Connie Golsteijn

Serena Wright

Using Narrative Research and Portraiture to Inform Design Research

Keywords: Qualitative research, methods, narratives, story-telling, narrative research, portraiture, design research, interaction design, craft

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Introduction

The use of qualitative research methods originating from social sciencesfor example, interviews, ethnography, and data codingis well established in HCI and design research communities. In practice, however, there is still a significant gap between disciplines, because social science methods adopted in HCI do not always provide a close fit to the method's original ethos, often 'fail [ing] to do justice' to the kinds of insights that such methods can provide [1, p.549]. There is still plenty of discussion about the role of the social sciences and humanities in the inherently 'interventionary' world of HCI, which was again illustrated by a vivid panel discussion about this topic at CHI 2012 [START_REF] Bardzell | The humanities and/in HCI[END_REF]. This interdisciplinary paper aims to contribute to the discussion on how HCI may learn and benefit from closer investigation, appropriation, and collaboration with the humanities and social sciences, and enable the diversity of human life to come to life through our research. This paper is aimed particularly at researchers in interaction design who seek to generate qualitative person-centered data to aid both the design process and the understanding of the users, but who do not have an extensive social science background. As such, researchers familiar with social science methods may already be aware of some of the points made in this paper, although we hope that they may still benefit from the discussion around the adoption of such methods in a design process. Specifically, we address how the HCI field can benefit from adopting the practices of narrative research and portraiture from the social sciences, and we illustrate how these practices can be used together in a design research process, firstly, to gather, analyze and present data, and secondly, to inform idea generation activities. Narrative research and portraiture methods provide means to engage creatively and holistically with research participant data. As we will illustrate, this approach is beneficial for increasing understanding in users, their diverse motivations and behaviors, and the context of use. In addition, these insights can then be actively utilized in the design process to create novel and appropriate design solutions which are sensitive to these diversities.

The next section will address narrative research and portraiture in the social sciences, as well as the use of related methods in HCI and design. We then present an example of the use of narrative research and portraiture in a study on craft and ideation for 'digital craft', followed by a section with specific guidelines on how to employ these methods in design and HCI. We conclude with a discussion of opportunities and strengths, and limitations and risks of using these methods.

2

Related Work

Narrative Research, and Related Methods within HCI

Some twenty-five years ago, Bruner [START_REF] Bruner | Life as a narrative[END_REF] posited the concept of 'life as narrative', arguing that human beings construct meaning, make sense, and engage in 'world making' [3, p.11] through 'narrative'that is, through creating, telling, hearing, recording, and reading stories. Relatedly, the field of narrative research seeks to engage analytically with the storied ways in which we make sense of meaning and experiences, within the wider context of our social world and those social others within it [START_REF] Bruner | Life as a narrative[END_REF][START_REF] Hollway | Doing qualitative research differently[END_REF]. As such, narrative research is particularly useful for exploratory research projects, which seek to engage with experience and meaning-making processes of diverse individuals or groups, with such approaches being utilized across a range of subjects in the social sciences, including education [e.g. 5], health [e.g. 6] and crime [e.g. 7], as well as representing a primary staple of ethnographic research in any field [START_REF] Van Maanen | Tales of the field : on writing ethnography[END_REF]. The use of 'narrative' data has long been established and recognized as crucial in the attempt to understand users' needs within the HCI research community. In the main, however, we would argueas Dourish did with reference to ethnographies [START_REF] Dourish | Implications for design[END_REF] that narrative-based research methods have been read too narrowly within the HCI and design field. For example, narratives and story-telling have featured primarily as an outcome or goal of design research [e.g. 9, 10, 11] rather than being fully embraced as a research approach across the entire process. Narrative research approaches appear almost exclusively within experience-centered design, which 'aims to understand and design digital technologies that support rich, social and meaningful experiences in our everyday lives' [12, p.1506, 13], rather than engaging in depth with the stories and lives of the research subjects. Here, the concept of 'narratives' has, for example, been adapted as a conversational interview technique, through the use of cultural probes [START_REF] Wright | Experience-centered design: designers, users, and communities in dialogue[END_REF], whilst other uses of 'narrative' in HCI research focus more on possessions and technologies than on individual lives, e.g. 'deep narratives' [START_REF] Jung | How Deep Is Your Love: Deep Narratives of Ensoulment and Heirloom Status[END_REF] and technology biographies [START_REF] Blythe | Technology biographies: field study techinques for home use product development[END_REF]. Moreover, whilst some HCI methods share some common ground with narrative research -e.g. contextual inquiry's commitment to increasing understanding of users and their actions 'in situ' [START_REF] Wixon | Contextual design: an emergent view of system design[END_REF] they lack other crucial aspects (that is, CI focuses solely on the user in relation to their work, whilst most narrative studies within the social sciences go beyond the phenomenon of interest, engaging with the personal, social, and cultural life history of users). Similarly, whilst ethnographic approaches to design research [e.g. [START_REF] Dourish | Implications for design[END_REF][START_REF] Millen | Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research[END_REF] share some key aims with the narrative research and portraiture methods that we adopted for our research (e.g. deep understanding of individuals; rich descriptions of subjects and their environments; positive bias towards subjects' perceptions), they have been read 'too narrowly', with an over-emphasis on 'implications for design' [START_REF] Dourish | Implications for design[END_REF]. In contrast, instead of focusing on 'implications for design', the approach we are advocating in this paper aims to increase the importance of ethnographic data, by importing narrative data, integrity intact, into the ideation phase. Despite the presence of some common goals more broadly speaking, however, this does not render ethnography and narrative research methods synonymous; as noted by Lawrence-Lightfoot, 'key contrasts' exist between the two [START_REF] Lawrence-Lightfoot | Reflections on portraiture: a dialogue between art and science[END_REF].

In conclusion, whilst there is clearly a tradition of utilizing storied and narrativecentered approaches within the field of HCI research, currently this appears to be primarily limited to the area of experience-centered design. Furthermore, methods designed within the social sciences have not always been adapted in a way that remains faithful to their original ethos.

2.2

Portraiture, and Related Methods in Design and HCI Whilst a diverse range of methodologies exist for analysing storied data [START_REF] Riessman | Narrative methods for the human sciences[END_REF], the one that concerns us here is that of the 'research portrait' (often referred to simply as 'portraiture'). A research portrait is a written narrativefor example, about an interviewee -which aims to 'capture the richness, complexity, and dimensionality of human experience in social and cultural context' [21, p.3]. The purpose of this is to attend to 'the aesthetic whole' [22, p.48] of the research subject(s), and as such, a portrait must be strongly specific and contextual [START_REF] Lawrence-Lightfoot | Reflections on portraiture: a dialogue between art and science[END_REF][START_REF] Lawrence-Lightfoot | The art and science of portraiture[END_REF]. Similar methods to the research portrait also have some degree of prominence within HCI and design research. However, here they primarily exist as a means for distilling and communicating the results of ethnographic fieldwork. For example, Wright and McCarthy [START_REF] Wright | Empathy and experience in HCI[END_REF] highlight the narrative method of 'ethnographic vignettes' -'short pen pictures of people in a setting [which] have been used to capture the felt experience of working in a particular place or setting' [24, p.642]as a means to elicit empathic responses from readers [START_REF] Orr | Talking about machines: an ethnography of a modern job[END_REF]. Whilst Wright and McCarthy's method shares with narrative and portraiture an interest in 'felt experience' and the use of 'pen pictures' (which are, in essence, short research portraits) [24, p.642], it lacks our study's full integration across the design process, e.g. as a dedicated tool in ideation.

