Category: Research

Simon Fraser University, SIAT, PhD Studies, Summer 2012 – Present

As an ex-skateboarder, I’ve been interested in skateboarding for a while. When I came to the Everyday Design Studio in 2011/2012 I was introduced to research studies on everyday design that had been done. Everyday design qualifies and defines the types of actions that people do to creatively transform and adapt objects in their daily lives. It highlights a form of creativity that we all take part in and one that helps us negotiate our daily lives through design-in-use and appropriation. Everyday design also includes the work of hobbyists and amateurs who make and reuse design artifacts in their practice. When it came to picking a first topic to explore from a research and everyday design perspective, I immediately thought about looking at how skateboards have been appropriated. Since then, I conducted two studies.

Skateboards and Everyday Design – First Study

My first study was looking at the appropriation of (broken) skateboards surveying how everyday designer reuse, transform, adapt and appropriate (broken or old) skateboards. People, most of them somehow involved in the skateboarding culture, make art, furniture, accessories, jewelry and other things out of old or broken skateboards. See some examples in the images. I interviewed 5 people that were upcycling skateboards to learn about the specifics of their intentions and processes. This study can be seen as a pilot study. We published a WiP (Work-in-Progress paper and poster) about this study. In the paper we used the study findings to reveal a new lens on mobile technology by seeing the skateboard itself as a mobile technology.

Hauser, S., Desjardins, A., & Wakkary, R. (2013). Skateboards as a mobile technology. In Proc. of  CHI EA‘13. ACM, NY, USA, pp. 1419-1424. (5 pgs)

The Practice of Skateboarding and Technologies – Second Study

My second study followed up on looking at the skateboard with the developed technology lens. Skateboards can be seen as a personal technology as well and reveal insight into this type of technology as well. Looking also at the practice of skateboarding with this lens reveals interesting facts around technology design and practice-oriented design. In this study I interviewd 12 Skateboarders about their practice and experience of skateboarding, which revealed extremely interesting insight into the phenomenon of skateboarding as a practice, a subculture, an activity, an embodied practice etc. I’m working on another publication with study findings from my second study, in which I interviewed and observed several skateboarders.

Simon Fraser University, SIAT, PhD Studies, Summer 2012 – Fall 2013

At the Everyday Design Studio we conducted two different studies of green practices: the practice of everyday repair and the practice of green-DIY. These two studies show the range and differences between practices of sustainability. The Everyday Repair Study was conducted prior to me coming to SIAT. The Green-DIY study, which I was part of, aims at understanding the motivations, objects, tools, and skills used by green enthusiasts (individuals who create projects that support a sustainable lifestyle).

We were mostly interested in understanding the underlying practices of green enthusiasts, using green blogs  as an entryway to observe how people make green projects. We narrowed the results to 5 Web sites: Crafting a Green World, Green Upgrader, Instructables, Planet Green, and Simple Organic.

We then looked at the study data with a framework of Theories of Social Practice differenciating between three practice elements: Competences, Material, Meaning. It showed that in Green DIY practices meaning plays a stronger role than competences, for instance, often enthusiasts are willing to learn new skills if that will enable them to make a sustainable project. More on those studies can be read in the article below.

We published this article on this project:

Wakkary, R., Desjardins, A., Hauser, S. & Maestri, L. (2013) A Sustainable Design Fiction: Green Practices. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI). 20, 4, Article 23 (2013). (34pgs)

Simon Fraser University, SIAT, Course on quantitative research methods. Instructor: Professor Bernhard Riecke

I got the chance to collaborate with the carsharing company car2go in Vancouver. I conducted a Before-After-Control-Impact (BACI) Study investigating the impact of car2go’s Eco-Score on members driving behaviour.

The Eco-Score monitors the efficiency of the members driving style by measuring the accelerations, the breaking maneuvers, and the overall driving style for the most efficient fuel economy. It calculates Eco-Scores and presents them to the driver. The displays in the cars show how efficient the driving style is by showing percentage values of the three categories acceleration, evenness of driving, the vehicles roll-out. Each value is illustrated with a picture of a tree, which gets bigger with better values.

Here is the final class paper of this work.

Simon Fraser University, SIAT, PHD student work, Research Assistant, Spring 2012, Summer 2012

In my first three terms as a Ph.D. student at SIAT I had a cooperative Research Assistantship with Dr. Brian Fisher and Dr. Ron Wakkary. I worked in the field of Interaction Design and Visual Analytics (VA) for Emergency Management.

We observed the entire planning process of the emergency management planning of the City of Vancouver for the “Celebration of Lights” event in the summer. We looked at the process from a design perspective and then looked into discovering and articulating challenges that could be addressed in future research. We collected and documented a lot of data to the Visual Analytics group at SIAT.

I worked in collaboration with SIAT student Sara Salevati on this project.