An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.

Understanding the design of energy interventions to reduce end-user demand in organisational and domestic environments

Energy demand is on the rise globally due to unchecked factors such as population growth, lifestyle choices, and the industrialization of developing countries. Governments are investing in technologies for efficient and renewable energy in an attempt to secure energy for the future over current dependencies on fossil fuels, but the development costs are high, and the rate of developed technologies is projected to fall far short of meeting global requirements. Overshadowing this growing appetite for energy is the global issue of climate change, igniting the scientific and humanitarian debate over the use of fossil fuels and a need for renewable energy, presenting a societal problem of generating clean, sustainable and secure energy for future generations. As part of understanding how society can make positive changes to daily practices around energy use, many governments have turned to behaviour change, or ‘nudge’ units, that research work on changing energy consumption behaviours. The importance of this is underlined by a focus on reducing end-user energy demand (EUED) by providing contextual energy feedback, interwoven with behaviour change strategies, in both residential and organizational sectors. EUED in large organisations and small-medium enterprises (SMEs) accounts for a significant proportion of a nation’s energy requirements. In Europe, the services sector saw a 34% growth in EUED in the period 1990-2012, with computers and other appliances in the office substantially contributing to this. In the UK, for example, 13% of total energy consumed in 2011-2012 was within the services sector, which accounts for services and business, while the residential sector consumed 30% of total consumption. Given a lack of academic HCI research in the organisational energy intervention space when comparted to domestic, the principle research undertaken in this thesis was to understand employee energy consumption practices and attitudes in the workplace, through a combination of qualitative enquiry and analysis. Additionally, alternative forms of feedback such as aversive stimuli are often ignored in the HCI literature, with favour focused on positive feedback alone as a means for behaviour change. The work in this thesis presents findings on the design implications and considerations that inform the design of in-the-field organisational energy interventions that integrate feedback and antecedent behaviour contingencies. Additionally, research is undertaken in understanding the design of aversive feedback as part of domestic energy interventions. A significant contribution is made to the HCI sustainability literature on understanding the workplace energy intervention design space, and a contribution made on how aversive feedback can in fact be a useful and engaging method for the domestic environment

Internet of Things enabled sedentary behaviour change in office workers: development and feasibility of a novel intervention (WorkMyWay)

Sedentary behaviour (SB) without breaks is associated with adverse health outcomes. The prevalence of prolonged sitting at work among office workers makes a case for SB interventions to target this setting and population. Everyday mundane objects augmented with microelectronics and ubiquitous computing represent a novel mode of delivery for behaviour change interventions enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT). However, there is insufficient research to guide the design of interventions delivered with smart objects. This research addresses this gap by developing WorkMyWay, a workplace SB intervention delivered with IoT-enabled office objects (e.g. smart water bottles and cups), and evaluating its feasibility and acceptability in an 8-week “in-the-wild” study. This thesis made 4 contributions across the disciplines of behavioural medicine and human-computer interactions (HCI). The first contribution is the development of the WorkMyWay intervention, which is informed by findings from a systematic scoping review of prior research in this field (Chapter 3), a diary-probed interview study with 20 office workers (Chapter 4), and a series of technology audit, prototyping, human-centred design, and requirement engineering processes (Chapter 5). Findings from the feasibility study (Chapter 6) suggest that despite technical issues with the data connection, participants perceive high value of WorkMyWay in changing their SB. The intervention is potentially implementable in office-based workplaces, as long as connectivity issues are fixed. Recommendations are made on improvements and a series of future studies in accordance with the Medical Research Council’s guidance on complex intervention development and evaluation. Second, this thesis deepens the theoretical understanding of SB change, by following the Behaviour Change Wheel framework (including the COM-B model, theoretical domain framework, and taxonomies of Behaviour Change Techniques (BCT)) throughout intervention design and evaluation. The intervention contents are specified using the BCT taxonomies (Chapter 5) and informed by the first published COM-B analysis of office worker’s prolonged sitting behaviour at work (Chapter 4). This allows the feasibility study (Chapter 6) to contribute to theory development by matching the interview questions and psychological measures (e.g. strength of habit) with the BCTs (e.g. action planning, prompts and cues) and associated theoretical underpinnings (e.g. goal accessibility). It also allows implementation issues to be considered in light of how well those theories and theory-informed BCTs can work in real-life settings. Third, this thesis makes a methodological contribution by documenting an interdisciplinary approach to develop a digital behaviour change intervention and a model for applying and developing theories of behaviour change in the wild. This helps address the challenge identified in Chapter 3, by bridging the gap between HCI and behavioural medicine, and catalyse the process of feeding technological innovations downstream to health practice and intervention research. Fourth, this research contributes to the HCI literature by proposing a 2×2 matrix framework to guide the design of technology for sustainable behaviour change. On one hand, the framework unifies some of the existing visions and concepts about ubiquitous computing and applies them to the context of behaviour change, by considering the type of cognitive process (automatic versus reflective, based on the dual process model) through which a persuasive design influences the behaviour. For another, the framework considers the required dosage of their technology intervention to maintain the behaviour, or the distribution of changes between the physical world and the human cognition

Designing an educational interactive eBook for newly diagnosed children with type 1 diabetes: Mapping a new design space

peer-reviewedIn this paper, we report on a project investigating the role of Interactive Technologies (IT) and participatory design methods in supporting self-care practices in paediatric Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM). In particular, we discuss the design of an educational interactive eBook to support newly diagnosed children and their families in learning about effective management outside the clinical–medical consultation. We use our design as an illustration of a potential new design space for type 1 diabetes learning resources. We map this space by identifying a series of oppositions that helps us to explore new design assumptions that could better support the education of newly diagnosed children and families: learning alone vs learning together, medical vs patient perspective, prescriptive language vs narratives and social stories, and static vs interactive educational contents. Through a discussion of these shifting of points of focus in the design of educational products in T1DM, we hope to open up new opportunities to rethink the design of tools to support the education of paediatric diabetes (and possibly of other chronic diseases and conditions)

Proceedings experiencing light 2009 : international conference on the effects of light on welbeing

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Proceedings experiencing light 2009 : international conference on the effects of light on welbeing

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