Similarly, 'scenario-based design' and 'character-driven scenarios' share with sociological portraiture a focus on capturing users' experiences in a storied form, which then facilitate the creation of fictional 'rounded' character descriptions [START_REF] Nielsen | From user to character: an investigation into user-descriptions in scenarios[END_REF], which act as placeholders for individual users. This is also a key aspect in the creation of 'personas', which are composite fictional characters, based on user data from field research, which embody multiple users' unique characteristics and beliefs [START_REF] Cooper | The inmates are running the asylum[END_REF]. Other methods related to personas are 'pastiche scenarios' (uses fictional characters from well-known cultural sourcese.g. novels, movies, playsto encourage designers to explore alternative interpretations of technologies) [START_REF] Blythe | Pastiche scenarios[END_REF], 'extreme characters' (uses fictional characters with exaggerated emotional attitudes, e.g. a drug dealer, or the Pope) [START_REF] Djajadiningrat | Interaction relabelling and extreme characters: methods for exploring aesthetic interactions[END_REF], and 'design alter egos' (uses fictional characters based on the recollections and reflections of designers) [START_REF] Triantafyllakos | Design alter egos: constructing and employing fictional characters in collaborative design sessions[END_REF]. Much like our own study, these approaches also utilize narrative/storied data within the ideation processes, howeverto paraphrase Lawrence-Lightfoot and Daviswhat they lack is the commitment to maintaining 'a view of the whole' of each individual user, which is the art and science of portraiture [START_REF] Lawrence-Lightfoot | The art and science of portraiture[END_REF]. In the aforementioned portraiture-related approaches, character sketches or personas are most frequently summarized and/or blended descriptions of multiple users into one or more realistic and characteristicyet importantly, fictitious users [START_REF] Blomquist | Personas in action: ethnography in an interaction design team[END_REF][START_REF] Chang | Personas: from theory to practices[END_REF]. Such an approach risks a lack of depth, detail, and 'wholeness' that is so central to portraiture, potentially leading to superficial, and even erroneous, assumptions [START_REF] Triantafyllakos | Design alter egos: constructing and employing fictional characters in collaborative design sessions[END_REF]. Moreover, such approaches eschew the important reflexive question of the role of the researcher in producing the data generated, and through doing so, effectively 'neutraliz[e] out of existence' the researcher in each individual instance [21, p.86]. This is highly problematic since it is 'crucial that [the researcher/s] voice be monitored' [21, p.86]. To fail to do so risks the dominance of the researcher's interpretation of the user's data, and the loss of what was originally important to the person being consulted.

Conversely, the portraiture approach addressed in this paper tells the story of each interviewed or observed person in a separate individual portrait, within the context of use and staying true to the real users, with an ever-present eye to reflexivity and researcher 'voice', considering at all times whose perspective is being presented when the researcher relays a point. We believe our approach therefore minimizes the risks of stereotyping and oversimplifying users and their experiences inherent to the aforementioned methods. In addition, we propose importing these holistic descriptions of real users directly in the ideation process. This ensures that attention remains focused on the diversity of the people in the target group throughout the process. This approach therefore contrasts quite strongly with the ways in which narrative data is used within personas, which are usually created between data collection and ideation phas-es, thus generalizing and summarizingrisking the loss of individual diversitiesbefore ideation has begun. This may cause interesting insights to be lost earlier in the design process, which portraiture aims to prevent. To sum up, the narrative research and portraiture approach addressed in this paper distinguishes itself from other ethnographic data gathering approachese.g. ethnography and contextual inquiryby engaging holistically with users' stories and by providing tools for integrating these stories throughout design processes, and from other data representation approachese.g. scenario-based design and personasby retaining researcher reflexivity, and by carrying forward the stories of real users throughout the design process and into the ideation stages, which helps to retain the diversity of the target group, for both the communication of ethnographic fieldwork results and the generation of broad spectrums of ideas.

Illustrative Example: Using Narrative Research and Portraiture to Design for Digital Crafting

In this descriptive section, we present an illustrative example from our own study to demonstrate the ways in which a narrative and portraiture method of data generation and analysis contributed to our research within design and HCI. The section which follows on from this, which is more analytically-focused, will center on the ways in which the lessons we learned can be extrapolated for the benefit of wider design and HCI communities.

Broadly, the study we will address was concerned with 'everyday craft'; that is, the creative processes people engage in to carefully make things [START_REF] Csikszentmihalyi | Creativity : flow and the psychology of discovery and invention[END_REF][START_REF] Gauntlett | Making is connecting: the social meaning of creativity from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0[END_REF][START_REF] Sennett | The craftsman[END_REF]. More specifically, we wanted to better understand everyday crafting practices with physical materials, in the attempt to initiate design explorations of how characteristics and processes of craft may be extrapolated to the digital realm. The study also looked to developing ideas for new products or systems related to 'digital crafting' (that is, crafting with digital materials and/or tools). Because in this paper we merely aim to illustrate the use of the method through the example of our craft study (and not so much to discuss the topic of craft itself), a literature review of what constitutes 'craft', and related HCI and design work, lie beyond the scope of this paper.

In total we interviewed eight individuals who were involved in crafting/making things with physical materials in a diverse range of settings. In order to explore the breadth of everyday crafting, we recruited individuals with varying levels of expertise, and included professionals, semi-professionals, and amateurs, hoping to cover all types of crafters from the 'certified […] genius', to those individuals who just 'seem[ed] to like making things […] in everyday life' [34, p.75]. Each individual was chosen specifically for their work in craft-or art-oriented disciplines, in the hope that they would inspire our development of the 'digital crafting' concept. As such, the interviewees were: a guitar builder, a jewelry designer, a hairdresser, a paint artist, a glass artist, a silk painter, a wood and metal hobbyist, and a mixed media artist. We felt that the narrative and portraiture approaches were particularly appropriate because we wanted to engage with the meanings these individuals attached to 'crafting' and the characteristics, processes and purposes behind its physical manifestation, in the hope that we could extrapolate these findings to better understand 'craft' within the digital realm.

In order to illustrate the procedure of our method we will describe how the first author went about interviewing one of the participants -Paul, a Dutch guitar builderusing a narrative approach, before describing the process of 'portraiture' (i.e. writing Paul's research portrait), and how we used this to generate ideas.

Interviewing Paul Using a Narrative Approach

Paul's interview took place in his home in a small town in the south of the Netherlands. Before going to meet him, we had developed an interview guide that would act to encourage storied responses, rather than potentially close such responses down (often an issue with standard semi-structured interview guides) [START_REF] Hollway | Doing qualitative research differently[END_REF] after all, one cannot work with narratives if one does not provide the conditions for their construction in the first instance. This was therefore a crucial step, one which is explored in detail in Section 4.1 below, to prevent the tedium of repetition. Briefly, the interview guide consisted of a list of topics we were interested in rather than a concrete set of questions, and included: how and why the participant started crafting, the process of crafting, how they learned it, and materials and tools they used. We further left plenty of room for discussion of unanticipated topics that were brought up by the participant. While the introduction was started in the living room, immediately thereafter the interviewer was invited to Paul's workshop, which was located in the garage, which had been refurbished and dedicated to the craft of guitar building. Much like it is beneficial for contextual inquiry and ethnographic research more broadly, being in the guitar builder's workshop also aided the narrative interview for a number of reasons. Firstly, it illustrated some of the topics Paul was talking about, and allowed the interviewer to better understand and document (both through taking notes and photographs) the context of the crafting practice. Secondly, it gave both interviewer and interviewee handles for new topics to address, and thirdlycruciallyit benefitted the narrative character of the interview as Paul naturally (without prompting) started telling stories about materials, tools, and examples in the workshop.

Because the main interest lay in exploring the breadth of the practice, it was important to let Paul talk about his craft and his workshop freely, in order to facilitate the generation of storied data that was personally relevant to him. We began the interview by asking questions that would elicit storied responses [again, see Section 4.1], such as "Can you tell me something about the kind of crafting you do?", and "Can you tell me how and when you started building guitars?" During the interview, the participant was encouraged to draw on examples and stories of personal relevance to him, generating ideas previously unanticipated by the researchers. A new topic was only introduced by the interviewer when the participant had finished a story. Interviews lasted half an hour to little over an hour (44 minutes on average) and were audio recorded to allow the interviewer to more fully engage with the participant. The few written notes that were made focused mainly on aspects the audio recording would not capture, such as the interviewer's observations and impressions during the interviews, e.g. on participants' use of examples, the mood and personality of the crafter, and the appearance of the workshop, e.g.:

"As the interview takes place in his workshop, it gets hands-on by default and throughout the interview Paul keeps walking up and down the workshop, opening drawers, taking things from shelves, and handling tools and materials to show me exactly what he is talking about. I get the feeling the workshop further serves as a mental map to give Paul new handles for things to talk about and he visibly enjoys using the half-finished guitar parts lying around as examples."

