Process

Participants

We identified three categories of stakeholders with which to test the WCF. They were computer scientists, biologists, and cat carers. We carried out a collaborative requirements workshop for each team, for a total of three workshops. Each workshop team was composed of four members, with an overall number of twelve human participants.

For Gottesdiener (2003), developers and engineers are part of the stakeholder category of ‘suppliers’ and therefore they should be involved during the design process of a product. Hence, we initially organised a workshop with four computer engineers and designers working in the School of Computing and Communications at The Open University (OU). We chose a particular group of colleagues who attended a course on prototyping provided by the +ACUMEN-IDEO organisation34 _{several months before our study. During the course,}

they gained knowledge about UCD concepts, became acquainted with the method of collaborative workshops, and learnt to collaborate to develop prototypes. Except for one of the participants, who was a dog carer, the others did not have any experience with animals; and none of the four participants has ever had a cat. We deemed this group ideal for testing

our WCF, because they were a target stakeholder group and because they were familiar both with the method and with each other. Our objective was to see how people who are already acquainted with typical design tools and techniques were using the WCF.

After this first workshop, we recruited co-workers in another two units of The Open University. One team was composed by three biologists that work with laboratory animals such as rodents. The biologists did not have any experience with interaction design techniques and concepts. Two of them had had pets as children but not any longer; one was a dog and cat guardian at present. The team was completed by an interaction designer with no knowledge about animals since we needed a balancing member that could help detect unfeasible solutions and help biologists to focus on design aspects about which they knew little. With this team the aim was to explore how people that handle animals for their work could use the WCF. We deemed this team’s perspective to be important as they have experience of animals but not (necessarily) within affective relations level.

The third team was composed of four members of an OU club specialising in prototyping, crafting, and modifying technological gadgets, three of whom were cat carers. Our aim was to see how the WCF was used by people who have an affective relationship with animals and who are also interested in technological gadgets as users. The fourth team member was not caring for any pet; their participation was included to align the number and skills of participants of this workshop with the other two.

Each team was as much as possible organised to include people with a similar background, and familiar with each other. One reason for this was to differentiate the composition across teams and thus explore whether the background of participants would have influenced the application of the WCF. The second reason was to facilitate the tight schedule of a four-hour workshop since we deemed that people who knew each other would feel more at ease than they would with non-acquaintances and would be likely to get to work more efficiently by having a more open discussion and participating more proactively (Chick 2017). Four hours was the maximum time available that participants agreed to give us. Participants (subsequently collectively referred to as ‘designers’ regardless of whether they were computer scientists, biologists or cat carers) took part in the workshops on a voluntary basis and consented in writing to the use of the data acquired through the workshops for reports and publications. Their participation was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of The Open University (Ref. N. HREC/2016/2202/Paci/1, see Appendix 1) and incentivised with a small amount retail voucher.

Ultimately, our objective was to understand how different categories of stakeholders used the WCF as a guiding and inspiring tool for designing a new concept (i.e. wearability in animals) to which they were not familiar with.

Workshop schedule and activities

The three workshops were scheduled following a template derived from the +ACUMEN- IDEO.org course for roughly prototyping a physical artefact. The use of this kind of workshop was a way of facilitating a collaborative design process and allowed us to perform a ‘quick and dirty’ requirements analysis and prototyping activity in a relatively short time. The facilitator briefed each team about the aims of the workshop, presented the problem of impacts on animal wearers, presented the WCF and explained its components in detail, and guided each team through the sequential steps of the workshop, employing different techniques to facilitate the participants to apply the WCF. The workshops consisted of four parts: an introduction phase, in which the aim was to expose the problem of impacts in biotelemetry and explain the WCF role in the design process; an instruction phase, in which the WCF components were illustrated; an exploration phase, in which designers were asked to apply the WCF to a case study for establishing wearability requirements; and a crafting phase, in which each team was asked to make a low-tech mock-up based on the requirements discussed during the exploration phase. Each workshop comprised the following designing techniques and tools:

§ For the introduction and instruction phases: a short personal questionnaire helping participants to think about one’s own ‘inner craftiness’ and share it with the others; and a warm-up exercise to move the designers’ mind from ideas to making actual things (Appendix 3).

§ For the exploration phase: a ‘cat persona’ giving designers a concrete case with which to work; charts listing many variables relating to animals’ biology to help designers think about what was important for the cat persona; a brainstorm activity helping designers to propose ideas that might address an impact; a selection activity helping them to collaboratively choose the features of a device to be designed that would provide good wearability for the cat persona.

§ For the crafting phase: a ‘make it’ activity helping designers to collaboratively shape a low-tech mock-up; designers had at their disposal a variety of crafting materials (e.g. cardboard, paper, textiles of various textures and elasticity, bandages, rubber bands, strings, laces, straws, Velcro, paper clips, normal and duct tape, etc.) that they could use to build their device idea as well as a dummy cat that functioned as a physical representation of the cat persona and that could be used to try on prototype ideas; additionally, since this was a simulative exercise, designers could also imagine having in their hands any kind of material they wished.

Figure 6.1 depicts one of the teams during one of the discussions and the results of the brainstorm and crafting activities. The slides used to propose all the activities reported above and the list of materials used during the workshops can be found in Appendix 3. This

particular team imagined a soft furry collar of the same colour of the stuffed cat toy used as a dummy with the internal electronics evenly distributed along the length of the collar.

Figure 6.1: Example of workshop activities. The members of the team sketched their ideas on post-its during a brainstorm activity. Then, they chose among the ideas those to be designed during a ‘make it’ activity.

All the workshops were administered in the same order and included the same ‘facilitating’ techniques and crafting material.

Data collection and analysis

During the workshops, designers were invited to confer with each other and share their thoughts, ideas, and design propositions. They were also asked to describe the low-tech mock-ups crafted during the ‘make it’ activity and to explain their design details. Designer’s conversations and activities were video-recorded to facilitate a post-study data process, which consisted of transcribing the participants’ dialogues and linking their words to the crafting actions they performed during the crafting activity. From the transcripts, quotes were extrapolated and analysed for two purposes:

1) to understand whether the WCF was useful to designers to conduct a requirements analysis (this will be detailed in chapter 8), and

2) to gather requirements that had the potential of contributing to designing for wearability. A requirement is defined by Preece and colleagues as a clear, unambiguous, and specific statement that can have various levels of abstraction (Preece et al. 2015, p. 353). To formulate them, we firstly extrapolated all the designers’ statements that referred to the features of their mock-ups at any level of abstraction, and successively we categorised the statements as general high-level requirements (HLRs) or specific descriptions of how to

accomplish the HLRs. In this way, we identified three sets of wearability requirements35

(HLRs and related specifications), one set for each designer team. These requirements are reported in the next section.