Talk given at The Open University's IET Technology Coffee Morning, 15 May 2013. Copyright The Open University 2013.

1. Catwalk technologies
and researching in the wild
Elizabeth FitzGerald and Anne Adams
Institute of Educational Technology, OU
elizabeth.fitzgerald, anne.adams@open.ac.uk

2. Our talk today
• Introduction
• Some jargon/concepts:
– Catwalk technologies
– Boundary creatures
• In the wild projects
– OTIH
– Mobile GIS (Geographic Information Systems)
– Hidden Histories
• Modelling researcher design roles: from catwalk
technologies (CT) to prêt-à-porter designs
• Summary

3. Introduction
Our talk today is about several things:
• Catwalk technologies (and prêt-à-porter)
• The role of the researcher (especially when working with
different user groups / “in the wild”)
• Case studies of research “in the wild” (wild both in terms
of physical environment and also context/settings)
• Technical innovation vs scalable innovation
• Responsible innovation and ethical research: what legacy
do we leave behind?

4. What does “in the wild” mean?
Photo: mpaskevi (Flickr)
Photo: Kaplan International College(Flickr)
Photo: Fotos Gov/Ba (Flickr)
Rogers, Y. (2011) Interaction
design gone wild: striving for
wild theory. interactions 18(4),
58-62.

5. What are catwalk technologies?
• Fashion design metaphor: technological innovations
that represent the most high-tech state-of-the-art and
are not easily scalable to mass production or mass usage
• May require special expertise or additional equipment or
infrastructure for them to function
• May involve high costs (although not always)
• Seeks to change our concepts of an object and also how
we interact with it
• Also seeks to change, rather than maintain, practice

6. “Devil Wears Prada”

7. Miranda Priestly: [Miranda and some assistants are deciding between two similar belts for an outfit.
Andy sniggers because she thinks they look exactly the same] Something funny?
Andy Sachs: No. No, no. Nothing's... You know, it's just that both those belts look exactly the same
to me. You know, I'm still learning about all this stuff and, uh...
Miranda Priestly: 'This... stuff'? Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to
your closet and you select... I don't know... that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you're
trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.
But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's
actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a
collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent... wasn't it who showed
cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the
collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores
and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some
clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it's sort of
comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in
fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of
stuff.
“Devil Wears Prada” / “Ugly Betty”

8. Catwalk design
Vivien Westwood
Ferrero-Regis (2010): catwalk is wearable art
NOT ready to wear (prêt-à-porter)
• Previously department store copies were
scorned
• NOW „creative inspiration‟ for high street fashion

9. … and prêt-à-porter?
• i.e. ready-to-wear, off-the-shelf solutions
• The iphone is a good example
• These technologies are sustainable, scalable and can be
mass-produced or deployed to a mass market
• Easy to use, accessible, intuitive
• Shouldn’t need much technical support in setting up and
using it
• May also change practice (but not through technological
innovation) and not radically, but incrementally

10. From catwalk to prêt-à-porter
Top Shop
Vivien Westwood
CATWALK
PRÊT-À-PORTER

11. From catwalk technology to prêt-à-porter
Vivien Westwood
CATWALK
(thinkgeek.com: $29.99)PRÊT-À-PORTER
(CHI2013 conference)

12. Growerbot (Arduino-based watering system):
kit with wifi $120, or fully assembled $195
(http://www.growerbot.com)
Plant Link:
$69 for one base station
and one link (extra links
$25 each)
(http://www.myplantlink.com)
CATWALK
PRÊT-À-PORTER

13. prêt-à-
porter
Changing current
practices
Innovation led
Interaction practices
Design
C.T.
Enabling/maintaining
current practices
Researcher design roles (RDR) model: mapping expectations
from catwalk technologies (CT) to prêt-à-porter designs
Led by scalability and sustainability

14. Revolutionary and evolutionary design
• The iPhone: prêt-à-porter, evolutionary changes through
innovation of our current use of phone technology and
practices
• Facebook, Twitter and iPad: could be argued were
revolutionary changes to our practice (Adams et al, 2005)
• OUR research innovates, how does this engage or impact?
• Few innovations are TOTALLY scaled to transform practice
• Incrementally developing change to current practices

15. Researchers as boundary creatures:
managing expectations
• McGinnis (1999) presents a simple definition which is
that a ‘boundary creature inhabits more than one world’
(p.61)
• Donna Haraway (1991) ‘boundary creature’ = deviant from
the norm, a ‘monster’ (from demonstrate).
• Jones et al (2004) notion of passions back into study of
organizations remove idea of knowledge as an ‘objective
representation’ or ‘social construction’.
• The researcher moves between practice domains and
between/within different communities: what is their role in
these transitions?

16. Our identity as a researcher
• As Boud and Solomon (2001) argue, professional and vocational
practice is often multidisciplinary:
 Academics working in such programmes can find that the
traditional disciplinary and academy-practice boundaries become
blurred, challenging their own academic identity or even career
progression
…however…
 Burt (2005), working within a social capital perspective, argues
that brokers accrue benefits from this position – they appear
creative, insightful and possessing a genius born out of the import-
export of ideas
• Researchers working ‘in the wild’ run the risk of becoming ‘pedlers’
selling a ‘Magic Bullet’
• How can we conceptualise this?