Creating a Written Portrait

After the interview the audio recordings, written notes and photos were used to write up a 'research portrait' about Paul. Because of the narrative character of the interview, rich qualitative data was collected and a two-phased analysis process helped to identify which parts of the interview and which quotes provided interesting insights, and helped to retain and communicate a coherent picture of Paul as a craftsman. In the first phase, notes were taken on interesting comments and observations while listening to the audio recordings, reading notes, and looking at captured photos. During this phase, relevant sections of the recording were transcribed verbatim, e.g. Paul's explanation of why he likes building guitars, or his experiences learning the craft. Also notes were included on the context of the interview and when an example was shown.

In the second phase these notes were written up as a portrait which followed the structure of first introducing Paul's craft and the context of the interview, before looking at when and how he started, and the materials and tools he used, followed by any other interesting themes from the interview, including working by assignment, risks, and teaching guitar building. This meant that the portrait did not need to follow the sequence in which interview questions were asked. The portrait, in which the participant's name was anonymized, was a rich description supported with lengthy quotes from the interview where this was considered useful, e.g. because of the level of detail or the relevance to the research aims. The portrait further combined 'first order' narratives (those of the participant), and 'second order' narratives (the stories the researcher is conveying) [START_REF] Harling Stalker | A tale of two narratives: Ontological and epistemological narratives[END_REF], including interesting observations, and interpretations that would later become important for ideation, such as Paul's creation of his own tools:

"As I look around the workshop I see, apart from an impressive collection of the obvious tool such as saws, chisels, and files, many devices and tools that are unknown to me. Paul explains to me that he makes these himself to support parts of the process: 'Most of the work involved in building a guitar is precision work and each time you have to measure something there is risk of error, so you start looking for ways to limit this risk and create tools for this.' He modestly adds that the ideas for these tools do not all come from him, but also from colleagues, books and the internet. His self-made tools range from hand-powered tools (for example, a large, round, slightly hollow sanding disc for sanding the top panel of the guitar's belly, and a compass with a chisel to cut out a circular groove for the rosette around the sound hole), to advanced electronic devices (e.g. a sanding machine for shaping the large, thin wooden panels for the top and bottom of the belly, and an intricate-looking device for bending the thin panels for the sides of the belly with the aid of a heating element This further illustrates how researcher reflexivity was included in the portrait. Moreover, in recognizing the appreciation of the first author's genuine interest in guitar-making, it enabled us to use this reflection to understand the importance of teaching, authenticity, and commitment to Paul's crafting, which provided the basis for the 'Online Guild' idea outlined in the following section.

Idea Generation based on Paul's Portrait

Because the explored practice of crafting was so broad and there was no predefined direction in which design ideas for its digital equivalent should be sought, the crafter portraits were considered useful to provide a focus to ideation compared to using themes or design directions. The ideation phase consisted of individual brainstorm sessions by the first author in which each separate session focused on a specific crafter. Inspired by our new understanding of what practical, hands-on crafting meant to those engaged in it, brainstorming centered on asking: "If this crafter would instead be crafting with digital media or digital technologies, what could be designed for him or her?" A brainstorm session began by writing down a few key points for each crafter that arose from the portraits. For Paul these points were: knowledge of materials, patience and spending a long time, teaching the interested and appreciative, making his own tools, and the workshop as a mental map. Ideas were generated around these and other themes arising from the portrait, and the portrait was used intensely during the session: sections were read and reread, which triggered new ideas. Ten ideas were generated inspired by Paul's portrait, which included:

─ A craft timer that captures the time spent crafting an object in the object itself or on a timeline, and connects relevant occurrences in your life to the crafted object, or captures things you have done or said to be embedded hidden in the objectbased on the time and patience Paul has for creating objects, and valuing slow processes. ─ A digital craft workshop, such as a desktop or software lay-out, that can function as a mental map by being flexible in how tools and media are organized and by showing small previews around icons of specific tools and programs of what you have been working on last -based on the observation that Paul's workshop seemed to function as a mental map for him.

After this initial idea generation phase, ideas were distilled into a set of four or five idea statements that summarized and highlighted interesting ideas arising from the portrait, interview data, and design ideas, which for Paul included: contextual information implicitly visible in photos (expertise of materials); online workshops and guilds rather than a 'take what you need' mentality (see idea below); and create your own digital tool (see idea below). Finally, two ideas were selected and concept sketches were made for further exploration and discussion within the research team:

1. The Clay Tool (Figure 1a) allows you to create your own computer input device by making use of a set of sensors and actuators and a lump of clay, so you can make the appropriate tool for each task at hand instead of having to rely on manufactured, generic tools -based on Paul's creativity and interest in making his own tools for situations where standard tools do not suffice. 2. The Online Guild (Figure 1b) is a place where interested crafters can get together to share their love for their craft. Rather than being able to download anything, members have to be invested in the guild and contribute to the community. It is a more personal environment than a forum and its functions could include: learning from a remote master, exchanging experiences and skills with peers, browsing a digital workshop, or having tailored sets of tasks within a learning scheme set by another member -based on Paul's desire to teach only those who are interested and committed enough. This method of narrative interviewing, portraiture, and ideation was applied to the eight interviews and over ten ideas per crafter were generated in the initial brainstorm rounds. Out of these ideas one or two ideas per crafter were selected, which resulted in a set of thirteen conceptual ideas for new forms of crafting with digital media or digital technology, based on the practical art as constructed within the research portraits we had created. These ideas were not only true to the crafters we interviewed, but also formed a varied set that addressed multiple angles on crafting. For our study, one of the ideas was chosen and developed into an interactive prototype for further evaluation and development, which lies outside the scope of this paper, but illustrates that the method is highly capable of supporting the generation of ideas that are suitable for going into further design development phases.

Lessons from our Example: Applying the Tenets of Narrative

Research and Portraiture to Design and HCI

Generating Narrative Data

Because we were interested in understanding the nature of crafting, our own interview guideas noted aboveincluded topics for discussion with each crafter (e.g. how they started, and their materials and tools), which were supplemented with a range of discussion 'prompts' (e.g. perfectionism, risks, and social aspects of the craft). This can be applied to any area of research, so readers wishing to adopt this method should similarly choose a list of topicsaround ten to fifteen is idealwhich cluster around the area of substantive interest, and a list of related prompts which seek to provide depth in understanding the issue at hand. It is important that deviation from this guide as happened in our study with the discussion of unanticipated topics brought up by the participant, such as personal challengeshould be considered positive, since it may generate ideas previously unanticipated by the research team. Of course, having constructed a topic guide is of little use if one cannot ask a question likely to occasion a narrative response, and since the concept of narrative is inherently bound up with that of storytelling, it is crucial that the research methods chosen are capable of eliciting storied data. In this sense, narrative-focused interviews are distinct from run-of-the-mill, semi-structured qualitative interviewing strategies, where even the favoured 'open-ended question' can act to suppressand even eradicatethe impulse and opportunity for storytelling [cf. 4]. To illustrate this, Hollway and Jefferson [4, p.35] recommended that researchers 'narrativise topics'; that is, 'turn questions about given topics into story-telling invitations'. For example, a question that we might have asked in a more semi-structured interview under the topic heading 'Learning about crafting' -e.g. "How did you learn your craft?"could easily be answered in one short sentence, for example: 'Through my college degree and placements.' However, by 'narrativising' the question in the way suggested by Hollway and Jefferson above, and instead asking "Could you explain to me the processes and people by which you learned your craft?", we increased the likelihood of eliciting a personally relevant and detailed story about processes, experiences, and interactions with others.

Also crucial to the construction of narrative data is the idea of situated context. For this reason, and based on our own experiences, we would suggest interviews are undertaken within design environments or workspaces relevant to the study and design goals (as noted earlier, this is a common aspect of both narrative/portraitures, and methods of contextual inquiry and ethnography), although we acknowledge that this may not always be logistically viable. Researchers should also seek to ask questions which look to the broader personal histories and social influences behind an individual's reasoning, in order to provide shape depth to the portrait.

An audio recorder may be more important during narrative-focused interviews than standard interviews, owing to the centrality of rich descriptions and quotes so crucial in the analysis and portraiture stages of the research. Moreover, using a recording device frees up the interviewer's note-taking to focus on the observations, non-verbal data, and reflexive considerationswhich provide a depth and wholeness to the interview, and can be used to build up a far more detailed research portrait at a later stage.

