The HTO group is presently involved in many different activities and one of the latest additions to the list is a workshop at Uppsala Health Summit, which Åsa Cajander (main organizer), Christiane Grünloh and Jonas Moll are organizing. This workshop was introduced by Åsa in this blog post. The planning has continued since then and now we have a setup which will soon be available in the pre-conference report which will be posted on the summit web page. On this page you can also already find a short description of our workshop, “Using Data for Better Cancer Treatments”.
In February, Åsa was interviewed about our workshop! Among other things, she discusses some challenges regarding the use of data for diagnosis and treatment of cancer and how we will make use of critical incidents as points of departure in the workshop. You can read about the interview here!
The summit will be held at Uppsala Castle, June 14-15, and according to the recently published summit programme our three-hour workshop will be held during the second day. Organizing this workshop will surely be an interesting and rewarding experience for all of us and hopefully we will come up with results that will inspire further research in this important area!
Romantic mice actually do sing. This was but one message from the conference Gilla jobbet (“Enjoy Work”). The event is a joint venture including a number of central actors on the Swedish labour market, who focus on workers’ health and safety. The conference itself had four major tracks: health promotion, the digital work environment, assessment and retention. If you missed it, it will go on tour in spring 2018. (Edit: some seminars were video recorded and you can watch them here.)
One presentation in the health promotion track–by Frida Fossland and Sara Leijonqvist–related to work life balance. Frida Fossland’s message was that we need to be observant of the more subtle aspects of flexible work. Sure, hyper connectivity 24/7 can be a striking aspect, but flexible work also creates tensions between employer and employee that needs to be taken care of–as traditional modes of management by walking around no longer apply. To support this, Prevent (a Swedish health promoting agency) has developed Balansguiden (“The Work Life Balance Guide”). This is an online tool supporting both the employer and the employee with the ultimate goal of facilitating discussions in the workplace relating to policies and strategies for flexible work. It is quite an impressive product and it actually was awarded first prize at the International Media Festival for Prevention in 2017.
One of the main sessions was a joint presentation on the topic of digitalization and the work environment. Sweden’s digitalization champion Jan Gulliksen introduced the topic with an emphasis on the societal aspects of the digital transformation, though with many examples from everyday work. He also promoted a book on the subject that will be released just before Christmas, a book where our colleague Bengt Sandblad is one of the co-authors.
This was followed by a presentation by Jonas Söderström, Sweden’s usability guru. He is the author of the book Jävla Skitsystem (Stupid **** system!) and is a key figure in establishing public awareness around the topic. He did a great presentation and the figures really brought home the message. Finally, Anna Pramborg from Sunt Arbetsliv ended the session with a preview of a new framework–aimed at municipalities and counties–also related to improving the digital work environment.
The main event at this session was nevertheless the presentation by Fredrik Beskow of the new online tool Inför rätt IT (“Do IT right”) from Prevent, aimed at supporting organisations during digital transformation. This tool in many ways represents Swedish state of the art in this respect, as the team behind it included among others aforementioned Jonas Söderström as well as our own Bengt Sandblad. Fredrik Beskow did stress that this was the first version and that the team were hoping to get lots of feedback so that the tool could be developed furher.
The day ended with a brilliant piece of entertainment. Stand up comedian Måns Möller and stress researcher Dan Hansson (an Uppsala University alumni) successfully combined humor and science in their show Öka livet! (“More life!”). And yes, it was in this show that the singing mice were introduced. It turns out that mice actually court by singing and we got the opportunity to listen to a smal serenade.
As I wrote in the previous post, I recently had the opportunity to attend and present at INTERACT which took place in Mumbai, India. In this post, I write about two posters & demos. The Poster and demos sessions took place in every coffee / tea break during the whole conference, giving the attendees plenty of opportunitities to visit the individiual demo booths.
HeartHab
Supraja Sankaram presenting her HeartHab application
Supraja Sankaran (Hasselt University, Belgium) demonstrated a tool to personalize e-coaching based on individual patient risk factors, adherence rates and personal preferences of patients using a tele-rehabilitation solution. In their abstract, she and her co-authors Mieke Haesen, Paul Dendale, Kris Luyten and Karin Coninx describe, that they
developed the tool after conducting a workshop and multiple brainstorms with various caregivers involved in coaching cardiac patients to connect their perspectives with patient needs. It was integrated into a comprehensive tele-rehabilitation application.
Supraja was one of the participants in our EIT Health / ACM SIGCHI eHealth summer school (see here, or here), so it was really nice meeting her again at the conference. Supraja was born in India, and she went out of her way helping us Non-Indians, for instance explaining the food or local practices to me. It was really fun!
