There are various reasons why I’ve been so quiet recently. One of them is the DESIRE’11 conference, which kicked off this week. I’m communications chair, and my duties have covered the good (working with great people), the bad (admin gets dull fast) and the ugly (Easychair :( ).

This morning, I ran a tutorial at the conference. The title was Analysis, Redesign and Evaluation with Teasing Apart, Piecing Together, and you shan’t be surprised to hear, dear reader, that it very strongly drew upon my doctoral work. TAPT is a method I developed during my EngD in Southampton, and is about analysing an experience in order to redesign it for use in a new context. For instance, perhaps you want to rebuild web-based social networking for use in a care home for the elderly, or to build a wiki-inspired area of a museum for people to share their reactions to exhibits.

In essence, the tutorial fell into three parts:

1. An introduction to TAPT: why it exists, where it came from, and its use for analysis and redesign. This part included some practical  exercises (of course!).
2. Agile uses of TAPT: TAPT as a tool for in-depth analysis, and for experience-oriented evaluation. Again, including exercises.
3. Running TAPT workshops: pointers on how to use TAPT in the field, covering topics from number of participants and room layout, to eliciting suitable data and handling the impact of your presence as a researcher.

This was the first time I’d run a TAPT tutorial, and I’m really pleased with how it went. There were eight participants from diverse backgrounds, who were most lively and asked many questions.

I  enjoyed the experience of teaching interested, imaginative practitioners about TAPT and how it might be useful to them. I’m intrigued to see what might come of it: for example, one of the attendees is looking at socio-digital experiences between children and parents, which would be a whole new area for applying the method.