In our craft study, it was also considered beneficial that the first author was involved in the whole process from interviewing the crafters, data analysis and writing up the portraits, to the idea generation. This helped to build up a thorough understanding of the crafters, and the characters they represented in the ideation. However, as a basis for idea generation, the portraits are believed to be a powerful tool to support designers even if they have not been involved in the data collection. Because of their richness and realistic qualities, being based on real, individual people, they are able to act as 'substitute whole' for even those without access to the raw data [4, p.70].

Writing the Portrait

Research portraits, which can be used as analytical tools for any design research involving experiential and storied data, are particularly useful when exploring insights of populations who have traditionally been denied a 'voice' within more mainstream research [START_REF] Lawrence-Lightfoot | The art and science of portraiture[END_REF]. However, we also found it to be a useful tool for maintaining the presence of the participants within the analytical process. Therefore, you do not need to be working with an historically 'voiceless' population; simply, you need only an interest in keeping focus on the context (personal, social, and otherwise) within which participants' insights arise, and an acknowledgement of the benefits that can be gained from doing this rather than removing the individual early in the process (as is the usual practice with personas, for example).

A research portrait should include large, verbatim chunks of interview data. It should detail the setting in which the interview took place, and feature the researcher's feelings about the setting and the individual participant. In terms of structure, it should cluster around the key 'narratives', or storylines/plots, that underpin what the participant is telling you, 'documenting their voices and visionstheir authority, knowledge, and wisdom' [37, p.51], as illustrated to some extent by the excerpts in the previous section. It should also include observations from the researcher, who acts both as witness to, and interpreter of, participant 'voices', and who engages in sketch-ing the design context, and systematically 'scanning the action' [21, p.87], documenting important contextual observations. An important tenet of both narrative research and portraiture is that of reflexivity (although not exclusively to them, since it is also central to ethnographic and feminist approaches, for example), which focuses on the importance of researcher(s) reflecting on the research scenario and their interaction within this context [START_REF] Hill | The poetry in portraiture: Seeing subjects, hearing voices, and feeling contexts[END_REF][START_REF] Elliot | Using narrative in social Research: Qualitative and quantitative approaches[END_REF]. When conducting narrative research, it is important that one always considers the ways in which one's own personal autobiography (think for example about gender, age, social class, educational/employment status and rank) might impact upon the biographies disclosed within the interviews [START_REF] Cotterill | Weaving Stories: personal auto/biographies in feminist research[END_REF], and the same is true of writing a research portrait, which is 'shaped through dialogue between the portraitist and the subject' [37, p.51]. Researchers employing this method should be awareas we werethat their own backgrounds (in our case, interaction design and criminology), and even their hobbies (e.g. playing the guitar, or not) impact variously on their own views of the topics at hand, the ways in which interviews are conducted, and in which the portraits are written. For example in our craft study, where the first author with a design background conducted the interviews, some participants felt intimidated at first to talk about their craft because they felt the interviewer was 'very creative', and extra attention needed to be given to reassuring participants that we were not assessing their skills but were interested in their stories.

Whilst these interactions can be problematic if one is unaware of them and is writing up the findings oblivious to this, the reflexive researcher acknowledges such phenomena, writes him or herself into the research in order to demonstrate this, and makes clear in writing up the point at which first-order narratives become secondorder. We also advocate following Miles and Huberman's advice, who suggest that participants be allowed to read, and comment upon, their own portraits, being sure to question whether our interpretation of lives are 'credible to the people we study' [in: 21, p.246]. This allows us to see where individuals may challenge the interpretations we have made from the data, and provide scope for us to more carefully reflect and consider those instances where our own autobiography may have acted to unwittingly shape that which we had written.

Ideation and Idea Development

Building the portraits into a tool for design ideation moves beyond their original uses in the social sciences, and employs them as an active part of this innovative phase. Based on our experiences, designing for a broad topic area in which the direction for design ideas was not predetermined, portraits can provide useful handles and focus for idea generation in those cases where 'anything is possible'. Of course, as with any ideation method, the use of portraits is not a guarantee for good ideas, but we found them to be effective when used as described below. We recommend that brainstorm sessions focus on generating ideas around the main question: "If we would be designing [the design goal or topic] for this person, what would that need to be? What would be important to them?" As we have shown, this can be done in a process of first distilling interesting or striking findings from the interview in the form of short statements, generating ideas around these findings, summarizing the key points from these ideas, and selecting or developing the main ideas. However, we have found it important to treat ideation as an iterative process and intensely use the portraits in this process: we recommend reading and rereading the portrait several times during the session because ideas may trigger different interpretations of the portrait and thus new ideas. Also, as in any idea generation approach, it is important to allow all ideas, no matter how unfeasible or 'crazy' they may seem.

In most cases more than one participant will be interviewed and as such each participant should get their own dedicated brainstorm session. We acknowledge that this is time consuminghowever, we felt that in terms of outputs generated, this was a fair trade-off. As with most brainstorm approaches it is important to follow up an ideation phase with an idea selection and idea development phase. In this phase ideas are evaluated on originality, feasibility, cost, and any other practical demand the project may pose. For using portraiture in ideation we recommend at this point to put together ideas arising from different participants, look for overlap and possible opportunities to combine ideas, and select the most promising ideas.

Further attention in this phase should go to assessing how specific to each person an idea is and how it may be generalized to a larger audience. Despite the fact that our ideas were generated starting from one specific person, we found that the resulting design concepts could be extrapolated to other target groups and use contexts: through the process of idea generation, selection and development, ideas were generalized, categorized, summarized, and extended to larger target groups, making sure they were relevant beyond idiosyncratic individuals whilst retaining their unique relevance to the interviewee. Similar to the designing for extreme characters approach [START_REF] Djajadiningrat | Interaction relabelling and extreme characters: methods for exploring aesthetic interactions[END_REF] and pastiche scenario [START_REF] Blythe | Pastiche scenarios[END_REF] approaches, we found developing or reformulating concepts to reach a broader audience afterwards generally easy to do, and the unique inspiration the individual initially provides, weighted up to this extra evaluation step. On the whole, we found that the embracing the portrait across the research process helped us to maintain the individual inspiration and diversity for idea generation that could have easily have gotten lost if categorization, generalization, and summarization had been done immediately after the interviews, as is the case with personas. As such, using portraiture for design takes into account the diversity of different people within a target group throughout the whole design process, and retains this attention for the individuals until the conclusion of the ideation process.

Discussion

Drawing on our experiences using narrative research and portraiture approaches in a design research process, we will critically assess the opportunities and strengths, and limitations and risks of these methods. Being highly qualitative in nature, and resulting in different findings for each participant, it is difficult to validate the method presented in this paper in any traditional sense, since its efficacy cannot objectively be measured. Further, because of the unique dialogue created between researcher and each researched individual, replicating any such study would be 'exceedingly diffi-cult' [37, p.55]. However, we believe the strength of this method goes beyond the success of any individual idea generated, or the level of increased empathy for the user. Its strength extends to the possibilities of studying and designing for topics which are broad and undefined, and which require a great deal of attention to diversity within the topic area and the target group throughout the design process, as we have aimed to illustrate. Moreover, employing a narrative and portraiture approach in the ways we have described allows for retaining the accounts of the individual users throughout ideation phases while generalizing and summarizing afterwards, as opposed to other methods, such as personas, which do so earlier in the process and thus increase the risk of oversimplifying and loosing interesting design opportunities.

Following the guidelines we have provided we believe this method can be applied to a large number of different topics and projects, with 'craft' being just one example. We see the described method as exploratory, both regarding the topic under study and the ideas generated, and as with most methods aiming at ideation, further development of the ideas and evaluations for feasibility are required in later stages of the process. We are further aware that the excerpts of the portrait provided in this paper may seem, to some extent, decontextualizedhowever, this is due to the limited space for the inclusion of full portraits. We believe that narrative research and portraiture have great potential for providing more contextualization of interview findings, and the 'full picture' about an interviewee, because they combine participant and researcher narratives. They can therefore be a valuable tool in design processes, as long as the researcher takes into account and documents contextual specifics in the portrait, i.e. social, cultural, of the topic or activity that is under study in the interview.

