10373 Abstracts Collection -- Demarcating User eXperience

From September 15 to 17, 2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10373 Demarcating user experience was held in Schloss Dagstuhl, Leibniz Center for Informatics, Germany. The goal of the seminar was to come up with a consensus on the core concepts of user experience in a form of a User Experience White Paper, which would provide a more solid grounding for the field of user experience. This paper includes the resulted User Experience White Paper and a collection of abstracts from some seminar participants

Demarcating mobile phone interface design guidelines to expedite selection

Guidelines are recommended as a tool for informing user interface design. Despite a proliferation of guidelines in the research literature, there is little evidence of their use in industry, nor their influence in academic literature. In this paper, we explore the research literature related to mobile phone design guidelines to find out why this should be so. We commenced by carrying out a scoping literature review of the mobile phone design guideline literature to gain insight into the maturity of the field. The question we wanted to explore was: “Are researchers building on each others’ guidelines, or is the research field still in the foundational stage?” We discovered a poorly structured field, with many researchers proposing new guidelines, but little incremental refinement of extant guidelines. It also became clear that the current reporting of guidelines did not explicitly communicate their multi-dimensionality or deployment context. This leaves designers without a clear way of discriminating between guidelines, and could contribute to the lack of deployment we observed. We conducted a thematic analysis of papers identified by means of a systematic literature review to identify a set of dimensions of mobile phone interface design guidelines. The final dimensions provide a mechanism for differentiating guidelines and expediting choice

Constructing dementia and dementia care: daily practices in a day care setting

Abstract • Summary:This article explores the ways in which dementia can be constructed and maintained by the actions, and received ideas concerning dementia, of social care staff practising in a local authority day care setting in the UK.The article is set within the context of ‘daily practice’, the things that we do forming the basis of how things may be (re)defined. • Findings:The study suggests that the physical environment of the day care setting, the routines and activities provided and the practices of care staff indicate three particular ways in which dementia was constructed. These comprised ‘holding and homogenizing’, ‘demarcating and distancing’ and ‘caring and controlling’. Each depended on individual approach, training and experience and was influenced by ‘received’ traditional approaches. • Applications:This is important to our understanding of dementia care as we seek to recognize diverse experiences and to consider pluralistic approaches to best practice in dementia care.The study indicates the need for training at a deep and reflective level in which the new culture of person-centred dementia care becomes part of daily practice rather than a distant ideal

Death in digital games : a thanatological approach

Analysing our time is an important part of our understanding and modi operandi. At the same time, of equal importance is the analysis of the end of time, that is, the time of death. The analysis of death contains a paradox, since there is no way of knowing death before death, and writing about death after the grave contradicts death itself. Nevertheless, death is a diachronic consistency which defines our presence, existence and, of course, every era, both culturally and temporarily. It reigns over our consciousness and its manifestations: language, philosophy, religion, literature and the arts. Nowadays, we live in the era of digital revolution and are re-familiarising ourselves with many established perceptions of the world we live in and the manner we experience and communicate within it. Death, together with our acknowledgement of it, is no different. Much can be said about how death is perceived through social media and digital applications, but my core focus will be death in digital games. Digital games, as a relatively new medium, and an ergodic one at that, have many interesting aspects that remain unexplored and are worth looking closer into as they provide an exciting field of study. Being one of—if not the most popular leisure activity of our age—one cannot be more in our time than when engaging with digital games. They pose a different approach to interactivity, and for that reason function in a novel manner and are accompanied by new challenges and a need for methodological tools. In this case however, digital games themselves will provide the tool for analysing such a timeless and simultaneously time-perceived idea as death itself. A great example of how the contemporary can not only facilitate the intertemporal, but also re-introduce it in innovative ways.peer-reviewe

Inputs and outputs: engagement in digital media from the maker's perspective

In the process of developing a technology assembly that can objectively measure engagement on a moment-by-moment basis, subjective responses to stimuli must be shown to correlate with the component technologies, such as motion capture or psychophysiology. Subjective scales for engagement are not all consistent in segregating the measurement of causes (inputs to the audience) and effects (outputs from the audience); this lack of separation can obscure appropriate inferences in the relationship between cause and effect. Inputs to the audience are scripted, and are controllable by the maker. An output is what the designed experience engenders in the end-user, and outputs can include both mental states (satisfaction) and physical activities (heart rate) during the stimulus and subsequently. Inputs can be maximised by design, whereas to optimise outputs from the end-user, one needs an empirical process because outputs are dependent upon an interpretive process or entry into a biological system. Outputs will be highly dependent on audience and context, and they will often be quite variable, even in individuals from a similar audience profile. It is critical that, in instruments assessing the relationship between inputs and outputs, controllable inputs to the end-user must not be conflated with outputs engendered in the end-user

Toward an Aesthetics of New-Media Environments

In this paper I suggest that, over and above the need to explore and understand the technological newness of computer art works, there is a need to address the aesthetic significance of the changes and effects that such technological newness brings about, considering the whole environmental transaction pertaining to new media, including what they can or do offer and what users do or can do with such offerings, and how this whole package is integrated into our living spaces and activities. I argue that, given the primacy of computer-based interaction in the new-media, the notion of ‘ornamentality’ indicates the ground-floor aesthetics of new-media environments. I locate ornamentality not only in the logically constitutive principles of the new-media (hypertextuality and interactivity) but also in their multiform cultural embodiments (decoration as cultural interface). I utilize Kendall Walton’s theory of ornamentality in order to construe a puzzle pertaining to the ornamental erosion of information in new-media environments. I argue that insofar as we consider new-media to be conduits of ‘real-life’, the excessive density of ornamental devices prevalent in certain new-media environments forces us to conduct our inquiries under conditions of neustic uncertainty, that is, uncertainty concerning the kind of relationship that we, the users, have to the propositional content mediated. I conclude that this puzzle calls our attention to a peculiar interrogatory complexity inherent in any game of knowledge-seeking conducted across the infosphere, which is not restricted to the simplest form of data retrieval, especially in mixed-reality environments and when the knowledge sought is embodied mimetically

Challenges for an Ontology of Artificial Intelligence

Of primary importance in formulating a response to the increasing prevalence and power of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in society are questions of ontology. Questions such as: What “are” these systems? How are they to be regarded? How does an algorithm come to be regarded as an agent? We discuss three factors which hinder discussion and obscure attempts to form a clear ontology of AI: (1) the various and evolving definitions of AI, (2) the tendency for pre-existing technologies to be assimilated and regarded as “normal,” and (3) the tendency of human beings to anthropomorphize. This list is not intended as exhaustive, nor is it seen to preclude entirely a clear ontology, however, these challenges are a necessary set of topics for consideration. Each of these factors is seen to present a 'moving target' for discussion, which poses a challenge for both technical specialists and non-practitioners of AI systems development (e.g., philosophers and theologians) to speak meaningfully given that the corpus of AI structures and capabilities evolves at a rapid pace. Finally, we present avenues for moving forward, including opportunities for collaborative synthesis for scholars in philosophy and science