The Design of Not-so-everyday Things: Designing for Emerging Experiences

In this paper, we explore how emerging technologies and experiences challenge previous theories and practices to grow and adopt and, thus, address new and unique challenges, such as designing across macro-level ecosystems, new devices, and interaction models that enable user control of data in an increasingly complex digital world. We discuss these topics with respect to real and future examples, the unique challenges they present, and how academia and industry must collaborate to adapt current frameworks and develop new methods to address these challenges. This partnership will ensure both parties better understand the problem space for designing emerging experiences in today\u27s digital economy. Further, this partnership enables scholars and practitioners to more effectively explore the solution space for designing novel products and developing advanced theories that help craft meaningful user experiences. Finally, we argue that the partnership between academia and industry can develop future talent and upskill current practitioners, which is paramount in successfully meeting the challenges inherent in the design of emerging technologies

UbiComp in Opportunity Spaces: Challenges for Participatory Design

The rise of ubiquitous computing (UbiComp), where pervasive, wireless and disappearing technologies offer hitherto unavailable means of supporting activity, increasingly opens up ‘opportunity spaces’. These are spaces where there is no urgent problem to be solved, but much potential to augment and enhance practice in new ways. Based on our experience of co-designing novel user experiences for visitors to an English country estate, we discuss challenges for PD in such an opportunity space. Key amongst these are how to build a working relationship of value when there are no urgent requirements; how to understand and scope the space of opportunities; and how to leave users with new resources of value to them

OWidgets: A toolkit to enable smell-based experience design

Interactive technologies are transforming the ways in which people experience, interact and share information. Advances in technology have made it possible to generate real and virtual environments with breath-taking graphics and high-fidelity audio. However, without stimulating the other senses such as touch and smell, and even taste in some cases, such experiences feel hollow and fictitious; they lack realism. One of the main stumbling blocks for progress towards creating truly compelling multisensory experiences is the lack of appropriate tools and guidance for designing beyond audio-visual applications. Here we focus particularly on the sense of smell and how smell-based design can be enabled to create novel user experiences. We present a design toolkit for smell (i.e., OWidgets). The toolkit consists of a graphical user interface and the underlying software framework. The framework uses two main components: a Mapper and Scheduler facilitating the device-independent replication of olfactory experiences. We discuss how our toolkit reduces the complexity of designing with smell and enables a creative exploration based on specific design features. We conclude by reflecting on future directions to extend the toolkit and integrate it into the wider audio-visual ecosystem

Interaction platform-orientated perspective in designing novel applications

The lack of HCI offerings in the invention of novel software applications and the bias of design knowledge towards desktop GUI make it difficult for us to design for novel scenarios and applications that leverage emerging computational technologies. These include new media platforms such as mobiles, interactive TV, tabletops and large multi-touch walls on which many of our future applications will operate. We argue that novel application design should come not from user-centred requirements engineering as in developing a conventional application, but from understanding the interaction characteristics of the new platforms. Ensuring general usability for a particular interaction platform without rigorously specifying envisaged usage contexts helps us to design an artifact that does not restrict the possible application contexts and yet is usable enough to help brainstorm its more exact place for future exploitation

Designing a Waterless Toilet Prototype for Reusable Energy Using a User-Centered Approach and Interviews

User-oriented community engagement can reveal insights into ways of improving a community and solving complex public issues, such as natural resource scarcity. This study describes the early process of co-designing a novel, waterless toilet to respond to the water scarcity problem in the Republic of Korea. It presents how we designed a toilet focusing on three factors???a sanitization function, an ergonomic posture, and clean aesthetics???by conducting focus group interviews as part of a user engagement approach to understand what community users want from a toilet and ways of improving their toilet experiences. The results not only supported the development of an experiential service design project to raise community awareness of water scarcity but also supported scientists and engineers in experimenting with and developing new technologies by collaborating closely with designers

Establishing the design knowledge for emerging interaction platforms

While awaiting a variety of innovative interactive products and services to appear in the market in the near future such as interactive tabletops, interactive TVs, public multi-touch walls, and other embedded appliances, this paper calls for preparation for the arrival of such interactive platforms based on their interactivity. We advocate studying, understanding and establishing the foundation for interaction characteristics and affordances and design implications for these platforms which we know will soon emerge and penetrate our everyday lives. We review some of the archetypal interaction platform categories of the future and highlight the current status of the design knowledge-base accumulated to date and the current rate of growth for each of these. We use example designs illustrating design issues and considerations based on the authors’ 12-year experience in pioneering novel applications in various forms and styles

