Collaborative Human-Computer Interaction with Big Wall Displays - BigWallHCI 2013 3rd JRC ECML Crisis Management Technology Workshop

The 3rd JRC ECML Crisis Management Technology Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction with Big Wall Displays in Situation Rooms and Monitoring Centres was co-organised by the European Commission Joint Research Centre and the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten, Austria. It took place in the European Crisis Management Laboratory (ECML) of the JRC in Ispra, Italy, from 18 to 19 April 2013. 40 participants from stakeholders in the EC, civil protection bodies, academia, and industry attended the workshop. The hardware of large display areas is on the one hand mature since many years and on the other hand changing rapidly and improving constantly. This high pace developments promise amazing new setups with respect to e.g., pixel density or touch interaction. On the software side there are two components with room for improvement: 1. the software provided by the display manufacturers to operate their video walls (source selection, windowing system, layout control) and 2. dedicated ICT systems developed to the very needs of crisis management practitioners and monitoring centre operators. While industry starts to focus more on the collaborative aspects of their operating software already, the customized and tailored ICT applications needed are still missing, unsatisfactory, or very expensive since they have to be developed from scratch many times. Main challenges identified to enhance big wall display systems in crisis management and situation monitoring contexts include: 1. Interaction: Overcome static layouts and/or passive information consumption. 2. Participatory Design & Development: Software needs to meet users’ needs. 3. Development and/or application of Information Visualisation & Visual Analytics principle to support the transition from data to information to knowledge. 4. Information Overload: Proper methods for attention management, automatic interpretation, incident detection, and alarm triggering are needed to deal with the ever growing amount of data to be analysed.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

From interaction to trajectories: designing coherent journeys through user experience

notes: Best of CHI 2009 Awardpublication-status: PublishedThe idea of interactional trajectories through interfaces has emerged as a sensitizing concept from recent studies of tangible interfaces and interaction in museums and galleries. We put this concept to work as a lens to reflect on published studies of complex user experiences that extend over space and time and involve multiple roles and interfaces. We develop a conceptual framework in which trajectories explain these user experiences as journeys through hybrid structures, punctuated by transitions, and in which interactivity and collaboration are orchestrated. Our framework is intended to sensitize future studies, help distill craft knowledge into design guidelines and patterns, identify technology requirements, and provide a boundary object to connect HCI with performance studies

ECSCW 2013 Adjunct Proceedings The 13th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 21 - 25. September 2013, Paphos, Cyprus

This volume presents the adjunct proceedings of ECSCW 2013.While the proceedings published by Springer Verlag contains the core of the technical program, namely the full papers, the adjunct proceedings includes contributions on work in progress, workshops and master classes, demos and videos, the doctoral colloquium, and keynotes, thus indicating what our field may become in the future

Photo mementos: designing digital media to represent ourselves at home

We examine photos in the family home as examples of mementos, cherished objects kept in memory of a person or event. In a ‘memory tour’, we asked participants to walk us through their family home selecting and discussing significant mnemonic objects. With each personal narrative we recorded memento location, i.e. the room, place within the room and any nearby objects. Although photos were not the most popular mementos, when chosen they were highly significant, and often unique. These photo mementos were usually not representational but symbolic, where only the owner knows their many layers of meaning. Photos from different times in the person’s life were strategically placed in different rooms. Their location afforded different functions, e.g. photo mementos in family spaces reinforced family bonds, photo mementos in personal spaces were for immersive reminiscing, whereas those in public rooms had an aesthetic value and to spark conversations with visitors. Finally photo mementos were rarely isolated: they were clustered in displayed albums or stored with other memorabilia in boxes or drawers to represent a stage in life. We explore the implications of these findings by designing potential new home photo technologies, looking at how new designs might support the types of behaviours observed. Through four conceptual designs we examine how photo technology might integrate into the practices and aesthetic of the family home. The concepts led to a set of concluding considerations that need to be taken into account when designing new forms of display technology that are part of a larger domestic photo system

