IDENTIFICACIÓN Y ANÁLISIS DE RIESGOS

The final collection of fields are those that take a technocentric approach, these research domains are those that place an emphasis on the impact

that technology has on a place, especially when compared to the above domains. The technocentric fields grew out of HCI and it’s desire to create more useable technological artefacts. With such a beginning it is natural that the research performed has a focus on the technological, however re- search in HCI and related fields are in a period of flux.

This flux is to be expected in what are relatively recent research dis- ciplines. The field is transitioning from applied science evaluations and usability experiments to ethnographic and in-the-wild understandings of place. In 2003 Kjeldskov and Graham performed a survey of the variety of different research methods and approaches being used in mobile HCI by investigating 102 papers from the top conferences in HCI and related fields, such as CSCW and Ubiquitous Computing. These papers were cat- egorised and grouped, after which research methodology trends could be examined. The work showed a very heavy bias in mobile HCI research towards applied science approaches to engineering a technological arte- fact (45 of 102 papers), or for lab experiments to evaluate a technological artefact (30 of 102) (Kjeldskov and Graham 2003). This led the authors to declare that“the view that building and evaluating systems by trial and error is better than grounding engineering, evaluation and theory in user-based studies

weakens research in mobile HCI” (Kjeldskov and Graham 2003, p.326). The

conclusion of the article called for researchers to ground their evaluations more heavily in the spaces before beginning any work. A related article published only a year later investigated whether or not field experiments– as opposed to lab experiments–were worth the extra time and cost they require (Kjeldskov, Skov, Als and Høegh 2004). The authors compared two usability evaluations, one in the field, the other in a lab, and discov- ered that the differences between the two experiments were very minor, leading them to ask the question“Is it worth the hassle?” (Kjeldskov et al.

3.3. TOOLS FOR RESEARCH

2004).

Advance to 2012 and the research world of mobile HCI and related fields has changed a great deal. Kjeldskov and Paay (2012) performed an analysis of research methods as a follow up article to the original 2003 arti- cle and it showed how in less than decade the field had undergone quite a change. There was still a bias towards engineering a solution and evaluat- ing the solution in a laboratory setting, but the review showed that there is an increase in the number of field experiments and studies whose purpose was not to engineer a solution but simply to understand a place or prob- lem better. This change led the authors to see mobile HCI as following two main approaches,peopleandsystems, depending on whether the focus was on understanding or evaluating, and to express a desire to see these two approaches merge together over time (Kjeldskov and Paay 2012). This trend toward a greater understanding and grounding in a space was also echoed by another follow-up article to the 2004 article on lab versus field evaluations (Kjeldskov and Skov 2014). This article looked at the responses to, and uses of, the article asking the question whether field studies are worth the additional cost and time. The responses and uses of the paper help to indicate three things: that there is a change in the research toward a more holistic approach, that more“in the wild”(Crabtree, Chamberlain, Grinter, Jones, Rodden and Rogers 2013) evaluation and understanding are important to“seek to understand and shape new technology interventions within everyday living”(Crabtree et al. 2013, p.1), and that the desire for generalis- ability is perhaps less useful to the field than a proper understanding of a space and how the people in it exist (Kjeldskov and Skov 2014). The paper concludes that the field has a good understanding on how to build sys- tems, and in general needs to move away from simply creating and per- forming usability evaluations on artefacts. Kjeldskov and Paay’s (2012)

paper into research trends shows that this movement is already happen- ing. The future should be using approaches and methods that encourage in-the-wild understanding of a space and any artefacts introduced into it. It is no longer a question of whether these approaches should be taken, but when they should be taken (Kjeldskov and Skov 2014).

Urban informatics on the other hand has both a similar, and a differ- ent approach to research. Urban informatics could be considered part of the HCI fields, but can also be seen as separate, sitting on top of HCI and including a variety of other fields. The different number of fields that com- prise urban informatics gave it a unique start to begin research from HCI, effectively skipping the decade or so of HCI where the research was heav- ily biased towards only engineering and applied science. Despite this, urban informatics is still heavily technocentric (Tacchi, Slater and Hearn 2003, Hearn and Foth 2005), making it “interested in how ubicomp artefacts

can enhance the communicative ecologies”(Bilandzic and Venable 2011, p.2).

Based on the desire to better understand and to handle the “messy”

(Baskerville, Pries-Heje and Venable 2007, p.17) interactions that such a grounded approach to a communicative ecology entails, a study into ur- ban informatics methodology stated that urban informatics research has mostly settled on variants of either action research (an approach Kjeld- skov and Paay (2012) desired to see more of) or design science research (Bilandzic and Venable 2011). When Bilandzic and Venable (2011) wrote about the methodological challenges facing urban informatics, one of the sections discussed the adaptation of action research for more technocen- tric research fields, resulting in a slew of action research inspired method- ologies being created and used. These include canonical action research (Davison, Martinsons and Kock 2004) as a general purpose information systems research methodology, ethnographic action research (Tacchi et al.

3.3. TOOLS FOR RESEARCH

2003, Tacchi, Foth, Hearn et al. 2009) for understanding and developing community ICT solutions, or network action research (Foth and Adkins 2006) seeking to increase the amount of participation amongst the researchers and urban community members. In the end, the primary differences be- tween these approaches is the degree in which they encourage participa- tion amongst the community and the researchers.

Design science research, on the other hand, came about due to a desire to formalise the part of technocentric research responsible for the building and evaluation of relevant artefacts. This was in response to the heavy fo- cus that action research and its related methodologies took on primarily understanding the behaviour (Hevner, March, Park and Ram 2004). Simi- larly to action research, the design research methodology has been adapted and modified as needed. Some examples of these modifications are soft design science methodology created by combining soft systems methodol- ogy (Checkland 1981) with design science research (Baskerville et al. 2007) to better associate a solution to its problem, and action design research (Sein, Henfridsson, Purao, Rossi and Lindgren 2011) arguing that any so- lution must emerge from the interaction and evaluation of the design and the people using it, which Venable (2006, p.185) called“naturalistic evalua-

tion”. There have also been attempts to understand better how action re-

search and design research are similar and dissimilar to each other (Iivari and Venable 2009), which ultimately lead up to the modification and adap- tion of both methodologies to be merged together into new methodological approaches incorporating the best of both (Bilandzic and Venable 2011).

In summary, with the technocentric research fields there is a push for research to be more heavily grounded in a space or problem, to perform more in-the-wild research approaches, and to get a better understanding before introducing an artefact (should it be warranted).