons but as people withtheir own background and identity. These two work-shops were not enough but they gave us some hintsof the kind of dialogue that we wanted to have withthis particular community. In the future the axis of this dialogue will challenge the perception of emo-tion and space for the visually impaired.

We realize that the way we collect material af-fects the results we obtain. Thus, it is necessary toreect on the approach used for collecting material.The tasks presented to the participants were well de-ned but open-ended. In this way people could ex-

press themselves ingeniously. The categorization of the clay pieces forms the basis of this analysis. Theapproach was chosen for both the collection of re-search material and for analyzing it. These diagramsserved to clarify our interpretations and enabled usto present them in certain order. On this topic Bertinhas the opinion that graphics make visible the notions

of discussion, reasoning and understanding. (Bertin2000/2001, 11).

The material gathered is inspirational material thatwill be used in the next phase of Äänijälki, when we

plan to implement it in Ateneum. These are also out-comes gathered for the later design of suitable andaccessible interventions in other museum spaces.

notes

[1] Sound traces.

[2] The English quotations referring to participants’ speech of this paper are all our translationsfrom Finnish.

Figure 7. Diagram 2.



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acknowledgeMents

Thanks to Lily Diaz-Kommonen that is always help-ing and encouraging us in our work. We want to espe-cially thank all the participants of the workshop and

the staff of Ateneum. Thanks to Arla Institute. Thanksto M. Luhtala and T. Laine who were in charge of thevideo documentation during the workshops.

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