Items where Author is "Moira, McGregor"

Guest lecture for COMP2213. Moira McGregor has worked on various projects at the Mobile Life Research Centre including: everyday use of digital maps; the sharing economy; mobile battery maintenance; and speech technology in workplace meetings. What these projects have have in common is a desire to look at the use of mobile technology as it happens in order to understand how users make sense of the technology, and also how users interweave this use with other interactions going on around them at the same time. The above coincides with a general move from studying mobile phone technology in the controlled setting of the lab, to the challenge of devising methods to allow the study of mobile phone use in situ, out ‘in the wild’. This focus on use in situ calls for a focus on working with distributed research methods, including video analysis, interactional and conversational analysis, interviews, and technical probes – all of which have been deployed in Moira’s work in order to give access to moment by moment interaction with mobile technology. The resulting small scale and detailed perspective may be combined to complement the more pervasive approaches of recording mobile phone use by instrumenting technology with sensors and logging use over longer periods, with large cohorts of users. Moira is currently a PhD student at the MobileLife Research Centre in Stockholm. Her work looks at how technology is used in everyday life – from mobile phone use in co-present interaction with others, to how an app like Uber is changing the work practices of taxi drivers. In this seminar, Moira will present some of the research methods used in her studies and some of her preliminary findings.