Opportunities and Strengths

As we have shown, portraiture symbolises a creative means of organising and presenting research findings that can further be used to inform design activities. It forms a departure from often-employed thematic techniques of analysis, which may otherwise undermine the 'holism' of the user. In presenting the data holisticallyincluding verbatim data from the transcript, researcher's observations about the participant and their environment, as well as the use of contextual visual data (photos of the workspaces, materials, and tools)the researcher may also find an 'overarching vision' [21, p.248]; that is, in viewing the 'whole' as well as the thematic. While more commonly-used methods such as personas are often created after data collection by summarizing and blending multiple users into one or more fictional usersthereby letting the real users fade to the background before idea generationportraiture takes into account the diversity of individual, real people, and retains valuable insights about these people throughout the design process. This can be greatly beneficial in preventing the adoption of superficial and erroneous assumptions [START_REF] Triantafyllakos | Design alter egos: constructing and employing fictional characters in collaborative design sessions[END_REF] early in the process while ideation has yet to begin.

As our case has illustrated, the portraiture method also offers the opportunity, particularly in explorative research where little is known about the topic or design, to generate a range of emergent themes and ideas. For the craft project there was no predefined direction in which design solutions should be sought, which made the data collection and analysis cover a large variety of topics. Where a thematic analysis did not provide enough focus for the idea generation because of the breadth of the study and the large number of potential themes to explore, the portraits acted to provide depth and focus, because rather than thinking about 'anything' we could think about the needs of one specific persona real personand what could be designed for this person. Afterwards ideas could be extrapolated to a larger target group. Apart from focusing the idea generation, the portraits provided new insights which led to new, out-of-the-box ideas. When looking at designing based on portraits as opposed to designing based on specific design requirements or research questions, the portraits were perceived to be less restrictive and limiting. simply, this is because whilst strict design requirements can act to stifle creativity and idea generation, portraits opened up the design space and allowed for the removal of limiting criteria, which was of vital importance to our brainstorming process.

Limitations and Risks

A potential limitation of the narrative approach is that not everyone will be able to narrate their lives and experiences. Although we did not encounter this in our study, not all people are equally capable of giving responses in storied form, even when prompted to do so [START_REF] Riessman | Narrative methods for the human sciences[END_REF]. This may lead to a distressed participant, a frustrated researcher, and a wasted time slot for all concerned. It may therefore be worth having a back-up interview schedule, with more structured questions for those whoas the interview progressesappear to lack the impulse, inclination, or ability to narrate. As already noted, narrative research approaches require a change in interview strategy: questions must provide opportunities to elicit storied responses [START_REF] Hollway | Doing qualitative research differently[END_REF]. This introduces the risk that the novice interviewer may experience difficulties, which could result in the data generated not being suitable for the intended analysis or ideation. Bear in mind also that with this approach a single interview can generate many hours of data. Therefore it is important that whilst participants are given time and space to compose their stories, your topic list should be short and focused. . A narrative approach to research and analysis encompasses a range of unique ethical concerns in addition to those traditionally associated with qualitative research, particularly around anonymity, because of the level of contextual and personal detail [START_REF] Smythe | Owning the story: Ethical considerations in narrative research[END_REF]. The ways in which the words and meaning of the research participants are represented is also a contentious issue, and researchers must also be wary around claims to 'give voice', when the reality is that the main aim of the research is to help the interviewer, not the interviewee [START_REF] Atkinson | Rescuing narrative from qualitative research[END_REF]. These critiques are counterbalanced by practices of self-awareness, reflexivity, and the explicit identification of the researcher's own perspective within the portrait [START_REF] Lawrence-Lightfoot | Reflections on portraiture: a dialogue between art and science[END_REF], as we noted above in Paul's portrait. Furthermore, the perceived lack of means to assess the 'validity' is answerable by reference to the championing of multiple perspectives and 'situated truths' rather than absolutes, which characterizes both portraiture and narrative inquiry more broadly [20, p.185, 21]. Ultimately, it remains the task of the responsible, reflexive, and conscientious researcher to see to it that these concerns are met, which may provide a challenge to the creation of portraits based on narratives. Despite these challenges, narrative research approaches and portraiture have widely been used within the social sciences, and with our treatment of the methods and by providing guidelines to how they may be used for design and HCI, we hope to inspire researchers in these fields to continue to learn from social science practices and adopt these methods where appropriate to benefit their design and research processes.

Conclusion

As we have shown in this paper, the holistic incorporation of the portraiture approach to data analysis into idea generation processes can offer some additional benefits compared to existing methods within HCI and design research which utilize narratives and storied data. For us, the portraiture method comes into its own within the realm of design research, since it has the potential for dual functionality within this field. Firstly, it represents a deeply holistic and contextual means for analyzing and disseminating findings, thereby facilitating rich understanding of the users and their design needs. Secondly, in doing so, it can act as an active catalyst for innovative ideation, informing, shaping, and enhancing the subsequent design process. We have illustrated the use of narrative and portraiture methods for design research with an illustrative example from our research on digital crafting, and have provided transparent documentation as to the ways in which we achieved this. We have critically discussed the opportunities and strengths offered by the incorporation of these methods in our own study, as well as addressed its limitations and risks. We hope we have not only indicated the benefits these specific analytical methods hold for HCI and design communities, as part of the wider trend towards narrative-centered research in these disciplines, but also the ways in whichas methods which hold at their core a commitment to maintaining participants' voices and a sense of their various individual needs these represent key methods in the important endeavor of 'designing for diversity'.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Concept sketches for a. the Clay Tool, and b. the Online Guild. a. b.

  ). Paul tells me that when you start doing something as a hobby you have to prioritize and choose which devices to get within your financial possibilities. For the rest you have to make do with what you have, and 'what you can do yourself… it is also fun to build that.' He adds: 'sometimes I get so into making a certain tool and when that is finished, you can just sit down, look at it, and enjoy it. That's wonderful.[…]'" Paul also told the interviewer about how he had started teaching guitar building to small groups of students who, like him, "don't want a cheap guitar; they want the adventure of building it. They want the experience of the development of that thing and feeling what happens with the wood." He said he was reluctant to teach at first, but when he saw that so many people were interested he decided he wanted to share his hobby and expertise. He likes these sessions with students because they are interested, and the following closing excerpt from the portrait aims to capture how important this interest and appreciation from others is to Paul:

"Throughout the interview I have gotten a strong feeling for Paul's […] appreciation of my interest in his craft. He explains to me that sometimes people come over who just have a glance at his workshop, ask him questions like: 'So, how many guitars do you make a month?' and they leave after 15 minutes. 'They should just stay away,' in Paul's opinion. Not me, however, being a guitar-player myself I would have been unable to hide my enthusiasm and appreciation even beyond the scope of this interview, much to Paul's liking. As I prepare to leave he repeatedly thanks me for listening and chuckles: 'In 30 years' time, when I've made my 200th guitar, come back and I can tell you much more.'"

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Microsoft Research through its PhD Scholarship Programme, and the Economic and Social Research Council. We further thank the participants in the interview study, our colleagues at the University of Surrey and Microsoft Research Cambridge, and in particular our PhD supervisors, David Frohlich, Abigail Sellen, Elise van den Hoven, Roger Tarling, and Karen Bullock.


Karen Renaud
email: karen.renaud@glasgow.ac.uk

Rénette Blignaut
email: rblignaut@uwc.ac.za

Isabella Venter
email: iventer@uwc.ac.za

Designing Mobile Phone Interfaces for Age Diversity in South Africa: "One-World" versus Diverse "Islands"

Keywords: Mobile Phones, Design, Age

de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Introduction

The world is a-changing, in different ways and at varying paces. One technology that has changed lives across the planet with dizzying speed is the mobile phone. These devices have become so interwoven with our daily lives that it is hard to imagine a world without them. Indeed, people object when they are denied their phones, even for short periods, evidenced by opposition to the ban on usage during take-offs and landings of airplanes [START_REF] Perry | Do portable electronics endanger flight? The evidence mounts[END_REF]. Interestingly, there are now calls for this ban to be lifted [START_REF] Eddy | FCC asks FAA to allow broader in-flight device use[END_REF]. Our focus in this paper is generational impact on the use of mobile phones, and how this ought to be accommodated in the design of phone interfaces. Many countries world-wide are grappling with a shift from a demographically young to a demographically old society and the challenges this constitutes in terms of care and having enough young people to finance pensions. This has been a relatively slow but inexorable shift as birth rates have declined and health advances have prolonged life spans. The breakneck speed at which technology has advanced in the same period is something the older generation often finds daunting.

