Last year I submitted a book chapter for a new collection of Human-Computer Interaction papers. It’s about using scenarios in a particular way for thinking about designing stuff that’s really hard to prototype.
Caricatured scenarios are a tool that designers and researchers can use to explore the use of disruptive technologies and communicate the implications of introducing disruptive technologies to existing work practices.
Earlier this year the actual hardbacked book arrived. And now, the whole book is available for free, chapter by chapter as downloadable PDF or you can even grab the whole 30 (!) chapter book as a zipped PDF.
My chapter (PDF) is based on a part of my PhD thesis where I adapted Susanne Bodker’s 2000 paper on different sorts of scenario-based design to imagine different ways to use speech recognition technology in the Magistrates Court of the ACT.
Here’s the introduction:
The purpose of this chapter is to describe the use of caricatured contrasting scenarios (Bødker, 2000) and how they can be used to consider potential designs for disruptive technologies. The disruptive technology in this case is Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) software in workplace settings. The particular workplace is the Magistrates Court of the Australian Capital Territory.
Caricatured contrasting scenarios are ideally suited to exploring how ASR might be implemented in a particular setting because they allow potential implementations to be “sketched” quickly and with little effort. This sketching of potential interactions and the emphasis of both positive and negative outcomes allows the benefits and pitfalls of design decisions to become apparent.
A brief description of the Court is given, describing the reasons for choosing the Court for this case study. The work of the Court is framed as taking place in two modes: Front of house, where the courtroom itself is, and backstage, where documents are processed and the business of the court is recorded and encoded into various systems.
Caricatured contrasting scenarios describing the introduction of ASR to the front of house are presented and then analysed. These scenarios show that the introduction of ASR to the court would be highly problematic.
The final section describes how ASR could be re-imagined in order to make it useful for the court. A final scenario is presented that describes how this re-imagined ASR could be integrated into both the front of house and backstage of the court in a way that could strengthen both processes.
