Pre-installation challenges: classifying barriers to the introduction of smart home technology

Increasing technological developments indicate potential for a variety of improvements in the domestic environment. As part of an interdisciplinary research project, this study interviewed households prior to the installation of smart home technologies (SHTs) in order to identify critical issues at the pre-installation phase. Semi-structured interviews took place in 16 houses before the installation of SHTs, when a range of smart sensors and controls were presented to households for the first time. At this stage, they started to make key decisions about which devices to use, where to install, and how to position them. Participants mentioned diverse issues surrounding the introduction of SHTs. To guide the qualitative analysis, an organizing framework for research on smart homes and their users was used. This paper indicates that, even though participants appreciate the functional aspects of SHTs and the possibilities of a better living, their concerns related to technology (hardware & software), design (acceptability & usability) and spaces (home as complex places) are numerous. These results complement the existing literature (which focuses more on the use phase) with the perceived enablers and barriers prior to the installation of SHTs

Evaluation Beyond Usability

The evaluation of research artefacts is an important step to validate research contributions. Sub-disciplines of HCI often pursue primary goals other than usability, such as Sustainable HCI (SHCI), HCI for development, or health and wellbeing. For such disciplines, established evaluation methods are not always appropriate or sufficient, and new conventions for identifying, discussing, and justifying suitable evaluation methods need to be established. In this paper, we revisit the purpose and goals of evaluation in HCI and SHCI, and elicit five key elements that can provide guidance to identifying evaluation methods for SHCI research. Our essay is meant as a starting point for discussing current and improving future evaluation practice in SHCI; we also believe it holds value for other subdisciplines in HCI that encounter similar challenges while evaluating their research

Designing and evaluating a behaviour change intervention that introduces modification of time perceptions as a solution to promote sustainable behaviours

This research presents the design and evaluation of an intervention that introduces modification of time perceptions as one of the solutions to promote sustainable behaviours. It is demonstrated in this thesis that unnecessary energy use is often caused by temporal tensions, defined as the relation between actions to be performed and available time. This research proposes that it is possible to deliberately reduce temporal tensions, and this can motivate people to behave more sustainably. Persuasive technology and human-computer interaction provided the tools needed to manipulate time perceptions and therefore bring about changes in the specific behaviours that result in unnecessary energy usage. Previous studies indicate that behaviours play an important role in energy consumption. From the different domains of energy use that could be examined, cooking was chosen to be the platform where the studies on behaviour change and energy use would take place. How behaviours influence energy use motivated the design of empirical studies to understand behaviours related to domestic energy use and identify what are the determinants of these behaviours. Each determinant was related to a strategy to be included on a behaviour change intervention. A wider survey was developed to understand students acceptance of a set of proposed energy saving techniques, and resulted in a vast volume of information about user preferences and intentions to perform the suggested energy saving behaviours for cooking. It emerged that participants rushed into the cooking tasks without much deliberation, consequently not following preparation procedures and thus using more energy. Information gathered during the first studies also showed that participants behaviours were partially motivated by the need to speed up the cooking process in order to reduce boredom when they were waiting for the food to cook, consequently resulting in extra energy usage. The knowledge gathered from the preceding steps and a literature review informed the design of strategies to modify the non-sustainable behaviours and promote energy saving. A user-centred design process involving an idea generation session and scenario analysis was used to provide a set of strategies to be embedded in an intervention, containing the specific methods to tackle the correspondent determinants of behaviours. The specific needs of the cooking activity indicated that an electronic intervention was an adequate platform to be implemented and tested. Two high resolution working prototypes of the electronic interventions were developed as mobile phone applications. The final study comprised the evaluation of the proposed interventions in improving aspects of the cooking activity, the acceptance of the interventions and effectiveness in promoting energy saving

Personalized Game Content Generation and Recommendation for Gamified Systems

Gamification, that is, the usage of game content in non-game contexts, has been successfully employed in several application domains to foster engagement, as well as to influence the behavior of end users. Although gamification is often effective in inducing behavioral changes in citizens, the difficulty in retaining players and sustaining the acquired behavior over time, shows some limitations of this technology. That is especially unfortunate, because changing players’ demeanor (which have been shaped for a long time), cannot be immediately internalized; rather, the gamification incentive must be reinforced to lead to stabilization. This issue could be sourced from utilizing static game content and a one-size-fits-all strategy in generating the content during the game. This reveals the need for dynamic personalization over the course of the game. Our research hypothesis is that we can overcome these limitations with Procedural Content Generation (PCG) of playable units that appeal to each individual player and make her user experience more varied and compelling. In this thesis, we propose a deep, large and long solution, deployed in two main phases of Design and Integration to tackle these limitations. To support the former phase, we present a “PCG and Recommender system” to automate the generation and recommendation of playable units, named “Challenges”, which are Personalized and Contextualized on the basis of players’ preferences, skills, etc., and the game ulterior objectives. To this end, we develop a multi-layered framework to generate the personalized game content to be assigned and recommended to the players involved in the gamified system. To support the latter phase, we integrate two modules into the system including Machine Learning (ML) and Player Modeling, in order to optimize the challenge selection process and learning players’ behavior to further improve the personalization, by deriving the style of the player, respectively. We have carried out the implementation and evaluation of the proposed framework and its integration in two different contexts. First, we assess our Automatic Procedural Content Generation and Recommendation (APCGR) system within a large-scale and long-running open field experiment promoting sustainable urban mobility that lasted twelve weeks and involved more than 400 active players. Then, we implement the “Player Modeling” module (in the integration phase) in an educational interactive game domain to assess the performance of the proposed play style extraction approach. The contributions of this dissertation are a first step toward the application of machine learning in automating the procedural content generation and recommendation in gamification systems