The diffusion of mobile phones into society provides a powerful example of the rate of change the elderly have witnessed in their lifetimes. Whereas it took 95 years for 90% of American homes to get landline phones, it took only 20 years for mobile phones to penetrate the market to the same extent. The young of today are used to this rate of change [START_REF] Tapscott | Growing up digital: the rise of the net generation[END_REF]. There is evidence that the older generation experience particular and challenging difficulties using this mobile technology [START_REF] Gelderblom | Mobile phone adoption: do existing models adequtely capture the actual usage of older adults?[END_REF] [START_REF] Neves | Too old for technology? How the elderly of Lisbon use and perceive technology[END_REF]. Children use mobile phones intuitively [START_REF] Campbell | The impact of the mobile phone on young people's social life, Centre for social change research[END_REF] but for older users it often seems an alien device [START_REF] Salkowitz | Generation blend: managing across the technology age gap[END_REF].

A Google trends search for "senior phone" delivered the graph in Fig. 1, which suggests that there is an increasing and sustained interest, worldwide, in mobile phones for the older user. What is not yet clear is what approach should be taken to accommodate the needs of this growing user group. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 contemplates the different approaches to designing for diversity. Section 3 presents the design of the study we carried out to determine whether there is a need for an age-sensitive approach to designing mobile phone user interfaces. Sections 4, 5 and 6 detail the three distinct parts of the research, the first carried out by the student researchers, the second the conclusions about mobile phone usage by the young and the third modeling mobile phone usage by the older participants. Section 7 discusses the findings and Section 8 concludes.

Designing for Diversity

It is beneficial to ensure that we set out with a clear understanding of the core concept of diversity. Synonyms for diversity are variety, multiplicity and difference. These suggest designing for ease of use without the expectation of the user having any specific set of skills or prior experience. Users have goals and needs and wish to use the interface to satisfy them: they do not wish to have to undertake training, read manuals or to struggle to use the device. There are at least two ways of designing for diversity.

• The first is to design a universal interface offering a wide range of functionality and personalisation features. This option accommodates a wide range of needs and wants, being all things to all users and is followed by smart phone manufacturers.

The owner of the smart phone can tailor the phone to their own personal tastes and needs, with a myriad of options and settings available to facilitate the process. Many mobile phones allow the owner to choose a ring tone, background, layout and set of applications, and is referred to as the one-world approach [START_REF] Chattratichart | Envisioning a mobile phone for all ages[END_REF]. The snag might be that we run the risk of not meeting anyone's needs properly, of delivering the same sub-optimal interface to everyone. • The second option is to perform segmentation, to provide a range of interfaces and devices, each focused on satisfying the needs of a specific group of users. This approach assumes that users can indeed be segmented into islands of relative homogeneity. The users within these islands are considered to share more characteristics with fellow islanders than they do with the inhabitants of other islands, but within each island there is still much diversity. This can be referred to as the island approach. This option can have negative connotations and be considered discriminatory. To address this, islands have to delineate with great sensitivity and care. This approach is argued for by Head & Ziolkowski who proposed segmenting mobile phone users in a meaningful way and moving beyond the "one-size-fits-all" model [START_REF] Head | Understanding student attitudes of mobile phone features: Rethinking adoption through conjoint, cluster and SEM analysis[END_REF]. Which approach should be followed in designing mobile phone interfaces for age diversity, the one-world or the island approach? Prensky makes a strong case for designing for age-based groups [START_REF] Prensky | Listen to the natives[END_REF]. Fig. 2 (left) offers an extreme example of the most popular way of solving difficulties experienced by the elderly: withdrawing and reducing functionality to the bare minimum. As with many other seemingly quick and easy solutions to intractable problems this approach is amusing rather than effective since it severely reduces the usefulness of the device. Some mobile phone manufacturers have indeed identified the elderly as a group justifying the island approach. Most of the "senior" phones on offer provide severely reduced functionality and almost child-like interfaces (see Fig. 2 -right). The underlying assumption is unpalatable: the elderly are incapable or don't need all the functionality other users need. While the island approach might well be justified, they appear to have failed in their execution because these phones do not accommodate the diverse needs of all "island" members, and might actually alienate some with their simplistic design.

The failure of the mobile phone industry to meet the needs of older users with their targeted device and interface could be due to the island approach, as a concept, being a fallacy, at least as far as age is concerned [START_REF] Bayne | The "digital native" and "digital immigrant": a dangerous opposition[END_REF]. It could also be because the design has veered too far towards an unwarranted assumption of island homogeneity, not acknowledging islander diversity.

The viability of a generation-sensitive island approach, rather than a one-world approach, needs to be studied in order to determine how to design mobile phone interfaces to accommodate the a wide range of generational diversity.

Purpose of the Study

Our aim is to reveal diversity or homogeneity within and between generational "islands", with the end purpose of approving or denouncing generation-specific design. It could be that there are no, or merely shaky, grounds for the island approach [START_REF] Bayne | The "digital native" and "digital immigrant": a dangerous opposition[END_REF].

The evidence might well convince interface designers that the one-world option is the wiser. An ethnographic study will help to deliver this insight.

Researcher Choice

The critical question is: who should undertake such a study? One of the main concerns is that whoever does the study will be influenced by the natural human tendency to stereotype older people. We all have a tendency to assign people to classes or categories and then to exercise judgement based on this categorisation [START_REF] Cuddy | Doddering, but dear: Process, content and function in stereotyping of elderly people[END_REF]. This is particularly true of age-specific groups, since age is immediately apparent when we meet someone for the first time. Cuddy and Fiske also point out that "out-groups" (as the young would consider the old or visa-versa) are seen to be homogeneous. In terms of how the young see the elderly, this leads to expectations of competence (low) and friendliness (high). Thus two observers might interpret the same incident very differently, especially when they come from two different generations.

A researcher might have an unconscious bias towards the island population, which would influence their interpretation. It is important for the reported findings to be validated, to ensure that they are not merely the product of pre-conceived notions. Fortunately, Caspi reports that inter-age contact serves to reduce stereotype-like attitudes [START_REF] Caspi | Contact hypothesis and inter-age attitudes: A field study of cross-age contact[END_REF]. Moreover, ensuring that individuals from two distinct groups interact has been shown to reduce stereotypical characteristic attributions [START_REF] Erber | Age and forgetfulness: Perceivers' impressions of targets' capabilites[END_REF]. Thus, if we incorporate inter-generational contact, on a one-to-one basis, into the study, we can reduce the stereotyping effect. This will lessen the likelihood that researchers merely report pre-conceived notions rather than real effects.

There is another way of contemplating age-specific research. Neugarten, Moore and Lowe argue that older people are more aware of age-appropriate behaviours than are younger members of society [START_REF] Neugarten | Age norms, age constraints, and adult socialization[END_REF]. Thus the younger do not have invariant expectations of age-specific behaviour, as do the older. This means that, in contrast to the stereotyping perspective, which suggests pre-conceived expectations, this perspective suggests that they would not have as strongly held behavioural expectations as the older participants. This might make them more open to contemplating the situation as it is, as opposed to merely confirming their own pre-conceived notions about what people of the older generation do and think.

Hence it made sense to dispatch trainee user interface designers to carry out this research. This delivered other benefits too. Where clearly we would like to confront seasoned designers themselves with the findings of this study, it is even better to task designers themselves to carry out the study. This kind of engagement is a very valuable way of exposing interface designers to the needs and opinions of a group of users they wouldn't normally encounter. Moreover, it would be especially valuable for aspiring user interface designers to experience this at the outset of their careers before they establish less than helpful design habits and become less malleable and more likely to hold pre-conceived notions [START_REF] Ariely | How actions create -not just reveal -preferences[END_REF].

