Human-centred computer architecture: redesigning the mobile datastore and sharing interface

This dissertation develops a material perspective on Information & Communication Technologies and combines this perspective with a Research through Design approach to interrogate current and develop new mobile sharing interfaces and datastores. through this approach I open up a line of inquiry that connects a material perspective of information with everyday sharing and communication practices as well as with the mobile and cloud architectures that increasingly mediate such practices. With this perspective, I uncover a shifting emphasis of how data is stored on mobile devices and how this data is made available to apps through sharing interfaces that prevent apps from obtaining a proper handle of data to support fundamentally human acts of sharing such as giving. I take these insights to articulate a much wider research agenda to implicate, beyond the sharing interface, the app model and mobile datastore, data exchange protocols, and the Cloud. I formalise the approach I take to bring technically and socially complex, multi-dimensional and changing ideas into correspondence and to openly document this process. I consider the history of the File abstraction and the fundamental grammars of action this abstraction supports (e.g. move, copy, & delete) and the mediating role this abstraction – and its graphical representation – plays in binding together the concerns of system architects, programmers, and users. Finding inspiration in the 30 year history of the file, I look beyond the Desktop to contemporary realms of computing on the mobile and in the Cloud to develop implications for reinvigorated file abstractions, representations, and grammars of actions. First and foremost, these need to have a social perspective on files. To develop and hone such a social perspective, and challenge the assumption that mobile phones are telephones – implying interaction at a distance – I give an interwoven account of the theoretical and practical work I undertook to derive and design a grammar of action – showing – tailored to co-present and co-located interactions. By documenting the process of developing prototypes that explore this design space, and returning to the material perspective I developed earlier, I explore how the grammars of show and gift are incongruent with the specific ways in which information is passed through the mobile’s sharing interface. This insight led me to prototype a mobile datastore – My Stuff – and design new file abstractions that foreground the social nature of the stuff we store and share on our mobiles. I study how that stuff is handled and shared in the Cloud by developing, documenting, and interrogating a cloud service to facilitate sharing, and implement grammars of actions to support and better align with human communication and sharing acts. I conclude with an outlook on the powerful generative metaphor of casting mobile media files as digital possessions to support and develop human-centred computer architecture that give people better awareness and control over the stuff that matters to them

Interaktion mit Medienfassaden : Design und Implementierung interaktiver Systeme für große urbane Displays

Media facades are a prominent example of the digital augmentation of urban spaces. They denote the concept of turning the surface of a building into a large-scale urban screen. Due to their enormous size, they require interaction at a distance and they have a high level of visibility. Additionally, they are situated in a highly dynamic urban environment with rapidly changing conditions, which results in settings that are neither comparable, nor reproducible. Altogether, this makes the development of interactive media facade installations a challenging task. This thesis investigates the design of interactive installations for media facades holistically. A theoretical analysis of the design space for interactive installations for media facades is conducted to derive taxonomies to put media facade installations into context. Along with this, a set of observations and guidelines is provided to derive properties of the interaction from the technical characteristics of an interactive media facade installation. This thesis further provides three novel interaction techniques addressing the form factor and resolution of the facade, without the need for additionally instrumenting the space around the facades. The thesis contributes to the design of interactive media facade installations by providing a generalized media facade toolkit for rapid prototyping and simulating interactive media facade installations, independent of the media facade’s size, form factor, technology and underlying hardware.Die wachsende Zahl an Medienfassenden ist ein eindrucksvolles Beispiel für die digitale Erweiterung des öffentlichen Raums. Medienfassaden beschreiben die Möglichkeit, die Oberfläche eines Gebäudes in ein digitales Display zu wandeln. Ihre Größe erfordert Interaktion aus einer gewissen Distanz und führt zu einer großen Sichtbarkeit der dargestellten Inhalte. Medienfassaden-Installationen sind bedingt durch ihre dynamische Umgebung nur schwerlich vergleich- und reproduzierbar. All dies macht die Entwicklung von Installationen für Medienfassaden zu einer großen Herausforderung. Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Entwicklung interaktiver Installationen für Medienfassaden. Es wird eine theoretische Analyse des Design-Spaces interaktiver Medienfassaden-Installationen durchgeführt und es werden Taxonomien entwickelt, die Medienfassaden-Installationen in Bezug zueinander setzen. In diesem Zusammenhang werden ausgehend von den technischen Charakteristika Eigenschaften der Interaktion erarbeitet. Zur Interaktion mit Medienfassaden werden drei neue Interaktionstechniken vorgestellt, die Form und Auflösung der Fassade berücksichtigen, ohne notwendigerweise die Umgebung der Fassade zu instrumentieren. Die Ergebnisse dieser Arbeit verbessern darüber hinaus die Entwicklung von Installationen für Medienfassaden, indem ein einheitliches Medienfassaden-Toolkit zum Rapid-Prototyping und zur Simulation interaktiver Installationen vorgestellt wird, das unabhängig von Größe und Form der Medienfassade sowie unabhängig von der verwendeten Technologie und der zugrunde liegenden Hardware ist

Gestures and cooperation: considering non verbal communication in the design of interactive spaces

This dissertation explores the role of gestures in computer supported collaboration. People make extensive use of non-verbal forms of communication when they interact with each other in everyday life: of these, gestures are relatively easy to observe and quantify. However, the role of gestures in human computer interaction so far has been focused mainly on using conventional signs like visible commands, rather than on exploiting all nuances of such natural human skill. We propose a perspective on natural interaction that builds on recent advances in tangible interaction, embodiment and computer supported collaborative work. We consider the social and cognitive aspects of gestures and manipulations to support our claim of a primacy of tangible and multi-touch interfaces, and describe our experiences focused on assessing the suitability of such interface paradigms to traditional application scenarios. We describe our design and prototype of an interactive space for group-work, in which natural interfaces, such as tangible user interfaces and multi-touch screens, are deployed so as to foster and encourage collaboration. We show that these interfaces can lead to an improvement in performances and that such improvements appear related to an increase of the gestures performed by the users. We also describe the progress on the state of the art that have been necessary to implement such tools on commodity hardware and deploy them in a relatively uncontrolled environment. Finally, we discuss our findings and frame them in the broader context of embodied interaction, drawing useful implications for interactions design, with emphasis on how to enhance the activity of people in their workplace, home, school, etc. supported in their individual and collaborative tasks by natural interfaces

"It felt like I was part of the data": Comparing Mouse, Touch, and Physical Interaction with Visualizations

With my two exploratory studies I contribute a deeper understanding of the different experiences people have when manipulating data representations using mouse, touch, and physical interaction. To uncover experiences rather than performance measures I employed two different methodologies in the context of “data connectedness.” My first study used Likert-based questionnaires to determine differences in how connected participants felt to the data they were interacting with. To gain a deeper understanding, my second study employed a word selection activity (using the Desirability Toolkit), which led to much richer data. I found that people associated words like “engaged,” “direct,” and “satisfying” with touch and physical interaction, but often used words like “awkward,” “dull,” and “distant” with the mouse. My findings help to tease apart the characteristics of experienced interaction modalities in relation to how people feel about their connection to the data. Furthermore, my work provides a deeper look into how to measure abstract concepts such as connectedness that are highly elusive but important to understanding why certain ways of interacting with data may be more attractive, more liked, or even more effective