Practical Research Projects - Project Description
Project Description
This is a description of a project which may be performed in the PREP course
Project Title
A Study of Mobile Location-aware Services' Use of Space and Place
Quarter
Responsible
Second level advisor: Susanne Bødker.
Aims
The goal of this project is to study how people use existing mobile location-aware services to interact with their physical environment. The project specifically aims at an analysis of the ways in which these systems mediate this engagement from a user perspective and relates this to the notions space and place as coined in [1] and [2].
Examples (and a non-authoritative list of potential candidates) for such services to study are Foursquare, Facebook Places, and Yelp in general and SeeClickFix, CitizenConnect, FixMyStreet, and VoterMap more specifically in the domain of participatory urban planning.
The study may be conducted through a (yet-to-be-determined) range of methods: a user experience-based analysis inspired by [3], a content analysis of user contributions, a static analysis of the features of such systems, or the other appropriate methods.
- Harrison, S. and Dourish, P. 1996. Re-place-ing space: the roles of place and space in collaborative systems. In Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW '96), 67-76.
- Dourish, P. 2006. Re-space-ing place: "place" and "space" ten years on. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW '06), 299-308.
- McCarthy, J. and Wright, P. 2004. Technology as Experience. The MIT Press.
Learning Outcome
- discuss the research work process
- apply relevant terminology, methods, and results from the respective area
- plan and execute a smaller research related project
- apply a known research method to a smaller research design project
- conduct a small-scale user study to a real research problem
Requirements
One or more of the following courses: user experience, social and collaborative computing, designing interactive technologies or similar graduate courses.