There is another consideration too. In previous eras the older generation trained and apprenticed the young; they had something valuable to impart, which suggests that the young respected and learnt from them. There is worrying evidence of a shift in attitude. Netz and Ben-Sira asked a range of generations to rate adolescents, middle-aged and elderly people on four semantic categories [START_REF] Netz | Attitudes of young people, adults, and older adults from threegeneration families toward the concepts "ideal person", "youth", "adult" and "old person[END_REF]. All participants rated the "older" category lowest of all the semantic categories. Sharps, Price-Sharps and Hanson compared attitudes to the elderly in Thailand and America and their study confirmed these kinds of negative attitudes towards the elderly in both countries [START_REF] Sharps | Attitudes of young adults toward older adults: evidence from the United States and Thailand[END_REF]. The widespread use of the word "ageism" is perhaps the most prescient reminder of the fact that the elderly are increasingly considered a burden to society, displacing them from their erstwhile strong position of respect and source of sage advice. Going back to our previous discussion about stereotyping, and the benefit of ensuring that individuals from different groups meet each other, it would seem helpful for students to carry out the research so that a sense of mutual respect can be fostered.

Hence we decided to set this as a task for students, aspiring human-interface designers, to carry out as coursework. The student researchers can undeniably deliver a different and fresh perspective, delivering potentially new and different insights since they are not constrained and influenced by their previous designs and activities,

Study Design

The study was structured as shown in Fig. 3. In stages 1 and 2 we set coursework for students undertaking a third-year Computer Science Human Computer Interface course. They were to interview an older mobile phone user about their use of their mobile phones and to teach them how to use a function on their phone. They had to assume that a mobile phone company, wanting to target the over-65 market, employed them.

The students were required to submit a joint report detailing their findings and making recommendations for improvement of the device and/or interface. We provided the framework for the interview to ensure that all students investigated the same aspects. This questionnaire addressed: background information about the participant, their mobile phone experience and usage, and how they felt about their mobile phones. No personal information was collected so anonymity was preserved. To familiarise students with ethical practice they were instructed to ask the participants to complete a consent form prior to the interview. We confirmed their findings by carrying out a search of relevant academic publications reporting the findings of empirical studies in this area. In stage 3 we instructed the student researchers to also complete the questionnaire so that we could carry out a comparative analysis. We also interviewed the students to gather qualitative data to support stage 4. In stage 4 we consulted the academic literature to establish an understanding of their typical attitudes to, and use of, mobile phones. During stages 5 and 6 the reports, questionnaires and interview data were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. The analysis of the qualitative data supported identification of similar or contradictory themes [START_REF] Cohen | Research methods in Education[END_REF].

Stages 1 and 2: Student Researchers' Reports

Fifty student researchers collected data from 99 participants (aged 65 years and older). The students were asked to recommend changes to the interface design that could improve mobile phone usage. Case sampling was used to select the participants "where a profile of attributes or characteristics that are possessed by an 'average', typical person or case is identified, and the sample is selected from these typical people or cases" [19, p. 143]. To explore their participants' experience of their mobile phones, they interviewed the participants using a standard questionnaire of 65 questions developed by the authors. Students sometimes found it difficult to find willing participants for the project but a few students obtained permission to interview residents in retirement villages or homes. Those with relatives in the vicinity mostly interviewed family or family friends. Most student interviewers interviewed a friend or acquaintance (see Fig. 4). The older participants were mostly unskilled (42%), although 37% were skilled, 11% were retired and 9% were unemployed. The majority (37%) of the participants had between 6 and 12 years of schooling (see Fig. 5). Significantly more students indicated that their English (reading and writing) skills were very good (Χ 2 = 30.95, p < 0.0001) (Χ 2 = 13.53, p= 0.0012). Students used their cell phones more regularly than the older generation (Χ 2 =18.58, p < 0.0001). Although 65% of the participants indicated that they enjoyed their phones, more students (97%) indicated that they enjoyed their phones (Χ 2 =15.93, p=0.0003). More students also indicated that they always kept their mobile phones within reach (Χ 2 =10.78, p=0.0010). As expected, students are more likely to use abbreviations when writing SMSs (85%) (Χ 2 =51.70, p < 0.0001). Students were more likely to have smart phones (91% versus 31%) than their participants (Χ 2 =45.50, p < 0.0001). Significantly more students found the mobile phone easy to operate, enjoyable, appealing and friendly compared to their participants.

Fig. 6. Similarities and differences

A statistically significant number of participants found the mobile phone confusing at times. Phones were obtained from similar sources and charged similarly. No differences were found between the two groups in terms of their feelings of frustration when operating the phone or it being overwhelming or time consuming. A summary of all the findings is depicted in Fig. 6 and can be seen in Table I in Appendix A.

Phone usage, as expected, was very different in the two study groups -all functions, except calls, were used statistically significantly more regularly by students than the elderly participants (see Fig. 7). Both groups found the mobile essential, useful, liked the phone, indicated that it made life easier and that it offered value for money (see Fig. 8). Similarly both groups indicated that there were some aspects of their mobile phones that they would like changed/improved. These included: the keyboard, the screen, the camera and other aspects such as sound quality and increased battery life.

Stages 3 and 4: Literature on the Younger Mobile Phone User

The young seem totally at ease with their mobile phones, almost considering the device to be an extension of themselves. To understand how the young feel about their phones we asked students to fill in the same questionnaires the participants completed. From this, a number of themes emerged, related to how they felt about their phones. The research literature confirmed these themes (see Fig. 9): [START_REF] Walsh | Over-connected? A qualitative exploration f the relationship between Aistralian youth and their mobilephones[END_REF]. They use their phones to enliven "dead time" while commuting or queuing, to maintain a sense of awareness of others not in the same location and use the phones to finalise arrangements for meetings in real time [START_REF] Ito | Technosocial situations: Emergent structurings of mobile e-mail use[END_REF]. Both Park and Wikle argue that some users become addicted to their mobile phones [22] [23].

If this happens, the device will easily become characterized as time-consuming.

2. Enjoyable, friendly, appealing, useful: in terms of these aspects it is difficult to know which comes first, the mobile or the prospect of enjoyment. Dickinger, Arami and Meyer suggest that the prospect of enjoyment drives adoption [START_REF] Dickenger | The role of perceived enjoyment and social norm in the adoption of technology with network externalities[END_REF]. Once they start using the phone, it is likely that their enjoyment will lead to more usage, with enjoyment and usage reinforcing each other, leading to whole-hearted adoption [START_REF] Turel | User acceptance of hedonic digital artifacts: A throey of consumption values perspective[END_REF]. 3. Frustrating, overwhelming: This was an unexpected result: that even the young sometimes experience negative feelings towards their phones. Thompson, Hamilton and Rust refers to feature fatigue being experienced by mobile phone users, which might be what these students are experiencing [START_REF] Thompson | Feature fatigue: when product capabilities become too much of a good thing[END_REF]. This aspect is confirmed by Head and Ziolkowski [START_REF] Head | Understanding student attitudes of mobile phone features: Rethinking adoption through conjoint, cluster and SEM analysis[END_REF]. 4. Emotional Attachment: It is interesting to note that young people consider their phone as a way of expressing their sense of self and use it as a fashion statement [START_REF] Katz | Mobile phones as fashion statements: The co-creation of mobile communication's public meaning[END_REF]. Vincent investigated emotional attachment to mobile phones, and suggests that its multiple roles and the activities it facilitates play a role in this attachment [START_REF] Vincent | Emotional attachment to mobile phones: An extraordinary relationship[END_REF]. Many of these findings were also confirmed by the Pew Internet survey of mobile use by teens in April 2010 [START_REF] Lenhart | Teens and mobile phones[END_REF]. What is interesting about this collection of themes is the apparent contradiction between approbation and opprobrium. The students rely on and use their phones frequently, but some still express a sense of being overwhelmed by their phones and admit to a measure of frustration. Nafus and Tracy carried out a longitudinal study into the use of mobile phones in the UK. They found that teenagers in their study were very enthusiastic about their phones, but that attitudes changed after 20, with some participants expressing outright hatred of their phones. They acknowledged the usefulness of the phones but had reservations about their negative social consequences. The authors postulate that the ubiquity of phones challenges their emerging sense of individuality. They report that the over-30s in their study appeared indifferent to their phones. It could be that our students, in the 20-30 age group, are in the process of shifting away from unqualified enthusiasm to a more mediated utility-oriented usage of their phones [START_REF] Nafus | Mobile phone consumption and concept of personhood[END_REF].

