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The interactive thread: exploring methods for multi-disciplinary design

Published: 01 August 2004 Publication History

Abstract

The Interactive Thread is a design method that helps us gather detailed, contextualised data from a large user population while sharing interaction design methods with professional designers from different disciplines. We developed a set of 10-15 minute exercises drawn from design, social and computer science and presented them as a series woven throughout two interaction design conferences. Our goals were to provide an entertaining, interactive conference activity, to teach and share multi-disciplinary design methods, and to gather information that would otherwise be too labour-intensive for us as designers. This paper reflects on our experiences, including what worked and what did not. We discuss how others may reuse this strategy in other settings, including workshops, conferences and corporate retreats and we include an appendix with the specific interactive thread exercises.

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cover image ACM Conferences
DIS '04: Proceedings of the 5th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques
August 2004
390 pages
ISBN:1581137877
DOI:10.1145/1013115
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 01 August 2004

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Author Tags

  1. design methods
  2. empirical methods
  3. interactive thread
  4. interdisciplinary design
  5. multidisciplinary design
  6. participatory design
  7. scenario
  8. storyboard
  9. storytable
  10. technology probe
  11. user-centred design

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DIS04
Sponsor:
DIS04: Designing Interactive Systems 2004
August 1 - 4, 2004
MA, Cambridge, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%

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Designing Interactive Systems Conference
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  • (2023)Aligning Crowdworker Perspectives and Feedback Outcomes in Crowd-Feedback System DesignProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35794567:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
  • (2022)SnappView, a Software Development Kit for Supporting End-user Mobile Interface ReviewProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35345276:EICS(1-38)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2022
  • (2022)What’s keeping teens up at night? Reflecting on sleep and technology habits with teensPersonal and Ubiquitous Computing10.1007/s00779-021-01661-x27:2(249-270)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2022
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