How we Think

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

aimed to attract a more diverse audience of gamers and non-gamers – and to bring video games off the screen and into the living room. While not all games are well suited for multiplayer play – ‘It’s hard to avoid getting in each other’s way and impeding rather than advancing game progress’ (p. 133) – most games are intended to be played while in the room with other people. ‘The Wii is just the latest attempt by Nintendo to bring a version of this kind of social gaming into the living room, closer to arcade parties and karaoke than to, say, bouts of online multiplayer military simulations’ (p. 142). Jones and Thiruvathukal’s book is as much a user’s manual for the potential of the Nintendo Wii as it is an academic and technical deconstruction of the console as a computing platform. Their joint approach to considering the topic works well, but it isn’t until the very end of the book that Jones’ cultural contextual approach really shines. In the final six pages of the sixth chapter (pp. 143–148), the authors consider the paratext of the Wii, as well as the diegetic and nondiegetic elements of video games – and the various layers of the platform and the games, interactions and activities it supports. ‘This social layer of a video game platform is an essential part of what the system means, because it’s the environment in which the platform gets used’ (p. 148). Much of the existing literature on Nintendo – such as Osamu Inoue’s (2010) Nintendo Magic: Winning the Videogame Wars and Jeff Ryan’s (2011) Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America – concentrates on the company’s success as a business. The more technical literature to date focuses on the use of the Wii Balance Board, another controller for the platform, in healthcare and therapeutic settings. This text sits comfortably in the middle, Wiimote and Nunchuk controllers in hand, making a valuable contribution to the study of the Nintendo Wii and how technology and culture work together.

It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

The "Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction" is the most thorough and definitive source providing coverage of everything related to the field of human computer interaction (HCI). This encyclopedia covers a wide range of HCI related topics such as concepts, design, usability, evaluation, innovations, and applications of HCI in organizations around the globe. Hundreds of contributors and advisors from around the world have conferred their expertise to this publication, making this encyclopedia a single source of authoritative and contemporary research in field of human computer interaction. The "Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction" also includes coverage of real life experiences and cases of HCI and the lessons learned helping readers to learn extensively about this important field of study.

Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction

This article proposes an agenda for research into the spatial, social, and relational character of globally circulating urban policies, policy models, and policy knowledge. It draws on geographical political economy literatures that analyze particular social processes in terms of wider sociospatial contexts, in part by maintaining a focus on the dialectics of fixity and flow. The article combines this perspective with poststructuralist arguments about the analytical benefits of close studies of the embodied practices, representations, and expertise through which policy knowledge is mobilized. I suggest that the notion of mobilities offers a useful rubric under which to operationalize this approach to the “local globalness” of urban policy transfer. The utility of this research approach is illustrated by the example of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, a city that is frequently referenced by policymakers elsewhere as they look for “hot” policy ideas. The case also indicates that there is much research y...

/pdf/urban-policy-mobilities-and-global-circuits-of-knowledge-26irwy4vel.pdf

Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge: Toward a Research Agenda

http://www.mobilelifecentre.org/sites/default/files/Passengering.pdf

Driving and 'passengering': Notes on the ordinary organization of car travel

As researchers interested in the use of mobile phones, everyday activities provide us with a rich resource to observe phone usage. We often see people using their phones on the bus, in parks, cafes, on bikes, in the streets, waiting for the cash machine, in shops — nearly everywhere.1 This public use of the mobile phone provides us with an invaluable resource for looking at the everyday, actual use of this technology.

Local use and sharing of mobile phones

The everyday use of smartphones with high quality built-in cameras has lead to an increase in museum visitors' use of these devices to document and share their museum experiences. In this paper, we investigate how one particular photo sharing application, Instagram, is used to communicate visitors' experiences while visiting a museum of natural history. Based on an analysis of 222 instagrams created in the museum, as well as 14 interviews with the visitors who created them, we unpack the compositional resources and concerns contributing to the creation of instagrams in this particular context. By re-categorizing and re-configuring the museum environment, instagrammers work to construct their own narratives from their visits. These findings are then used to discuss what emerging multimedia practices imply for the visitors' engagement with and documentation of museum exhibits. Drawing upon these practices, we discuss the connection between online social media dialogue and the museum site.

Instagram at the museum: communicating the museum experience through social photo sharing

In this paper I investigate the ways in which participants in mobile-phone conversations orient to each other's location, activities, and availability. By looking at data from recorded mobile-phone conversations, I use a conversation analytic approach to make initial observations on the character of mobile-phone conversations. I found that the frequent question “what are you doing?” sometimes caused a location to be given as part of the answer which shows how location, activity, and availability are strongly related. The participants thus obtained information about location, when this was considered relevant, through asking about activity. Location seemed especially relevant if it provided information about a future meeting. In some of the conversations where it seemed there was something going on where the ‘called party’ was located, the ‘caller’ reacted by initiating the conversation with a strategy which gave the called party a chance to end the conversation.

"I can't talk now, I'm in a fitting room" : Formulating availability and location in mobile-phone conversations

We present five provocations for ethics, and ethical research, in HCI. We discuss, in turn, informed consent, the researcher-participant power differential, presentation of data in publications, the role of ethical review boards, and, lastly, corporate-facilitated projects. By pointing to unintended consequences of regulation and oversimplifications of unresolvable moral conflicts, we propose these provocations not as guidelines or recommendations but as instruments for challenging our views on what it means to do ethical research in HCI. We then suggest an alternative grounded in the sensitivities of those being studied and based on everyday practice and judgement, rather than one driven by bureaucratic, legal, or philosophical concerns. In conclusion, we call for a wider and more practical discussion on ethics within the community, and suggest that we should be more supportive of low-risk ethical experimentation to further the field.

/pdf/five-provocations-for-ethical-hci-research-4ai8kz2hta.pdf

Alexandra Weilenmann

Papers

Driving and 'passengering': Notes on the ordinary organization of car travel

Local use and sharing of mobile phones

Instagram at the museum: communicating the museum experience through social photo sharing

"I can't talk now, I'm in a fitting room" : Formulating availability and location in mobile-phone conversations

Five Provocations for Ethical HCI Research