Mind the Gap
Another extremely interesting demo was the game “Mind the Gap – A Playful Take on Gender Imbalance in ICT” by Max Willis and Antonella De Angeli (University of Trento). I had met Antonella already on Monday during the field trip and she introduced me to Max (her PhD student) during lunch. Thus, we already talked briefly about the game and I couldn’t wait to play it. They outlined the aim on their poster:
Mind the Gap is a provocative, playful intervention and a research tool that illuminates players’ attitudes and experiences concerning gender privilege and discrimination in ICT. It initiates a structured social interaction around gender issues driven by role-play and participant authored texts.
The gameboard charts a typical technology carreer path. Female Player Characters (PC’s) roll a 4-sided die, male PC’s roll a 6-sided die. Players advance and draw a ‘privilege’ card describing a scenario which is scored to reflect a penalty or an advanage according to the gender of the PC.
During the game, players an author their own privilege cards, add decisions, or create new rules and add them to the game.
Playing this game was really fascinating, but also reading the cards authored by previous players. It didn’t take long for me to pick the card which you see in the picture below: “Congrats! You will have a baby!” As my character was female like me (the character is drawn at the beginning of the game), I had to leave the career path and go on the family path.
“Mind the Gap” by Max Willis and Antonella De Angeli
Later I drew the card “Change gender to female, if you are men”. Too bad – I might have wanted my character to change to male in that case 🙂 The game drew a lot of attention and it was really interesting. I am really looking forward to reading more about their findings in the future. For more information, visit their project website.
At the end of the conference, the organisers showed us the following clip they put together, which I think is really nice:
This year’s INTERACT conference took place in Mumbai, India. It started off with field trips and workshops on Monday and Tuesday. The main conference was held from 27-29. September. The conference was extremely well organised and I am very glad that I could attend, listen to interesting talks, present our own paper, and meet so many kind and open people who do extremely interesting research.
What is INTERACT?
INTERACT is a biennial conference and is organised by the Technical Committee on Human–Computer Interaction (IFIP TC13) of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). IFIP is a non-governmental umbrella organisation of national societies working in the field of Information technology. IFIP is organised through technical commitees; TC13 is the committee on Human-Computer Interaction and consists of serveral working groups. This year’s INTERACT conference was the 16th conference; the previous one took place 2015 in Bamberg (Germany). INTERACT in Bamberg was my first international conference, where I presented a paper on the use of online reviews in the design process and how they can help designers to take the perspective of the people they are designing for.
Field Trip
This year was the first time, that researchers could propose field trips. As the deadline for registrating one’s interest was before I was notified that our short paper was accepted, I thought that participation was not possible any more. However, Arne Berger, the organiser of one field trip saw on Twitter, that I was attending the conference and asked whether I was interested in joining one day, as there was still a free spot. Excellent opportunity indeed! The field trip Understanding The Informal Support Networks Of Older Adults in India aimed to get a nuanced view on older adults’ practices of receiving from and providing support to peers, family, friends, and neighbors. It was a two-day fieldtrip, however, I only attended on Monday. Here we were split into two groups and I was forming a group together with Dhaval Vyas (Queensland University of Technology) and Antonella De Angeli (University of Trento). We conducted two interviews during the day. The couple we interviewed first felt more comfortable speaking in Hindi, so Dhaval interviewed them, and every now and then translated his question and/or their answers in English. That was a really interesting experience and Dhaval did a great job also including us, when he translated every now and then, what was said. Of course, this was not always possible, as this would have disturbed the flow of the conversation. Something I noticed was that the idea of “older people receiving support” was challenged: This couple was not receiving support from their family in that sense. Instead, they were providing tremendous support for their children, because they took care of the grandkids.
The second interview took place in the afternoon, where we met a 85 year old woman, who had worked as a teacher until she was 80 years old. She felt comfortable speaking English, so all of us could ask her questions. I found her to be very inspiring and positive; it was a great pleasure talking to her and learning how she goes about her day. For example, she likes playing chess on the iPad and, according to her son, her memory improved since she does this. Every evening, she meets a couple of her female friends outside the house, where they all sit on the bench, enjoy each other’s company, and watch the grandkids play. We were invited to join her when she was meeting her friends right after the interview, which was really nice, too.
Indian women on the bench in front of their house with Arne Berger (TU Chemnitz)
Presenting our Paper on “Critical Incidents as Workshop Format”
I also was able to present our short paper on “Using Critical Incidents in Workshops to Inform eHealth Design”. This paper is based on the workshop we organised at NordiCHI 2016 and was written together with some of the organisers and participants. Practitioners, researchers and patients were invited to contribute with a critical incident related to eHealth services for patients and relatives. We accepted five critical incidents, of which three focussed on the patient perspective and two on the developer’s perspective. You can find the critical incidents submitted and analysed in the workshop here.
