Preserving Communication Context. Virtual workspace and interpersonal space in Japanese CSCW.

The past decade has seen the development of a perspective\ud holding that technology is socially constructed (Mackenzie and Wacjman, 1985; Bijker, Hughes and Pinch, 1987; Bijker and Law, 1992). This paper examines the social construction of one group of technologies, systems for computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). It describes the design of CSCW in Japan, with particular attention to the influence of culture on the design process. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the argument that culture is an important factor in technology design, despite commonly held assumptions about the neutrality and objectivity of science and technology. The paper further argues that, by looking at\ud CSCW systems as texts which reflect the context of their production and the society from which they come, we may be better able to understand the transformations that operate when these texts are “read” in the contexts of their implementation

A sustainable complex fenestration system using recycled plastics

Daylighting in built spaces has several benefits. It helps in reaching satisfactory levels of energy consumption by reducing the usage of artificial lighting. Furthermore, daylighting is also a major contributor in altering the visual comfort of occupants. Consequently, it boosts occupants’ concentration and productivity, which affects their performance in work tasks. However, an inadequately designed daylighting scheme leads to excessive solar heat gain, especially in hot and arid climates, increasing the temperature of interior spaces. In addition, due to the high solar altitudes in summer, the direct sunlight may fall right beneath the fenestration system and will not reach the depth of the space this phenomena is known as the “cave effect”. Many proposed designs of blinds, louvers, shades and low emitting glass panels, tackled the side effects of the summer sun; on the other hand, a few of the proposed solutions incorporated the use of recycled materials, for an added sustainable value. The aim of this thesis is to achieve a sustainable complex fenestration system (CFS) design that can diffuse and redirect the direct daylight component through an optimized pattern on its translucent layer. The CFS will comprise recycled plastic waste, which results from the conventional household waste. The recycled plastic waste will be used as a translucent material, with an optimized prismatic array design, to ensure adequate daylighting in hot climate desert areas. An optimization model for designing a prismatic panel is developed to meet the objective of minimizing sun light near the window and redistributing the sunlight to the depth of the space, while a ray tracing program is used to validate the developed model’s results. Furthermore, Radiance, a validated ray tracing simulation program, is used to produce accurate analysis with detailed hourly illuminance measurements throughout the year for the proposed CFS design using the five-phase method. Finally, a physical small scale model is developed to prove the viability of the CFS using three different recycled plastics, polystyrene (PS), polycarbonate (PC) polypropylene (PP). The proposed design succeeded to improve the daylight performance by redirecting an average of 50% of the direct light to an upward direction, thus levelling the daylight within the room depth. The physical prototype exhibits great performance in the redirection of daylight into deep areas of the room especially at high solar altitudes. Polycarbonate proved to be the best of the three tested recycled plastic followed by the polystyrene, while polypropylene needs further research to develop a more feasible product

Supporting Location Privacy Management through Feedback and Control

Participation in modern, socially-focused digital systems involves a large degree of privacy management, i.e. controlling who may access what information under what circumstances. Effective privacy management (control) requires that mobile systems’ users be able to make informed privacy decisions as their experience and knowledge of a system progresses. By informed, we mean users be aware of the actual information flow. Moreover, privacy preferences vary across the context and it is hard to define privacy policy that reflects the dynamic nature of our lives. This research explores the problem of supporting awareness of information flow and designing usable interfaces for maintaining privacy policies ad-hoc. We borrow from the world of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) and propose to incorporate social translucence, a design approach that “supports coherent behaviour by making participants and their activities visible to one another”. We use the characteristics of social translucence, namely visibility, awareness and accountability in order to introduce social norms in spatially dispersed systems. Our research is driven by two questions: (1) how can artifacts from real world social interaction, such as responsibility, be embedded into mobile interaction; and (2) can systems be designed in which both privacy violations and the burden of privacy management is minimized. The contributions of our work are: (1) an implementation of Buddy Tracker, privacy-aware location-sharing application based on the social translucence; (2) the design and evaluation of the concept of real-time feedback as a means of incorporating social translucence in location-sharing scenarios; and finally (3) a novel interface for ad-hoc privacy management called Privacy-Shake. We explore the role of real-time feedback for privacy management in the context of Buddy Tracker. Informed by focus group discussions, interviews, surveys and two field trials of Buddy Tracker we found that when using a system that provided real-time feedback, people were more accountable for their actions and reduced the number of unreasonable location requests. From our observations we develop concrete design guidelines for incorporating real-time feedback into information sharing applications in a manner that ensures social acceptance of the technology

