Social Practice Cards

The Social Practice Cards (SPC) are a collection of silhouette images of people doing things. It currently contains 204 silhouettes sorted by broad demographic categories and postures. Over time, I hope to add more silhouettes of more people or "intelligent" active things such as robots. The SPC was created as a set of stimuli for research on technology-mediated activities in social settings, but you can use it for other purposes as well.

How to Use and Notes on Licenses

You are free to use the SPC as a whole for almost any purpose. For example: - as stimuli for running experiments - in your architectural drawings to make them more "lively" - as visual elements in your slides for a presentation - to create card games (see the templates in the "cards" subfolders for standard formats) - and many more...

Using Individual Images

If you want to use an individual image from the SPC, please refer to its original license which can be found in the index.csv file. The images are assembled from several online sources, and each source image has been checked to have a license that permits inclusion in the SPC. Generally speaking, you can do everything with these images without attribution, except for creating a competitive service to the original hosters and maybe selling them without further modification. With some of the images you can even do that, but you would have to check the license yourself for your case. That said, please attribute the creators if possible in your context. You can find the source links with detailed information in the index.csv.

Some of the source images have been converted into silhouettes for inclusion in this set, or they have been otherwise modified (e.g., split into several images if several unrelated activities were depicted in the original). In that case, the modified images have the license of the SPC (i.e., CC0 1.0).

How to Contribute

You can contribute in several ways. Most importantly, if you use the SPC in your research and collect metadata in the process, please share them back! For example, you may have collected data about how people perceive each silhouette (e.g., the depicted person's gender, age, activity, ...). These data could be interesting for other people as well. I would like to include some general information with the SPC in the future and link to further resources from here.

Other ways to contribute: - share a link to your published research in which you used the SPC - provide more silhouette images (important: Always include license information and a source url for all third party material you found on the internet. New images can only be included if they have a permissive license, such as a Creative Commons Zero license. If you are the original creator, another easy way to share the image would be to upload it to a free online service (e.g., Pixabay or Unsplash) and then share the url) - add the names or handles of the original creators of images in the index.csv file

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following contributors: Mena Mesenhöller, Kieu Tran

Attribution

Attribution is not required, but appreciated. In a scientific context, for example, you can cite the SPC like this:

Uhde, Alarith (2022): Social Practice Cards. Version 1.1.1 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6255968

We have also published a workshop paper at CHI'22 in which we describe the SPC in more detail:

Alarith Uhde, Mena Mesenhöller & Marc Hassenzahl (2022): Social Practice Cards: Research Material to Study Social Contexts as Interwoven Practice Constellations. Contribution to the CHI'22 Workshop InContext: Futuring User-Experience Design Tools https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.01756