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

The evolution of a toolkit for smart-thing design with children through action research

Several workshops use toolkits to engage children in the design of smart things, that is, everyday things like toys enhanced with computing devices and capabilities. In general, the toolkits focus on one design stage or another, e.g., ideation or programming. Few toolkits are created to guide children through an entire design process. This paper presents a toolkit for smart-thing design with children. It revolves around SNaP, a card-based board game for children. The toolkit serves to frame the entire design process and guide them through their exploration, ideation, programming and prototyping of their own smart things. By embracing action research, the toolkit was adopted in actions with children, namely, design workshops. Results of actions were reflected over by considering children’s benefits, and they were used to make the toolkit evolve across cycles of action, reflection and development. The paper reports on the latest evolution cycles, ending with the 2020 cycle for continuing smart-thing design during COVID-19 times. The paper concludes with general reflections concerning action research and design with children, toolkits for framing smart-thing design with children, on-going and future work

ENHANCING USERS’ EXPERIENCE WITH SMART MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

The aim of this thesis is to investigate mobile guides for use with smartphones. Mobile guides have been successfully used to provide information, personalisation and navigation for the user. The researcher also wanted to ascertain how and in what ways mobile guides can enhance users' experience. This research involved designing and developing web based applications to run on smartphones. Four studies were conducted, two of which involved testing of the particular application. The applications tested were a museum mobile guide application and a university mobile guide mapping application. Initial testing examined the prototype work for the ‘Chronology of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah’ application. The results were used to assess the potential of using similar mobile guides in Brunei Darussalam’s museums. The second study involved testing of the ‘Kent LiveMap’ application for use at the University of Kent. Students at the university tested this mapping application, which uses crowdsourcing of information to provide live data. The results were promising and indicate that users' experience was enhanced when using the application. Overall results from testing and using the two applications that were developed as part of this thesis show that mobile guides have the potential to be implemented in Brunei Darussalam’s museums and on campus at the University of Kent. However, modifications to both applications are required to fulfil their potential and take them beyond the prototype stage in order to be fully functioning and commercially viable

Proceedings of the 3rd IUI Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects

These are the Proceedings of the 3rd IUI Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects. Objects that we use in our everyday life are expanding their restricted interaction capabilities and provide functionalities that go far beyond their original functionality. They feature computing capabilities and are thus able to capture information, process and store it and interact with their environments, turning them into smart objects

Connecting Couples in Long-Distance Relationships : Towards Unconventional Computer-Mediated Emotional Communication Systems

The number of couples who find themselves in a long-distance relationship (LDR) is increasing for a wide range of reasons, such as overseas employment, academic pursuits, military duty, and similar circumstances. With the myriad of communication channels enabled by the low cost and ubiquity of computer-mediated communication technologies, couples in LDRs are able to stay in touch with each other around the globe. However, recent studies have revealed that the mainstream communication tools are inadequate to support the full spectrum of communication needed in intimate relationships. Emotional communication is one of the fundamental needs in close relationships, as it forms an important part of intimacy. This dissertation argues that there is a gap between what is known about LDR couples’ needs in research and what has been implemented for them in practice. The aim of this work is to bridge this gap by mediating emotional communication through unconventional user interfaces that use interaction solutions outside of the scope of their conventional use, with a particular focus on couples who sustain a committed LDR. Here, taking research through design as a core approach, a variety of qualitative methods were employed to seek answers to the research questions. This dissertation includes eight case studies, each of which is dedicated to answering its corresponding research question(s). Study I presents a systematic literature review which explored the current state of the art and identified the design opportunities. Study II introduces a series of co-design activities with five couples in LDRs to reveal the needs and challenges of users in an LDR. Studies III and IV propose two functional prototypes for unconventional communication systems to connect couples in LDRs. Study V showcases 12 design concepts of wearables created by the participants to support their own LDR. Study VI describes how four low-resolution prototypes created for mediating LDRs by the participants in the workshop would be used in real-world contexts. Studies VII and VIII each present a novel design tool to be used as a scaffold when designing communication systems for supporting LDRs: specifically, a conceptual design framework and a card-based design toolkit. This dissertation contributes new knowledge to the field of human-computer interaction through design interventions. It showcases a spectrum of practices which can be seen as a first step towards mediating emotional communication for couples in LDRs using unconventional communication systems. The findings comprise theoretical and empirical insights—derived from the eight case studies in which the author identified design opportunities and design considerations—relating to how couples in LDRs can be better supported by unconventional computer-mediated emotional communication systems

