Interaction with the dirty, dangerous, and dull

The environments for which interaction designers design tend to be rather benign: the office, the home. The settings are familiar to us, identifiable and relatable, often places we’ve experienced firsthand. A host of assumptions are implicit in these settings that affect the style of design inquiry and the forms of prototyping and evaluation. For example, we might assume a stable and safe physical environment, or that if something doesn’t work, it is an annoyance rather than a life-or-death situation.

In our work, we have explored quite a different context: that of an oil and gas facility, where work is at times dirty, dangerous, and dull. We describe how we approached design for this unfamiliar environment and outline some of our concepts. In our general program of research, we are exploring new, yet “close to market” artifacts and systems for use in oil and gas, potentially for productization.