Ilan Mandel

Ritik Batra, Lydia Kim, Ilan Mandel et al.

Craft practices rely on evolving archives of skill and knowledge developed through generations of craftspeople experimenting with designs, materials, and techniques. Better documentation of these practices enables the sharing of knowledge and expertise between sites and generations. However, most documentation focuses on the linear steps leading to final artifacts, neglecting the distinct tacit knowledge, improvisational actions, and situated adaptations needed to meet the unique demands of each craft project. This omission limits knowledge sharing and reduces craft to a mechanical endeavor, rather than a sophisticated and contextual way of seeing, thinking, and doing. Drawing on expert interviews and literature from HCI, CSCW and the social sciences, we develop an elementary grammar to document improvisational actions of real-world craft practices. We demonstrate the utility of this grammar with a MLLM-powered interface called CraftLink that can be used to analyze expert videos and generate documentation to share material and contextual variations of practices with other knowledgeable but non-master craftspeople. Our user study with expert crocheters (N=7) evaluates our grammar's effectiveness in capturing and sharing expert knowledge with other craftspeople, offering new pathways for computational systems to support collaborative archives of knowledge and practice across time, space, and skill levels. We conclude by showing how our grammar address four key tensions of the craft learning environment: personal and shareable documentation, fragmented and discoverable expertise, linear and iterative practices, and data privacy and ownership.

Stacey Li, Sven Krome, Ilan Mandel et al.

The proliferation of voice agents in consumer devices requires new tools for evaluating these systems beyond their technical functionality. This paper presents a toolkit for the evaluation of Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) with the intention of measuring the crucial factors of subjective enjoyment in the user experience. The PUEVA toolkit was constructed using a meta-analysis of existing literature, structured N=20 and semi-structured N=18 interviews and a within subjects lab study. The resulting questionnaire contains 35 items that represent 12 scales in three categories: (1) Personality (2) Usablity and (3) Enjoyability. The PUEVA Toolkit moves us towards the capacity to evaluate and compare subjective, joyful experiences in between-subject as well as within-subject research designs.

Wendy Ju, Ilan Mandel, Kevin Weatherwax et al.

Travel restrictions and social distancing measures make it difficult to observe, monitor or manage physical fieldwork. We describe research in progress that applies technologies for real-time remote observation and conversation in on-road vehicles to observe field work on a farm. We collaborated on a pilot deployment of this project at Kreher Eggs in upstate New York. We instrumented a tractor with equipment to remotely observe and interview farm workers performing vehicle-related work. This work was initially undertaken to allow sustained observation of field work over longer periods of time from geographically distant locales; given our current situation, this work provides a case study in how to perform observational research when geographic and bodily distance have become the norm. We discuss our experiences and provide some preliminary insights for others looking to conduct remote observational research in the field.