Designing novel applications for emerging multimedia technology

Current R&D in media technologies such as Multimedia, Semantic Web and Sensor Web technologies are advancing in a fierce rate and will sure to become part of our important regular items in a 'conventional' technology inventory in near future. While the R&D nature of these technologies means their accuracy, reliability and robustness are not sufficient enough to be used in real world yet, we want to envision now the near-future where these technologies will have matured and used in real applications in order to explore and start shaping many possible new ways these novel technologies could be utilised. In this talk, some of this effort in designing novel applications that incorporate various media technologies as their backend will be presented. Examples include novel scenarios of LifeLogging application that incorporate automatic structuring of millions of photos passively captured from a SenseCam (wearable digital camera that automatically takes photos triggered by environmental sensors) and an interactive TV application incorporating a number of multimedia tools yet extremely simple and easy to use with a remote control in a lean-back position. The talk will conclude with remarks on how the design of novel applications that have no precedence or existing user base should require somewhat different approach from those suggested and practiced in conventional usability engineering methodology

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