Christiane Grünloh presenting at INTERACT 2017
In the paper, we reflect on Critical Incidents as a format, which we made use of in our workshop. In sum, the participants and we as organisers found it very helpful to reflect together in a group on eHealth projects. Even though the format was quite unusual and some participants reported, that they struggled to follow our instructions related to the critical incidents, it also helped to re-examine and re-frame their particular project. I really enjoyed presenting this at INTERACT on behalf of my co-authors. I have to admit, that the time constraint of 8 minutes was quite tough. But our session chair Jacki O’Neill did a wonderful job creating a positive atmosphere while keeping the time.
In part 2, I will write about the poster & demo session.
Uppsala Health Summit is “a recurring international policy arena for dialogue on challenges for health and healthcare, and how we can overcome them”. In 2018 the theme for the summit is cancer, and the HTO group has been asked to organize a workshop in the area of using existing data for diagnosis and treatment of cancer. We see this as a great opportunity to address this important issue and take it one step further towards a solution.
People who are personally invited are welcome to join this health summit. The project manager on the summit, Madelein Neil, personally invites decision makers, opinion formers and experts.
The HTO group are currently working on setting up the ideas for our workshop. We have had a few discussions and so far, we are thinking of re-using the concept of critical incidents that Christiane Grünloh presented at the INTERACT conference this year. The abstract of this paper is:
Demands for technological solutions to address the variety of problems in healthcare have increased. The design of eHealth is challenging due to e.g. the complexity of the domain and the multitude of stakeholders involved. We describe a workshop method based on Critical Incidents that can be used to reflect on, and critically analyze, different experiences and practices in healthcare. We propose the workshop format, which was used during a conference and found very helpful by the participants to identify possible implications for eHealth design, that can be applied in future projects. This new format shows promise to evaluate eHealth designs, to learn from patients’ real stories and case studies through retrospective meta-analyses, and to inform design through joint reflection of understandings about users’ needs and issues for designers.
Summer is over and Joy at Work is finally here. Well, at least that is the slogan for the Nordic Ergonomic Society’s yearly conference – NES 2017. This year it is three days of keynotes and presentation sessions in Lund, Sweden, at the Ingvar Kamprad Design Centre. As human-computer interaction ows some of its heritage to ergonomics, there are more than a few interesting presentations from our perspective. I notice that there are some presentations relating to eHealth which seem highly relevant to our DISA project, for instance.
On the whole, the conference sessions cover a lot of themes relating to ergonomics, its hard to identify any specific trends. On the contrary, I think the conference width is a good reminder of how complex working life actually is. Perhaps the inclusion of a special session for presentations relating to flexible workplaces is the strongest indicator of a hot new topics.
Monday ended with a tour of the lab facilities of the host, the division of Ergonomics and Aerosol Technology. This was a really pleasant surprise as the five stations in different labs revealed five very engaged researchers and some at times very hands on experiences of various equipment. I think a couple of the presenters could almost have persuaded me to change career. Science at its best.
Then there is also one presentation by myself on Tuesday afternoon, where I will discuss some of our experiences relating to the assessment of the Digital Work Environment in the wild. In a way, this presentation is just a teaser, as I will write more on this issue the coming months. For the very same reason I do hope I will get some input from the audience.
In the SISU project we study a major system implementation in a university context. This year we got accepted for the EUNIS 2017 Conference, which is an excellent opportunity to present our results outside the academic community (no pun intended).
My presentation was one of the last but we had a full seminar room and the response was positive. (The presentation will ba available from the EUNIS web site.) Many universities all over Europe are in the same stage, transitioning from old student information systems to new, so many shared the same concerns. One example was this year’s host Münster who presented their transition to a new student management system, a project which felt quite familiar to us studying Ladok.
Of course, for me it was really interesting to listen to the other presentations and to get a feel for what is important for the community and what is on the agenda.
The three largest conference tracks were e-learning, infrastructure and management respectivly. Reocurring themes were mobility and analytics. The new EU regulations on privacy were given special attention.
The conference ended with a brilliant presentation by Nikolas Guggenberger on trust in blockchains. Guggenberger discussed the relation between blockchain and law. He concluded by pointing out how reliance on blockchain will invert the field of data protection. Not by solving the problem but rather by switching focus from known individuals with secure transactions to anonymous users with open transactions. A main point was also how the lack of a central authority is misaligned with most jurisdiction as the idea of someone ultimately responsible is often critical.
To me, the keynote on open education by Sheila Macneill was nevertheless the most inspiering. Macneill is a long term advocate for open education and made a convincing case for openness being a core value of higher education. (Her presentation is available on her web site as a recording.)
Taking a somewhat longer perspective she also noted how hard it is to make reliable predictions. Just some years ago MOOCs were seen as the next big thing, ready to make all but a few HEIs obsolete. Now they are just a part of life but instead alternate facts are shaking the wery foundation of education. “That’s just an expert, what does s/he know?”. Sheila’s answer was a plea that universities must create their own strong narratives to remain relevant.
This year all but one member of the Ladok consortium were absent due to heavy workload. Pray next year’s conference will be dominated by lessons learnt from the Ladok project.
