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Brighton Science Festival is jolly good fun though I was glad of a seat at the end of a session I helped run a couple of years ago with colleagues, which I will now tell you all about :)

We were working on the CHI+MED (Computer Human Interaction for Medical Devices) project, EPSRC-funded, and looking at ways of making interactive medical devices - such as drug infusion pumps - a bit safer in use. There are lots of aspects to consider on that topic including the underlying software (bugs!), the interface (buttons!), what safety features are considered by the people who buy them for hospital, how does their use slot into busy hospital wards or when used at home by patients, if you type the wrong number in does the machine 'know'? etc etc.

For the festival we decided to pick the 'number entry systems interface' and get visitors to be Usability Experts, playing the game of Microwave Racing. Instead of drug pumps we used microwaves and instead of patients we used microwaveable popcorn.

The room stank of popcorn in a way none of us had really anticipated and I expect the carpets suffered rather a lot too. We got the familes to see which of our microwaves had the better interface and consider what design decisions had been made and what could be improved. All microwaves heat up food using a combination of warmth and time, and they all seem to have different ways of letting the user interact with those. Some interface designs make it a bit easier to get your popcorn popped, others don't. It's pretty much the same with medical devices too. We didn't take a video of the families but you can see an example with staff from UCL's Interaction Centre in this video.

The following year BSF asked, not unreasonably, if we might tweak things a bit so there was less popcorn stuck to the carpets everywhere. So for our next session we ruined their carpet more creatively with sticky tape forming a sort of hopscotch pattern to represent two number entry interfaces (one with numbers, one with up/down arrows), and then got the kids to jump up and down to 'enter the numbers'. Chaos!^ You can read about that here :)

We've also done similar things with clock radios in which the game is to try and set the alarm to come on in a few minutes' time, however this proved almost impossible as clock radios have the most obstinate* interfaces yet invented and many of our visitors had anecdotes of trying to fight with one in a hotel. (*And such a variety of wilfully unhelpful ways of not letting you do the task!).

Jo :D

(psci-com owner)

^Incidentally some microwaves actually have a chaos button, I think it's intended for sneaking up on things you want to defrost and catching them unawares.

On 19 September 2017 at 20:29, Richard Robinson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hello All

Brighton lies right in the path of Hurricane Half-Term next February. We need an administrator to help us cope with the ferocious windbags, gales of laughter and destruction of all preconceptions at Bright Sparks and Hands-On Half-Term, February 10-18th.

Who can do that job? Well, someone local probably, but not necessarily someone scientific.

If you are interested, please send a cv to me, asap.

Richard

HERE it is

Richard Robinson
Director
Brighton Science Festival
18 Temple St, Brighton, BN1 3BH
01273 777 628 // @BrightonScience // Facebook

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