In this seminar, David Cuartielles will discuss the work he is doing for his forthcoming PhD thesis. Below is an introduction to the talk.
The area of specialization is interaction design in general and the democratization of the access to platforms within the pedagogics of technology in particular. The main research question this thesis tries to answer is whether the creation of platforms can empower users to become autonomous in the use of technology. A side question emerging from this research is how to involve groups of users of different sizes in co-creation processes using digital tools and platforms.
The author will argue that the creation of technical platforms is opening up the possibility to people from all backgrounds to acquire knowledge in creating artefacts using digital electronics and software. The knowledge in those fields empowers people beyond the basic digital literacy and, by extension, brings them to create their own digital experiences and tools, but also solve real life problems and create new professions.
During the course of the research that resulted in this thesis the author explores, by means of experiments with users, how to bring platforms to the hands of users. There is a clear red-thread in the experiments that evolve from being created for single users at the beginning of the research, back in 2004, up to groups of 1.500 subjects at the time in the last years.
There is also a conceptual evolution in the work, while the early experiments explored aspects dealing with embodied interaction, the latest contributions to the thesis explore how contemporary pedagogical models like Constructionism and Project Based Learning can be deployed to large groups of population at once using collections of experiments like the ones created at the early stages of the research.
The repertoire of cases hereby presented was built in under the assumption that the human factor should be the key design consideration for tools having an educational value. Aspects like: ease of use, affordances, predictability of errors, and even price to the end user were of a lot more importance than technical performance or engineering excellence. That said, when deploying the empirical tests over periods of months at the time at multiple locations simultaneously, all regulations were taken into account, in other words, safety plaid a big role in the creation of the experiments.
This thesis explores two concepts from a more theoretical perspective: tools and platforms. The reflection upon these topics allows building the whole empirical body of work.
Tools are understood as bundles of electronics and software. As society evolves the concept of tool is moving away from the purely physical artefact as more and more devices carry embedded electronics. The arrival of this new kind of tools is transforming professions and professionals. This is bringing a new type of digital divide to society between those that know how to use these tools and those that don’t.
Within this context, a platform has to be understood as a bundle of electronics, software, and documentation. The author defines platforms as the tools including documentation or educational materials on how to use them. Platforms can therefore be a lot more abstract than tools and there can even be meta-platforms made of other platforms and tools. During the process of the fieldwork the author created or co-created several platforms that were used in the different experiments.