Flexible architecture for a liquid society: the case of Bourofaye Community, Senegal, Africa

Qualificació obtinguda: 8,5 Màster universitari en Disseny -- Contemporary DesignThe work explores the potential of flexible architecture as an agent in response to the needs of a community deprived and in constant flow of change, located at the periphery of Ziguinchor, Senegal, Africa. Studies on humanitarian architecture provide the basis for understanding the real needs of the human being. In this community, they are manifested in a floating way, by factors such as family, climate, people mobility, work, agricultural production, among others, as the Liquid Societies described by Zygmunt Bauman. In this way, the work will seek in the writings of Luis Arenas, Toyo Ito and Ignasi de Solà-Morales, an approximation about the definition of Liquid Architecture, that refers to the constant transformation of space, which in an unstable condition like that of liquids, is able to absorb the needs of the human being. As a way of concretize this concept, there are found in the flexibility, architectural solutions suitable for application in the design of a Community Center for Burofaye

The magic window : balancing privacy and awareness in office settings

Co-workers who are physically distributed in the same building often obtain information about others through the windows in office doors. Using the information gathered by looking through the window, they can determine whether it is a good time to initiate a conversation with the occupant. There are, however, two problems with ordinary glass windows. First, there are times when the window does not provide enough information, such as when the occupant is away. Second, there is potential to violate the occupant’s privacy; as a result of the privacy risk, people often cover their windows entirely. If office windows are to work efficiently as a support for collaboration, there must be a balance between awareness and privacy. In this research, I augmented the functions of a physical office window with a computer-mediated replacement called the Magic Window. The Magic Window collects video of the occupant, mediates the signal in various ways, and then presents the altered view on a screen that replaces the glass window. The Magic Window provides a better balance of awareness and privacy in office settings by allowing occupant to differentiate the amount of awareness information based on the viewer. The Magic Window system was tested in an eight-month field trial. The trial showed that the augmented window did provide a balance of privacy and awareness, and also raised a number of issues that will aid the design of future design of co-present media spaces

Developing an Affect-Aware Rear-Projected Robotic Agent

Social (or Sociable) robots are designed to interact with people in a natural and interpersonal manner. They are becoming an integrated part of our daily lives and have achieved positive outcomes in several applications such as education, health care, quality of life, entertainment, etc. Despite significant progress towards the development of realistic social robotic agents, a number of problems remain to be solved. First, current social robots either lack enough ability to have deep social interaction with human, or they are very expensive to build and maintain. Second, current social robots have yet to reach the full emotional and social capabilities necessary for rich and robust interaction with human beings. To address these problems, this dissertation presents the development of a low-cost, flexible, affect-aware rear-projected robotic agent (called ExpressionBot), that is designed to support verbal and non-verbal communication between the robot and humans, with the goal of closely modeling the dynamics of natural face-to-face communication. The developed robotic platform uses state-of-the-art character animation technologies to create an animated human face (aka avatar) that is capable of showing facial expressions, realistic eye movement, and accurate visual speech, and then project this avatar onto a face-shaped translucent mask. The mask and the projector are then rigged onto a neck mechanism that can move like a human head. Since an animation is projected onto a mask, the robotic face is highly flexible research tool, mechanically simple, and low-cost to design, build and maintain compared with mechatronic and android faces. The results of our comprehensive Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies illustrate the benefits and values of the proposed rear-projected robotic platform over a virtual-agent with the same animation displayed on a 2D computer screen. The results indicate that ExpressionBot is well accepted by users, with some advantages in expressing facial expressions more accurately and perceiving mutual eye gaze contact. To improve social capabilities of the robot and create an expressive and empathic social agent (affect-aware) which is capable of interpreting users\u27 emotional facial expressions, we developed a new Deep Neural Networks (DNN) architecture for Facial Expression Recognition (FER). The proposed DNN was initially trained on seven well-known publicly available databases, and obtained significantly better than, or comparable to, traditional convolutional neural networks or other state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and learning time. Since the performance of the automated FER system highly depends on its training data, and the eventual goal of the proposed robotic platform is to interact with users in an uncontrolled environment, a database of facial expressions in the wild (called AffectNet) was created by querying emotion-related keywords from different search engines. AffectNet contains more than 1M images with faces and 440,000 manually annotated images with facial expressions, valence, and arousal. Two DNNs were trained on AffectNet to classify the facial expression images and predict the value of valence and arousal. Various evaluation metrics show that our deep neural network approaches trained on AffectNet can perform better than conventional machine learning methods and available off-the-shelf FER systems. We then integrated this automated FER system into spoken dialog of our robotic platform to extend and enrich the capabilities of ExpressionBot beyond spoken dialog and create an affect-aware robotic agent that can measure and infer users\u27 affect and cognition. Three social/interaction aspects (task engagement, being empathic, and likability of the robot) are measured in an experiment with the affect-aware robotic agent. The results indicate that users rated our affect-aware agent as empathic and likable as a robot in which user\u27s affect is recognized by a human (WoZ). In summary, this dissertation presents the development and HRI studies of a perceptive, and expressive, conversational, rear-projected, life-like robotic agent (aka ExpressionBot or Ryan) that models natural face-to-face communication between human and emapthic agent. The results of our in-depth human-robot-interaction studies show that this robotic agent can serve as a model for creating the next generation of empathic social robots

