Presentation by m.c. schraefel and Alan Dix Producer: David De Roure Executive Producer: Jeremy Frey The smarttea cast (in alphabetical order): Gareth Hughes….the Scales, various apparati, Other Ontology Guy Hugo Mills…Ontology Guy m.c. schraefel…Narrator Graham Smith…The Chemist Early Tea Track rhythm guitar: Terry Payne Java Swing Bass: Alex Rogers Technical Consultants: Alan Dix and Luc Moreau Filmed Entirely on Location at the University of Southampton Making Tea with Chemists: Exploring Boundaries and Breaking Books A smarttea production No chemists were hurt in the making of this presentation Official web site:

Acts Act 1, Prepario: the problem space Act 2, the investigation of the domain Act 3 (in several parts) designio elicitatio the crisis motivating the new method The new method described The new method working Act 4, the new method in context of related work Act 5, reflection

problem to publication/curation for the eScientist Meaning: end to end support of data capture and data access for scientists throughout the experimental process

Levels to the Problem interaction: tools for chemists to capture experimental process digitally, transparently, in situ abstraction: model to represent the process from e-to-e builds: architecture and services to support the layers representation: more tools to get the data back out again and re-present to a variety of uses

ultimate goal: chemical aether an aware environment populated with smart services to support the experimental process

Most experimental information is recorded in a lab book. Big block to if it’s not digital, it’s difficult to share But…

Many Lab book Replacements have been tried. Many have failed How would we succeed?

Initial Approach Review of previous work Approaches towards the lab book as artefact Real world check on system take up Our own field studies - rapid ethnography, interviews, obs Context of work/artefact use Both valuable; both incomplete Brief ethno review follows

A chemistry lab is a hostile environment without much room to maneuver what can be captured captured automatically with sensors? what must rely on manual annotation? The fume cupboard The chemist

Fume cupboard Unusual chemist: no gloves - with gloves - how id a process? Potential bar code location for process id

very precise scales - but not connected to any recording device Competition for space

multiple chemists concurrently working in the lab Shared bench Dirty glassware stuff Log book of another chemist

critical data entry Industrial support

no dedicated location vulnerability of data captured access to data by others is limited privilege (IP) rights uniqueness history The Lab book

Missing pieces We understood the artefact’s role. We had a strong sense of the environment We had a picture of why some of the book’s affordances were appropriate (and why some were not) We did not know how the chemists really engaged with the artifact in the process of an experiment

Problem: we aren’t chemists Designers do not need to be domain experts Much to be said about not being an expert - not missing the obvious - ability to get limnal. But this was too domain naïve So…

As an experiment We made tea

Why make tea: available approaches and problems in ucd Observation of an Experiment - even rapid Expert and artefact walk throughs Apprenticeship and Prototyping Cultural Probes Task Analysis Deconstruction/Reconstruction Other methods: assumption of Time and Expertise Chemistry experiments can take days, weeks, months, years. They require high domain knowledge They are fluid, loosely structured things

What we needed A way to extend decon/recon for non- experts A way to compress time A faithful, not overly simplified process A way to engage the process A language we (chemists and designers) could all understand to interogate the process (the experiment) Enter Analogy

Making Tea: design elicitation through analogy Developed and validated the analogy with chemists Gave us a way to ask questions that would not otherwise have been possible Let us maximize observation Gave us repeatability Derived rudiments of a process model, too Provided lingua franca with chemists Provided a fun low risk environment that facilitated discussion among participants Making tea with kitchen tools Making tea with chemisty kit

Sample Questions from Tea Is that it? No really, that’s all you record? So, do you add the milk first, or the tea first? Tea 1Tea 2 Tea 2a Tea 1a Tea 1b

mT affordances: artefacts, environment, process and experience Tea gave us a way to understand not only the process but the experience of the process for our design.

Positive experiences - affect to capture Casualness of entry, pictures and notes Low attention, but frequent focus Minimal description of activities High degree of multi-tasking (multiple experiments on the go, much flipping back and forth) Readily accessible; “safe”

Breaking the book We designed services to support the activities that took place in the lab The UI does not mimic paper, but we sought to create the affect of the paper experience

Review over Tea We ran through our lo-fi prototypes with chemists by running the tea experiment They knew what was going on and could comment on veracity, features, process Initial ideas were good but the prototypes were too intrigued - did not reflect/support practice Design review was critical for reality checking; tea made that possible

Cup of tea demo Digital Tea II We join our heroes after having completed Exp 1, Making Tea, and are now into Exp 2 Making a cup of Tea with Milk and Sugar Design based on what chemists already do Recording takes place throughout an experiment. In this clip - a reagent is measured out - the weight is entered by fast keypad input - a step is selected and ticked off when completed - the compound is tested - that action is annotated The recording of steps is part of the COSSH requirement We leverage this in our system

Getting real Functional prototype for in-lab, real use testing

Results In real use, chemists were able to record their experiments After about ten minutes of use, they forgot about it as a new thing, and just used it “I can go anywhere and its, like, this is me and my data. It’s all there! Bang!”

How does making tea work? Spaghetti Tea Make this into several slides

It’s not about the bike book We didn’t set out to use a tablet We wanted to try really breaking the book, distributing the parts across the lab - that’s how it’s designed. All we could get was a tablet - which looks like a book - sort of. To paraphrase Lance Armstrong

Extensions: 3rd Yr Projects Ray Cooke Scrolling through lab books Will Davies Automating TLC plate capture for record and annotation

Models Making Tea gave us: A new design elicitation method for loosely structured, high expertise domain processes From this, a way to model the interaction A functional interaction prototype to evaluate approach

Related Work m.c. schraefel, Gareth Hughes, Hugo Mills, Graham Smith, Terry Payne, Jeremy Frey. Breaking the Book: Translating the Chemistry Lab Book to a Pervasive Computing Environment. Forthcoming, Conference on Human Factors (CHI), Preprint at Jeremy G. Frey, David De Roure, m.c. schraefel, Hugo Mills, Hongchen Fu, Sam Peppe, Gareth Hughes, Graham Smith, Terry R. Payne. Context Slicing the Chemical Aether. First Workshop on Hypermedia and the Semantic Web, in conjunctions with Hypertext m.c. schraefel, Leslie Carr, David De Roure, Wendy Hall. You’ve Got Hypertext. JoDI, forthcoming Greenwood, M., Goble, C., Stevens, R., Zhao, J., Addis, M., Marvin, D., Moreau, L. & Oinn, T. (2003). "Provenance of e-science experiments - experience from bioinformatics." Poster, UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, Nottingham, 2-4 September overview of initial work on the provenance of bioinformatics e-science experiments within the myGrid project). (full papers list)

Thank you! Questions?

- No such systems were available from national services or major chemical suppliers. - building blocks for the planner - reduce repetitive task load for chemists; improve data capture; support annotation on all data fields at site Building Bricks for COSSH transposition from legal form into experiment planner: integration of services at site - converted an existing simple inventory database used by the chemists into a web service. - integrated barcode scanners, to provide integrated inventory management support. - provide useful standard pieces of information about a chemical - provides all of the data of a normal periodic table. - grammes–to-moles chemical calculator. To develop these

“I can go anywhere and its, like, this is me and my data. It’s all there! Bang!” Contribution to chemistry: functional lab book model Contribution to HCI field: new methodology Towards contribution to Pervasive: cost/benefit analysis for resource deployment

TLC Plates 3 rd year project