Wearable payment for young women - Utilizing rapid prototyping in iterative conceptual design

This is a production-based thesis work made aside my work as a 3d-printing specialist in Microsoft Mobile`s Design Department`s 3d-lab. The topic is designing a jewelry-like payment device for young women. A production-based thesis work was made to discover the process of designing for wearable technology and the practical issues related to it. The main process-guiding assumption in this thesis is that familiar, jewelry-like form would be more acceptable for young women in context of everyday wearable device. Important goal for 3d-lab is to knit rapid prototyping as an integral part of design process, so I utilized rapid prototyping as my main methodology for studying the subject. The goals for thesis work were to learn more about wearable devices field and practical design issues relevant to it. For author the goal was to improve my skills both in iterative design concept -creation and prototyping. The goal for the concept-creation was to prototype an idea for acceptable, wearable, contactless alternative for traditional debit card in small everyday purchases, targeting to young women. The methods used in this thesis work are literature research, benchmarking, rapid prototyping, expert interview and user-centered design methods. The process consisted of background research, making re-brief, technical concept creation, making several product design ideas, testing and reviewing the ideas, selecting one design for further development and finally testing and reviewing the appearance model and interaction prototype with potential end users. The project`s end result is a design concept depicted by prototypes and pictures, and a written thesis report about the design process and philosophy behind the design work. The main focus of this written report is in product design, the minor focus areas are designing interaction and concept creation. Concentrating deeply to all product development areas was not purposeful in thesis framework, so I decided to put most effort on describing the product design development

Making data playable: A game co-creation method to promote creative data literacy

This article explores how making data playable, i.e. developing exploratory co-creation techniques that use elements of play and games to interpret small to mid-sized datasets beyond the current focus on visual evidence, can help a) promote creative data literacy in higher education, and b) expand existing definitions of data literacy. The article briefly investigates playful characteristics in existing data practices, and discusses how this perspective compares to existing frameworks that define data literacy. In a second step, we present a Discursive Game Design technique to promote creative data literacy. The article reports on findings from a sample workshop, during which students explored how modifying small, hybrid games based on real-world datasets can alter players’ interpretation of the data, but also their perception of how the games operate as epistemic objects within data analysis. Finally, we formulate recommendations on how to adapt the technique to different educational settings

Ubiquitous Computing in a Home Environment, Controlling Consumer Electronics

Building interaction prototypes for ubiquitous computing is inherently difficult, since it involves a number of different devices and systems. Prototyping is an important step in developing and evaluating interaction concepts. The ideal prototyping methodology should offer high fidelity at a relatively low cost. This thesis describes the development of interaction concepts for controlling consumer electronics in a ubiquitous computing home environment, as well as the setup, based on immersive virtual reality, used to develop and evaluate the interaction concepts. Off-the-shelf input/output devices and a game engine are used for developing two concepts for device discovery and two concepts for device interaction. The interaction concepts are compared in a controlled experiment in order to evaluate the concepts as well as the virtual reality setup. Statistically significant differences and subjective preferences could be observed in the quantitative and qualitative data respectively. Overall, the results suggest that the interaction concepts could be acceptable to some users for some use cases and that the virtual reality setup offers the possibility to quickly build interaction concepts which can be evaluated and compared in a controlled experiment