17. Boundary objects
• Technology as boundary objects: cross knowledge
domains and social structures
• Support collaboration and communication by acting as a
shared interface
• May act as barriers too: embedded in specific jargon or
unfamiliar practices
• Technology probes can help explore user-friendly and
potentially scalable
technical innovations
• Need to take into account
cultural social and
political issues
Video probes (see Hutchinson et al 2003)

18. Case studies: in the wild research
• Out There, In Here (OTIH)
• Mobile GIS (Geographic Information Systems)
• Hidden Histories

19. Out There & In Here
“this time I felt you looked
at the whole picture.”
“and you heard what was being
said by the people in here and you
thought, Ah, nice little point,
nice bit of direction and let’s go
and have a look at
that particular aspect.”
• Technology enabling current practices and
(BETWEEN locations) changing practices

20. Mobile GIS
"I don’t want to carry so
much electronic devices
with me."
“But, I mean, all these things
just take more time and like
more knowledge of
how to use the thing.”
• Technology changing or supporting current practice in
context
“the acetate was actually so effective, because … [ ] … it was very easy to sort
of place yourself in the right position and then it’s just there in front of you”

21. Hidden Histories
• Technology as boundary objects – context
“It was interesting and high-tech.
Looked nice. Wouldn't have been
good to be mugged.”
“The tech was too high-tech”
“English Heritage have a
very simple system - just
press buttons.

22. From prêt-à-porter to catwalk and back again…

23. HH
prêt-à-
porter
Changing current
practices
Mobile GIS
OTIH
Innovation led
Led by scalability and sustainability
Interaction practices
Design
C.T.
Enabling/maintaining
current practices
Expectation
influences
Change in
expectations
Expectation cycle
KEY:
Researcher design roles (RDR) model:
mapping expectations from catwalk
technologies (CT) to prêt-à-porter designs

24. Why does all this matter?
• IMPACT: do catwalk technologies have greater impact than
prêt-à-porter solutions? How can you tell?
• Gives us a language to frame discussions:
“I’ve often had to deal with these tensions but never had the appropriate language
to articulate it or legitimise it; this gives me a starting point for managing
expectations within the research process.”
• Makes the ‘in the wild’ researcher more aware of their role in
research projects and across user groups…
… and how this can change dynamically (depending on
context, stakeholders, socio-political/cultural factors etc.)
• RDR model articulates researchers’ narratives with the design
team, stakeholders and users around what is innovated
(e.g. technology, activities) and how the intervention changes
or sustains current practices

25. One more thing… responsible design
• Should we consider the ethics of how sustainable our
designs are after we finish the project?
http://gizmodo.com/human-and-animal-powered/
Copyright © 2012 EuroAfrica-P8 EU Project
What is the role of
catwalk technologies or
prêt-à-porter designs here?

26. Summary
• What ‘in the wild’ research really means
• Concepts of catwalk technologies and boundary creatures
• How these combine to inform the role of the researcher
• Case studies of research ‘in the wild’
• RDR model enables us to consider design processes, user
groups and both technology and/or practice-based
innovations

27. Thanks for listening:
any questions?
Thanks and acknowledgements to:
Gary Priestnall, Yvonne Rogers, Sarah Davies, Trevor Collins, Tim Coughlan,
Claire Taylor, Mike Craven, Gemma Polmear, Andy Burton and Sam Meek,
also to all the participants who took part in user trials.
Projects were funded by EPSRC and HEFCE.

28. References
Adams, A., FitzGerald, E. and Priestnall, G. (2013) Of Catwalk Technologies and Boundary Creatures. ACM
Transactions of Computer-Human Interaction (In Press).
Adams, A.; Blandford, A. and Lunt, P. (2005) Social empowerment and exclusion: A case study on digital libraries.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 12(2), pp. 174–200.
Boud, D, and Solomon, N. (2001) Work-Based Learning: A New Higher Education (eds.) Buckingham: SRHE &
Open University Press.
Burt, R. S. (2005) Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Ferrero-Regis, T. (2010) Reframing fashion: from original and copy to adaptation. In Proceedings of the 2nd
Global Conference, Fashion: Exploring Critical Issues, Oxford, UK, September 23-26, 2010.
Harraway, D.J. (1985) A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology and socialist feminism in the 1980s” Socialist
review 15 (2): 64-107
Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the reinvention of nature. London. Free Association Books
Hutchinson, H., Mackay, W., Westerlund, B., Bederson, B. B., Druin, A., Plaisant, C., Beaudouin-Lafon, M.,
Conversy, S., Evans, H., Hansen, H., Roussel, N. and Eiderbäck, B. Technology probes: inspiring design for and
with families. In Proc. the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '03), ACM, New
York, NY, USA (2003), 17-24.
Jones, G., McLean, C. and Quattrone, P. (2004) ‘Spacing and Timing’, Journal of Organisation, Vol. 11 (6), pp.
723–741.
McAdams D.P. (1993) The stories we live by. New York: Harper Collins.
McGinnis, M.V. (1999) ‘Bioregionalism’. Chapter 4. Boundary creatures and Bounded spaces