Ready Coder One: Action Research Exploring the Effects of Collaborative Game Design-Based Learning on Gifted Fourth Graders\u27 21st Century Skills and Science Content Knowledge

The purpose of this action research was to describe the impact of digital game building on fourth grade gifted and talented (GT) students’ growth in problem-solving, creativity, collaboration, and science content knowledge. Traditionally, gifted education has focused on acceleration of content, disconnected enrichment activities, and thinking skills practiced in isolation of real-world problems. Increasingly, there is a call to involve students in real world experiences through projects that explore real issues using technology in ways that could transform the field. The ability to create rather than consume technology has gained attention linking creativity and collaboration to using coding languages. Data collection included pre- and postsurvey on creativity and collaboration, pre- and posttest of science concepts, student design and reflection journals, video recordings, focus group interviews and students’ games. The participants came from two classes of GT students (n = 46). Quantitative data analysis showed significant growth from pre- to postsurvey for the Collaboration Survey. Students showed significant growth from pre- to posttest for the science content knowledge. The Creativity Survey showed no significant difference from pre- to postsurvey although it should be noted that student scores were high at the beginning of the study. Qualitative data analysis revealed five themes including overcoming challenges of group work, developing a culture of collaboration, creating narrative and connecting science, problem-solving is Scratch’s coding environment, and reflecting on learning. The findings of this study indicate that involving gifted students in game design-based learning in science had a positive impact on student perceptions of their abilities in problem-solving, creativity, and collaboration. Given GT students’ reluctance to work in groups, the collaboration scores were particularly relevant. Students took a leading role in learning creating a classroom culture of collaboration. As students encountered coding issues, they sought their own solutions and shared knowledge. Emergence of student expertise led to an environment where students felt comfortable seeking knowledge from each other. This research has implications for the exploration of ways to support gifted students in their growth in creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving within science. It is also important to note that all students need support in 21st century skills

Incorporation of privacy elements in space station design

Privacy exists to the extent that individuals can control the degree of social contact that they have with one another. The opportunity to withdraw from other people serves a number of important psychological and social functions, and is in the interests of safety, high performance, and high quality of human life. Privacy requirements for Space Station crew members are reviewed, and architectual and other guidelines for helping astronauts achieve desired levels of privacy are suggested. In turn, four dimensions of privacy are discussed: the separation of activities by areas within the Space Station, controlling the extent to which astronauts have visual contact with one another, controlling the extent to which astronauts have auditory contact with one another, and odor control. Each section presents a statement of the problem, a review of general solutions, and specific recommendations. The report is concluded with a brief consideration of how selection, training, and other procedures can also help Space Station occupants achieve satisfactory levels of seclusion