Two Steps Towards Kairos-Awareness

This thesis describes a research inspired by a concept of the classical discipline of rhetoric: kairos, the right moment to deliver a message in order to maximize its effect. The research followed two threads that, ultimately, lead to the same ending: the maximization of the potential of technology to deliver the right interaction at the right time. The first research thread is an operationalization of the concept of kairos. It entailed the development of EveWorks and EveXL, a framework for capturing daily life events in mobile devices and a domain-specific language to express them, respectively. The largely extended use of mobile devices and their proximity with their owners offers exceptional potential for capturing opportunity for interaction. Leveraging on this potential, the EveWorks-EveXL dyad was developed to allow mobile application programmers to specify the precise delivery circumstances of an interaction in order to maximize its potential, i.e., to specify its kairos. Contrasting to most event processing engines found in the literature that implement data-based event models, the EveWorks-EveXL dyad proposes a model based on temporality, through the articulation of intervals of time. This is a more natural way of representing a concept as broad as “daily life events” since, across cultures, temporal concepts like duration and time intervals are fundamental to the way people make sense of their experience. The results of the present work demonstrate that the EveWorks-EveXL dyad makes for an adequate and interesting way to express contextual events, in a way that is “closer” to our everyday understanding of daily life. Ultimately, in user centered applications, kairos can be influenced by the user’s emotional state, thereby making emotion assessment relevant. Addressing this, as well as the growing interest in the topic of emotions by the scientific community, the second research thread of the present thesis led to the development of the CAAT, a widget designed to perform quick and reliable assessments of affective states – a paramount task in a variety of scientific fields, including HCI. While there are already a number of tools for this purpose, in psychology, emotion assessments are largely conducted through the use of pen-and-paper questionnaires applied after the affective experience has occurred. As emotional states vary significantly over time, this entails the loss of important details, warranting the need for immediate, in situ, measurements of affect. In line with this requirement, the CAAT enables quick emotion assessment in a reliable fashion, as attested by the results of then validation studies conducted in order to assess its overall viability along relevant dimensions of usability and psychometrics. As such, aside from being a good fit for longitudinal studies and applications whenever the quick assessment of emotions is required, the CAAT has the potential to be integrated as one of EveWorks’ sensors to enhance its ability to find that sometimes elusive opportunity for interaction, i.e., their kairos. In this way, it becomes apparent how the two threads of research of the current work may be intertwined into a consolidated contribution to the HCI field