Deep Cover HCI

Abstract

The growing popularity of methodologies that turn "to the wild" for real world data creates new ethical issues for the HCI community. For investigations questioning interactions in public or transient spaces, crowd interaction, or natural behaviour, uncontrolled and uninfluenced (by the experimenter) experiences represent the ideal evaluation environment. We argue that covert research can be completed rigorously and ethically to expand our knowledge of ubiquitous technologies. Our approach, which we call Deep Cover HCI, utilises technology-supported observation in public spaces to stage completely undisturbed experiences for evaluation. We complete studies without informed consent and without intervention from an experimenter in order to gain new insights into how people use technology in public settings. We argue there is clear value in this approach, reflect on the ethical issues of such investigations, and describe our ethical guidelines for completing Deep Cover HCI Research.

Understanding Public Evaluation

“…But defining what "valid" or "authentic" data constitutes in public evaluations is hard and the research community lacks a shared ideal of validity [1]. There are strong but conflicting arguments for covert methods [34], mixed methods [33], and participant observations [15,29].…”

“…There are significant practical and theoretical ethical challenges in public evaluations [32,34]. The core ethical issue is that capturing authentic experience may demand that participants not be aware they are involved in an evaluation [32][34].…”

“…Practical challenges such as gaining appropriate ethical approval, choosing whether to gather explicit informed consent from participants, and ensuring participant safety have been discussed thoroughly in previous work [12,32,34]. Methodological challenges around recruitment, motivation, and intervention are harder to address.…”

“…Although covert observation removes the possibility of gathering on-the-street responses from users, advocates argue that this represents the most ecologically valid experience [34]. Because public displays have such a delicate balance between interaction and non-interaction, overt and stewarded observation may seriously distort the self-selection of interacting users.…”

“…There are diverse approaches to such evaluations, and even the meaning of "in the wild" is not widely agreed [18]. It is often used interchangeably with field trials [1,4], deployments [1], and intervention-based studies [34]. In this paper, we restrict our scope to "in the wild" studies of stationary technology in public and semipublic places, for example public displays and interactive installations.…”