MOTHER TREE DESIGN often uses qualitative methods to collect, analyze, and make design recommendations. One of the challenges of using this approach is in dealing with the voluminous amounts of data (i.e., text, video and design strategies). In the section below we provide a brief introduction to the methods used to enhance our work.

Design Analysis
How to engage people future forward thinking is a big question. To discover possible strategies we have studied practices used by alternate reality game (ARG) designers to engage fans. In this paper we present a multiple case study based on: Future Coast (2014), the Disaster Resilience Journal (2014) and Techno Medicine Wheel (2007 – ongoing). Our analysis derives from designer’s interview and observations of their narrative structure, postmortem. Findings provide a list of best practices related to the use of narrative style and physical locations that support fan engagement.

Moulder, V., Boschman, L. R., Wakkary, R., Neustaedter, C., & Kobayashi, H. H. (2018, April). HCI interventions for science communication. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-9).

Online Narrative Analysis
Understanding how to architect online narratives that encourage people to take action in real-live physical places is challenging! In this paper we analysis 18-designer’s interviews and use of location-based technology and participatory storytelling. Findings revealed the best practices for creating open and closed narrative structures and enhanced our understanding of design approaches.

Bonsignore, E., Moulder, V., Neustaedter, C., Hansen, D., Kraus, K., & Druin, A. (2014, April). Design tactics for authentic interactive fiction: insights from alternate reality game designers. InProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 947-950).

Community Engagement
How to provide non-profit organizations with the best technology support is difficult and requires in-depth conversations with the people familiar with the day to day operations. In this paper we discuss how to use various strategies to improve technological support using video analysis. This case study contributes new knowledge – tactics to conduct and evaluate HCI Design Interventions with nonprofits, as well as helping to expand the emerging intersection of political computing and human-computer interaction.

Moulder, V., Boschman, L. R., Wakkary, R., Odom, W., & Kuznetsov, S. (2014). HCI interventions with nonprofit organizations: tactics for effective collaboration. In CHI’14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 877-880).