Designing novel applications inspired by emerging media technologies

The field of Human-Computer Interaction provides a number of useful tools and methods for obtaining information on end-users and their usage context to inform the design of computer systems, yet relatively little is known on how to go about designing for a completely novel application where there is no user base, no existing practice of use available at the start. The success of the currently available HCI methodology that focuses on understanding users’ needs and establishing requirements is well-deserved in making computing applications usable in terms of fitting them to end-users’ usage contexts. However, too much emphasis on identifying user needs tends to stifle other more exploratory design activities where new types of applications are invented in order to discover or create new activities currently not practiced. In this paper, we argue that a great starting point of novel application design is not the problem space (trying to rigorously define the user requirements) but the solution space (trying to leverage emerging computational technologies and growing design knowledge for various interaction platforms), and we build a foundation for a pragmatic design methodology supported by the authors’ extensive experience in designing novel applications inspired by emerging media technologies

Editorial: Positive Technology: Designing E-experiences for Positive Change

While there is little doubt that our lives are becoming increasingly digital, whether this change is for the better or for the worse is far from being settled. Rather, over the past years concerns about the personal and social impacts of technologies have been growing, fueled by dystopian Orwellian scenarios that almost on daily basis are generously dispensed by major Western media outlets. According to a recent poll involving some 1,150 experts, 47% of respondents predict that individuals’ well-being will bemore helped than harmed by digital life in the next decade, while 32% say people’s well-being will bemore harmed than helped. Only 21% of those surveyed indicated that the impact of technologies on people well-being will be negligible compared to now (Pew Research Center, 2018)

Out there and in here: design for blended scientific inquiry learning

One of the benefits of mobile technologies is to combine ‘the digital’ (e.g., data, information, photos) with ‘field’ experiences in novel ways that are contextualized by people’s current located activities. However, often cost, mobility disabilities and time exclude students from engaging in such peripatetic experiences. The Out There and In Here project, is exploring a combination of mobile and tabletop technologies in support for collaborative learning. A system is being developed for synchronous collaboration between geology students in the field and peers at an indoor location. The overarching goal of this research is to develop technologies that support people working together in a suitable manner for their locations. There are two OTIH project research threads. The first deals with disabled learner access issues: these complex issues are being reviewed in subsequent evaluations and publications. This paper will deal with issues of technology supported learning design for remote and co-located science learners. Several stakeholder evaluations and two field trials have reviewed two research questions: 1. What will enhance the learning experience for those in the field and laboratory? 2. How can learning trajectories and appropriate technologies be designed to support equitable co-located and remote learning collaboration? This paper focuses on describing the iterative linked development of technologies and scientific inquiry pedagogy. Two stages within the research project are presented. The 1st stage details several pilot studies over 3 years with 21 student participants in synchronous collaborations with traditional technology and pedagogical models. Findings revealed that this was an engaging and useful experience although issues of equity in collaboration needed further research. The 2nd stage, in this project, has been to evaluate data from over 25 stakeholders (academics, learning and technology designers) to develop pervasive ambient technological solutions supporting orchestration of mixed levels of pedagogy (i.e. abstract synthesis to specific investigation). Middleware between tabletop ‘surface’ technologies and mobile devices are being designed with Microsoft and OOKL (a mobile software company) to support these developments. Initial findings reveal issues around equity, ownership and professional identity

Exploring Research through Design in Animal-Computer Interaction

This paper explores Research through Design (RtD) as a potential methodology for developing new interactive experiences for animals. We present an example study from an on-going project and examine whether RtD offers an appropriate framework for developing knowledge in the context of Animal-Computer Interaction, as well as considering how best to document such work. We discuss the design journey we undertook to develop interactive systems for captive elephants and the extent to which RtD has enabled us to explore concept development and documentation of research. As a result of our explorations, we propose that particular aspects of RtD can help ACI researchers gain fresh perspectives on the design of technology-enabled devices for non-human animals. We argue that these methods of working can support the investigation of particular and complex situations where no idiomatic interactions yet exist, where collaborative practice is desirable and where the designed objects themselves offer a conceptual window for future research and development