Human actions made tangible

Abstract

With designers increasingly moving beyond button pushing and flat-screen interaction towards tangible and embodied interaction, techniques for user studies need to develop as well. While ethnographic video studies and ethnomethodological analyses are becoming standard in many interaction design projects, it remains a challenge to investigate in detail how people interact with all of their body. Analysis of fullbody movement is time consuming, notation techniques are rare, and findings are difficult to share between members of a design team. In this paper we propose tangible video analysis, a method developed to engage people from different backgrounds in collaboratively analysing videos with the help of physical objects. We will present one of these tools, Action Scrabble, for analysing temporal organisation of human actions. We work with a case of skilled forklift truck driving. By backtracking our design research experiments, we will unfold how and why the tangible tool succeeds in engaging designers with varied analysis experience to collaboratively focus on human action structures -and even find video analysis fun!

Seeing Through the Eyes of Heavy Vehicle Operators

“…To aid the design of these information driven and more continuously improved systems there is a need for efficient validation of usefulness and stakeholder acceptance. Buur et al observed, doing user studies of forklift operators, that the skilled operators perform many operations in parallel, as well as, tasks far beyond the everyday notion of 'lifting', 'carrying' and 'dropping' a load [36]. The knowledge must therefore be based system use and adoption "in the wild", thus giving a true understanding of use to complement laboratory tests and prior assumptions [37,38].…”