6

Stages 5 and 6: The Younger Generation's Reports about the Older Mobile Phone User

Team reports, as well as interviews, were used to gather qualitative data. A grounded theory approach was used to analyse the reports: no pre-conceived themes were used to guide the analysis: the analysis allowed a number of dominant themes to emerge from the text. All comments referring to the elderly and the challenges they faced in using and learning mobile phone functions were extracted, and categorised. The themes that emerged suggest a pipeline-like filtering process between the phone, its myriad capabilities and functionalities, and the elderly user. It became clear that reduced functionality was a very strong theme. Some comments suggested that this was affected by the complexity of the interfaces but for some functions the strength of the need for use of the functionality provided sufficient impetus for mastery of the function, despite difficulties. Another strong theme was that of age-related impairment. All reports mentioned at least one of visual, auditory or dexterity impairment, which made the use of the phone challenging for the elderly participants. Some also referred to age-related memory difficulties. Another anecdotal theme was related to the perception that the participants appeared to learn more slowly than the researchers did themselves. There was the sense that this was impeding their use of the mobile device. There was also mention of education, gender and location effects on usage. A final strong crosscutting theme was that of change resistance and mistrust, with many of the participants being averse to changing the way they did things. Fig. 10 presents the themes as funnels, or filters, which intrude between the phone and its owner, making the device less useful and usable than it could be.

Fig. 10. Factors impacting on older mobile phone users

There is conflicting evidence in the literature about the impact of education on usage, such that we also cannot confirm that education, by itself, impacts older mobile phone users' use of their mobile phones [START_REF] Rasanen | Linked or divided by the Web? Internet use and sociability in four European countries[END_REF] [START_REF] Gutierrez | An approximation to the digital divide among low income people in Colombia, Mexico and Peru: Two composit indexes[END_REF]. The former study detected no educational effect while the latter did. Bagchia, Kirsa and López [START_REF] Bagchia | The impact of price decreases on telephone and cell phone diffusion[END_REF] also did not find an educational effect on ICT diffusion, yet Lee did observe an educational effect [START_REF] Lee | Education for technology readiness: prospects for developing countries[END_REF]. Finally, Boateng carried out a study of micro-traders in Ghana and was not able to show any educational effect in terms of mobile phone usage [START_REF] Boateng | Mobile phones and micro-trading activities -conceptualizing the link[END_REF]. It seems that one cannot reliably isolate the effects of education in impacting technology usage. Education, or lack thereof, like gender, is also a strong indicator of socio-economic status in Africa. Interestingly, the students also referred to a location effect. When the students referred to "location" they were probably referring to the areas participants lived in that reliably (in South Africa) serve as an indicator of their socio-economic standing. Rice & Katz were indeed able to confirm that this impacts mobile phone usage [START_REF] Rice | Comparing Intrnet and mobile phone usage: digital divides of usage, adoption, and dropouts[END_REF]. This, too, is confirmed by the Unicef report on the use of mobile phones in South Africa. Hence the gender, location and educational effects reported by the students arguably all fall under the socio-economic status umbrella, and this has indeed been shown to impact on mobile phone usage.

There is clear evidence confirming the other factors reported by the student researchers. There is confirmatory evidence of older mobile phone users making use of a small subset of core functionality [START_REF] Renaud | Worth-centered mobile phone design for older users[END_REF], and that their usage is determined by their needs [START_REF] Kurniawan | A study of the use of mobile phones by older persons[END_REF]. Turner, Love and Howell found evidence that older users did indeed use their phones less than younger users [START_REF] Turner | Understanding emotions experienced when using a mobile phone in public: the social usability of mobile (cellular) telephones[END_REF]. Ziefle and Bay found evidence that the complexity of the provided functions often discouraged older users from using them [START_REF] Ziefle | How older adults meet complexity: Aging effects on the usability of different mobile phones[END_REF]. There is also evidence of age-related impairments getting in the way of their use of the phones [START_REF] Renaud | Predicting technology acceptnce and adoption by the elderly: A qualitative study[END_REF] and there is evidence that they do indeed appear to learn more slowly than their younger counterparts (Holzinger, Searle & Nischelwitzer, 2007). They also resist change [START_REF] Gilly | The elderly consumer and adoption of technologie[END_REF] and many mistrust technology [START_REF] Benamati | Trust and distrust in online banking: The role in developing countries[END_REF].

Hence most of the identified factors are confirmed, suggesting that the students did indeed reliably identify age-specific difficulties in the use of mobile phones. The refined model is shown in Fig. 11. The ordering of the filters is not intended to be relevant or prescriptive. The relative impact and ordering will be individual-specific.

Discussion

There are striking differences between young and old in terms of their use of, and attitudes towards, mobile phones. Whereas the older generation appear to struggle with the phone interface and multiple functionalities, what is conspicuously absent from the literature is any mention of difficulties being experienced by young people using their phones. There were no reports of perceived complexity or any sense of their being put off by the speed of technology advance -they embrace the new opportunities these advances open up. Kreutzer carried out a study of the use of mobile phone features by high school children in the same part of South Africa as this study. He reports that, during one particular day, almost all students used phones, even those who did not own phones themselves. The most used aspect was personal communication, but the second most used functionality was related to entertainment (games, music, photos, videos). This type of use is very rare amongst the older participants [START_REF] Kreutzer | Assessing cell phone usage in a South African township school[END_REF].

The older generation, on the other hand, were cautious, mistrustful, almost censorious. They owned and used their phones but there was no sense that they enjoyed them the way the young did. They used them purely in a goal-directed fashion to satisfy their needs. Fernández refers to mobile phones having a peripheral position in the older person's life, which is very different from the way young people view their mobile phones [START_REF] Fernandez | Interactions with and through mobile phones: what about the elderly population?[END_REF].

Yet there were similarities between generations. Both groups found the mobile phone useful, suggesting that it supported their goal-directed needs. Conci, Pianesi and Zancanaro surveyed 740 older people and found that their mobile phone usage was primarily utilitarian driven, which appears to confirm this. The motives that drive older users to use mobile phones, they argue, are much the same as those that drive younger users [START_REF] Conci | Useful, social and enjoyable: mobile phone adoption by older people[END_REF].

We will conclude this section with a note of caution. It would be foolhardy to assume a high level of homogeneity within island groups. For example, Aoki and Downs analysed college students' use of their mobile phones and identified five groups within their sample, displaying very different attitudes towards their mobile phones even within a group of fairly similar age, interest and educational level. In designing for "islands" we have to ensure that we identify the shared characteristics, and design to accommodate those, but the design must also be sufficiently flexible to accommodate the wide diversity within the generational island [START_REF] Aoki | An analysis of young people's use of and attitudes toward cell phones[END_REF].

Conclusion

Daniel and co-researchers argue strongly for an understanding of context (social, economic and political dynamics) of ICT usage before any intervention is contemplated [START_REF] Daniel | Final Report. Information Society: Emergent technologies and development communities in the South[END_REF]. Here we have studied the use of mobile phones by the older population in South Africa, precisely in order to understand this context. We contemplated two approaches in this paper: designing for one-world or an island-specific design. We were able to depict the experiences (Fig. 7) and attitudes (Fig. 8) of the young researchers and the older participants and the differences are prominent and conspicuous. What we see is the older users grappling with a new and unfamiliar technology that often seems to overwhelm them with its complexity. We see usage of a reduced range of functionality and a measure of frustration at an inability to master this device that seems to mean so much to the younger generation. The young, on the other hand, appear to love their phones, use them constantly and seemingly couldn't do without them. Would it be possible to produce one design for these two groups? We do not believe this to be feasible or practical. In terms of age-sensitive mobile phone design, especially in a developing world context, we therefore argue that island-specific design is the wiser approach.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Google Trends Search for the term "senior phone" carried out 15 January 2012 (http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22senior%20phone%22)

Fig. 2 .

 2 Fig. 2. Eliminating Complexity by Reducing Functionality (The Age UK Mobile Phone on the right)(http://www.ageuk.org.uk/Products/Communications/Mobile-phones/)

Fig. 3 .

 3 Fig. 3. Study Stages

Fig. 4 .

 4 Fig. 4. Students' relationship to their participants

Fig. 5 .

 5 Fig. 5. Highest qualification of elderly participants

Fig. 7 .

 7 Fig. 7. Phone functions used indicated as a percentage

Fig. 8 .

 8 Fig. 8. How participants and students felt about their mobile phone

Fig. 9 .

 9 Fig. 9. Young people and their mobile phones

Fig. 11 .

 11 Fig. 11. A model of the factors that influence mobile phone usage by older users

Significant result p < 0.05; **Very significant p<0.01