[OWW-SC] Fwd: TALK:Friday 11-17-06 Making Tea with Chemists and Bioinformatitians

[Reshma Shetty]

This talk may be of interest based on the abstract below.  It has to
do with capturing information about experiments digitally.

-Reshma

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: CSAIL Event Calendar <eventcalendar at csail.mit.edu>
Date: Nov 13, 2006 11:41 AM
Subject: TALK:Friday 11-17-06 Making Tea with Chemists and Bioinformatitians
To: seminars at csail.mit.edu



Making Tea with Chemists and Bioinformatitians - lessons learned in
designing up close and at a distance
HCI Seminar Series Fall 2006
Speaker: mc schraefel
Speaker Affiliation: University of Southampton
Host: Rob Miller
Host Affiliation: MIT CSAIL

Date: 11-17-2006
Time: 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Refreshments: 1:15 PM
Location: Star Seminar Room (32-D463)

In our design methods work with Synthetic Chemists in the Smarttea
project (smarttea.org), we looked at design approaches to help
scientists move from paper lab books to semantic web based digital
experiment capture systems. The result was a novel design method
(called Making Tea) that focuses on designing for highly expert,
idiosyncratic, longitudinal processes.

In the myTea project (mytea.org.uk) we have been able to investigate
how a design method developed in one context can be applied to
another. In this case we wanted to look at applying the Making Tea
method for a design challenge with  with bioinformaticians. The
challenge has been to help them keep a record of their always already
computer-based experiments. WHere the chemists had a lab book and
wanted to go from paper to digital, the bioinformatitians have had no
history of recording their experiments. For them, we learned, it has
been easier to redo an experiment that to keep track of the hundreds
of small files they create working with their web and digital sources.

By re-deploying the Making Tea method in a new context, we have been
able to address the bioinformatition experiment capture problem, and
by this, consider how that method generalizes. But also, due to
unpredicted differences between the two contexts of the two projects,
we learned about additional factors in the design process that we
would recommend need to be taken into account for prepping future
e-Science usability work in particular. This talk reviews the Making
Tea design process as developed in the SmartTea project, and as
applied in the MyTea project. It also presents the lessons learned in
applying the approach in a distributed design environment.

Bio: mc schraefel is a visiting scientist in DIG/CSAIL and is the
first visiting fellow of the new Web Science Research Initiative
(webscience.org) between MIT and the University of Southampton, UK.
She is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Southampton's IAM Group,
School of Electronics and Computer Science. Her research has lately
focused on interaction issues for exploratory search and the semantic
web.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~mc
email: mc at csail.mit.edu

Relevant URL(S):
For more information please contact: Rob Miller, x46028, rcm at mit.edu

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