Human-centered Design for Augmented Reality (AR) (2018-2020)

Curator: Isabel Pedersen, Ontario Tech University | March 2018 and ongoing

Collection Editor: Sharon Caldwell
Collection Archivists: Jayden Cooper, Jack Narine, and Sharon Caldwell

This collection grows out of an augmented reality research collaboration between by Ann Hill Duin, Ph.D. (University of Minnesota), Dawn Armfield, Ph.D. (Minnesota State University), and Isabel Pedersen, Ph.D. (University of Ontario Institute of Technology). It will complement a panel presentation at the 2018 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm) in Toronto, and a corresponding paper Experiencing content: Heuristics for human-centered design for augmented reality to be published in the conference proceedings.

This collection is organized using an evolving metadata that informs a growing heuristic for Augmented Reality (AR) designers, developers, usability experts, students and professional communicators. It begins with human-centricity as a design premise or a "design strategy".  The collection charts new developments across corporate and academic innovations, many still in prototype, using specialized keywords and descriptions.
 
The methodology involved conducting a full text search of the database to identify items that were specifically about Augmented Reality, a subset of the broader pool that may simply mention the term. As of September 2018, the collection includes 176 artifacts that are tagged with unique metadata to inform an analysis of the discourse surrounding AR. Of the total, 100 representations describe an “invention” (i.e., prototypes, innovations, or advertisements for a commercial AR product); 48 are “Responses to inventions,” texts that inform discourses about inventions usually by non-inventors (i.e., journalism, news, academic sources); and 28 are “Objects of Allusions,” which are film clips that depict AR technologies.  The metadata tagging over and above this categorization classifies themes and motivations for Augmented Reality. For example, 37 items use the augment keyword, “playing”, suggesting that a large portion of AR is still geared to gaming, while 24 are tagged with "working".