Lessons out of Chaos - Human-Computer Interaction and Innovation in Handheld, Mobile and Wearable Technologies - page 135

as noise that can get in the way of development;
and anyway after all these years it's way too late
for us to try to reassert control over the journey.

mistake. The vital information gained from
these questions, complaints and design
suggestions is what moves the develop-
ment process in the direction that actually
results in something that can be used.
• Lesson (4) Be prepared to give up con-
trol. The real world is not a lab and the
researcher is never in control. This was a
painful but necessary lesson, the accep-
tance of which leads to an understanding
that the people providing and receiving
care are the ones who “own” the process
of care provision, never the developer nor
the researcher. Nothing a researcher can do
will have significant impact on the culture
of a care provision workplace—don't even
try.
• Lesson (5) Don't be surprised if you end
up someplace unexpected. Research in the
real world is like the great American road
trip: you know where you set out but can-
not predict where you end up. This is be-
cause the interesting things and places you
find along the highways and byways will
ultimately influence where you wind up,
which is guaranteed to be a different place
than you thought you were going.

CONCLUSION

We have learned many lessons from our journey;
about business, about the control of intellectual
property, about working with physicians, nurses
and informal caregivers. However, in the context
of conducting research in non-traditional envi-
ronments we have learned at least five valuable
lessons.

• Lesson (1) Get out of the lab. We learned
that testing a care provision technology in
a lab makes as little sense as testing an air-
plane wing in a vacuum chamber. In order
to assess technologies developed as tools
for care provision it is necessary to assess
them in the context of real world care pro-
vision, where real caregivers provide real
care to real people;
• Lesson (2) Place emphasis on people and
care, not gadgets. When developing and
testing the ELMS and the HCIS we learned
that there was no way for us to accurately
measure and track those variables relat-
ing to the human process of care provi-
sion—how caregivers think and act in re-
lation to information provided to them by
the gadgets—without dealing with people.
And, the more we dealt with people, and
the more varied their roles, e.g., caregiv-
er, supervisor, care recipient, the more we
learned.
• Lesson (3) Listen to what people say they
want . We learned over the last nine years
that people say they want many things and
once they have something they want it im-
proved. In many ways, the easiest road to
take is to regard these requests as noise
and ignore them. However, this is a crucial

Taken together these five lessons reflect the
fact that compared to the lab the real world is a
noisy, messy, chaotic place. It is a place where
the researcher encounters people who are not
passive research subjects in a controlled setting,
but real people going about their daily business of
providing and receiving care. Indeed, the thoughts
and actions of caregivers, as well as the behavior
and attitudes of the people for whom they are car-
ing, are indeed always “noisy” precisely because
they are in real, as opposed to artificial, settings.
While this makes life more complicated for the
developer and the researcher, it opens the door
to structured observation of the technology as it
is actually used as a care provision application,
something which is not possible in a laboratory.