Comment: Research on the Scrapheap

A visitor in Lancaster University at the beginning of the month might have noticed an odd hush After wandering the empty corridors, she puts her eye to the iris scanner and enters the Innovative Interactions Laboratory and is suddenly thrust into a melee: soldering, duck tape, holes drilled in old desk drawers, and deodorant sprayed onto the underside of a glass coffee table.

Those of you who were at the British HCI Conference (HCI2003) in Bath might have noticed my frenetic behaviour on Tuesday: seeking places where I could find both power and signal for my mobile for long and strange telephone conversations, enigmatic text messages.

In fact I had been setting and judging one of a number of 'scrapheap challenges' between teams back at Lancaster. On each Tuesday of September the teams are being given a challenge and then must produce something IT-ish to meet the challenge. In the previous week they had a mobile challenge "audio graffiti" and I had set the HCI challenge last Tuesday "absent presence" ... aptly I was absent.

On the Friday, when I returned to Lancaster, I got to actually see the creations - all different ways in which one can get some sense that the place you are in has in some way been occupied or visited before. A senses of human presence over time.

I saw a floor covered by a checkerboard of coloured squares which changed their colour as one walked over it an then faded; a screen where 'fairies' appeared to keep company those sitting on the armchair and then stayed to greet future visitors; a table where ghostly images of objects that had previously been there remained projected on its surface.

It was amazing to see what could be produced in so short a time - many three year research projects would be happy to have demonstrators like anyone of them! Furthermore these were not just 'lash-ups' that had a team of programmers behind the scenes keeping them up and alive. Each had been running continually, largely unsupervised, since Tuesday when I saw them on the Friday ... how many demonstrators of large EU projects could say the same?

Theoretically, each creation also raised and explored so many issues: technical such as video processing and web services, human issues of how to evoke a sense of human presence. Also it was often evident that the constraints of having to produce with available technology and materials over a short time had produced solutions that were better or radically different from those that a large budget and timescale would have allowed.

Does the overplanned nature of many research projects and our funding regimes preclude this kind of innovation? I fear so. However, there are examples of this kind of activity within more formalised settings. The Equator project has had focused periods when people from many institutions have gathered to prepare for large experience events. Extreme programmers get together for similar events and at the HCI conference I heard about a recent hack-fest (I think in Croatia) on open-source software for NGOs.

These examples seem to be rare, but show it is possible.

Perhaps one day all multi-million euro projects will be able to achieve as much as this single-day event ... perhaps?

Associated Link: More on the Scrapheap

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