Proof of Concept activity – Talk and debate on Institute of Communication/AAU

I made a personal walkthrough of the HANDS project objective and organzational challenges. It was positively but critically debated by an audience primarily from Aalborg University. But there where a couple of participators from HANDS partners.
The debate about HANDS was orientated towards
a) how to incorporate ethics in the design process
b) What type of testing and how to use the empirical data and
c) The main objective should be measurable.
Many valuable comments where given. Thank you to all participants of the meeting. The summary was written by Julie Leth. Thank you. My slides is here.

My motivation for this Proof of Concept meeting was the expectation, that the HANDS proposal will not be evaluated by qualified proposal-evaluators. Either will the evaluator have a Computer Science background, a cognitive psychology background or they will have an Human Computer Interaction background. Persuasive Technology is far new too the proposal evaluators.

In other words is this Proof of Concept activity my own desire to make a critical and Persuasive Technology competent review of the HANDS project.

In reality there where two obstacles to make succeed: first I had change from being in “Selling-mode” to an academic critical mode. Localize and explain the weak issues in HANDS and tell it to an audience which could be very critical. Second I had to explain the actual status of the design of HANDS within one hour.

The first obstacle was managed during the preparation of the talk. But it was initially difficult. To be open and to hope for critical comments. Unfortunately was the audience very positive and eager to make the project “come true” and wanted to contribute very constructively. It was a nice feeling but somehow too easy.

The second obstacle, introducing HANDS within one hour, was difficult. Even though the audience was knowledgeable about Persuasive Technology it wasn’t enough. Introducing HANDS software components demands that you describe the persuasive aims, you describe how you can achieve credibility and then you can explain the use of the functional triad. And when you talk about social actors things really become “scientific” or spectacular. Even a knowledgeable audience isnot familiar with the design choices. It takes a while to explain and it takes even more to digest.

Despite these reservations the meeting was valuable. It was not a complete walkthrough of the objectives of HANDS and all the challenges. But several vital HANDS issues were debated.

I will mention three issues here

1. Ethical issues.
The design of the social actor may introduce ethical problems. If the user gets too dependent of the social actor and too involved - how do you handle that? Ethical issues should (in a Scandinavian Persuasive tradition) be involved in the design process, not afterwards or at milestones, but a part of the systemdevelopment process.

b) What type of testing and how to use the empirical data.

Due to the fact that many research fields and traditions are included in the HANDS project it is not known how the empirical experiment should be designed. Very very true. Furthermore 1) the dataset size will be small(100<) 2) single individual with ASD have similarities with other individuals with ASD. And differs too. 3) The testsites will have to adapt the experiment to the single individuals which requireso not one experiment but many experiments.

c) The main objective should be measurable.

The meeting had a debate on the main objective of the proposal. The experienced EU-participators stressed explicitly, that it is very important to make the objective measureable. The same with all WorkPackages. EU needs projects which are not a risky business. The research design of HANDS makes it worthwhile to consider this very much. Quantitative research is far more easy to measure and HANDS will be a research
project primarily based on qualitative data.

There where other valuable comments. All valuable comments that will be integrated in the proposal. Thank you to the contributors.