An internet of old things as an augmented memory system

The interdisciplinary Tales of Things and electronic Memory (TOTeM) project investigates new contexts for augmenting things with stories in the emerging culture of the Internet of Things (IoT). Tales of Things is a tagging system which, based on two-dimensional barcodes (also called Quick Response or QR codes) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, enables the capturing and sharing of object stories and the physical linking to objects via read and writable tags. Within the context of our study, it has functioned as a technology probe which we employed with the aim to stimulate discussion and identify desire lines that point to novel design opportunities for the engagement with personal and social memories linked to everyday objects. In this paper, we discuss results from fieldwork with different community groups in the course of which seemingly any object could form the basis of a meaningful story and act as entry point into rich inherent 'networks of meaning'. Such networks of meaning are often solely accessible for the owner of an object and are at risk of getting lost as time goes by. We discuss the different discourses that are inherent in these object stories and provide avenues for making these memories and meaning networks accessible and shareable. This paper critically reflects on Tales of Things as an example of an augmented memory system and discusses possible wider implications for the design of related systems. © 2011 Springer-Verlag London Limited

Spaces of working in modern software organisations

The growing use of digital media in the workplace is shifting work to digital platforms, whilst digital working is often seen to be replacing office-based work practices. This study captures the opposite. It explores the appropriation of features of both physical and digital environments by collocated software development teams in a multinational IT company. These environments are designed in isolation, yet they become integrated in practice by employees. This study is positioned within the information systems literature as a step to address the gap on digital work and understand the essential role played by the physical environment in the usage and appropriation of digital tools in modern organisations. It posits a view of space as constantly in the making through sociospatial practices. It empirically demonstrates that the physical environment is not only integral to work practices and deeply entangled with digital interactions and activities, but space emerges as a result of a mutual shaping, where physical and digital coexist in tightly woven symbiotic form. In this manner, this study extends existing knowledge through four novel concepts including a combined theorisation to understand how work is performed in modern digital organisations: (a) spatial work practices extend the concept of spatial practices (de Certeau 1984) as they are intrinsically attached to work activities. They are responsible for the creation and the dismantling of (b) physical-digital assemblages, which conceptualise and explain how actors combine and configure elements from the physical environment and digital technologies to create (c) spatialities, as planned spatial effects to influence the way in which work activities are performed. These concepts are integrated through the emergent framework of (d) crafted workspaces, which enables the theorisation of new types of organisational space that transcend traditional dichotomous notions of physical or digital. This research thus responds to recent calls for a ‘spatial turn’ in organisational studies and information systems literature, enabling modern working practices to be understood and effectively integrated into modern organisations, whilst in turn calling for greater attention to space as a performative and constitutive element of digital work in information systems research

Comparison of Distributed Versus Collocated Command Group Collaboration Performance

The transformation of the United States Army to a combat force capable of operating successfully on future battlefields requires the leveraging of digital communication capabilities to support distributed battle command. The purpose of this study is to investigate collaborative command group planning performance in traditional face-to-face (collocated) and geographically dispersed group (distributed) conditions. The Reactive Planning Strategies Simulation (REPSS) system was developed to provide a realistic group planning task supporting empirical estimates of planning process and performance outcome success, measured in this context as delivery rate of humanitarian supplies. Results indicate that synchronization scores were not significantly different between conditions; however, they were highly correlated with command group humanitarian supply delivery rates when collapsed across both collocated and distributed\u27 conditions. Furthermore, collocated command groups delivered humanitarian supplies at a higher rate than did distributed command groups. This difference was primarily due to the cumulative effect of poor decision making across the multiple decision points required of the command groups during the exercise

External legibility and seamlessness in interface design

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-108).This thesis presents External Legibility: a property of user interfaces that affects the ability of non-participating observers to understand the context of a user's actions. Claims of its value are supported with arguments from the social sciences and human-computer interaction literature; research in designing tangible user interfaces; and an experiment comparing the external legibility of four interaction techniques.by Jamie B. Zigelbaum.S.M