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

The Media Trade in Virtual Design

As media attention has become a dominating force within the design economy, visibility became the combustible that fuels the current design industry. Designed objects were once real products, but are now often prototypes, props to be exhibited and photographed, whose role is to fill space in the media, raise the media profile of their creators and convey the name of brokers, sponsors and partners. As a result celebrated design objects are now rare pieces that are highly visible in the virtual media, while they are virtually absent from the conventional market. For industry, this trajectory of design makes them props to fill space in the media, raise the media profile of their creators and ‘brand’ the name of brokers, sponsors and partners. Today a designer has to be successful in the media in order to attract industry attention. This paper observes the way designers make virtue of their visibility in mediated contexts, thus redefining the industrial model of design practice. Simultaneously, the paper looks at the way the media makes use of its influence in a new virtual design context, producing informed speculations for the evolution of design activities. And in order to contextualize this evolution the paper follows a trajectory from the history of design to build a background to this foreground

A day in the life of things in the home

This paper is about human interaction with things in the home. It is of potential relevance to developers of the Internet of Things (IoT), but it is not a technological paper. Rather, it presents a preliminary observational study of a day in a life of things in the home. The study was done out of curiosity - to see, given the emphasis on ‘things’ in the IoT, what mundane interaction with things looks like and is about. The results draw attention to the sheer scale of interaction with things, key areas of domestic activity in which interaction is embedded, and what it is about domestic life that gives data about interaction its sense. Each of these issues raises possibilities and challenges for IoT development in the home

Building Artificially Intelligent Learning Games

The idea of digital game-based learning (DGBL) is gaining acceptance among researchers, game designers, educators, parents, and students alike. Building new educational games that meet educational goals without sacrificing what makes games engaging remains largely unrealized, however. If we are to build the next generation of learning games, we must recognize that while digital games might be new, the theory and technologies we need to create DGBL has been evolving in multiple disciplines for the last 30 years. This chapter will describe an approach, based on theories and technologies in education, instructional design, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology, that will help us build intelligent learning games (ILGs)

Assistive robotics: research challenges and ethics education initiatives

Assistive robotics is a fast growing field aimed at helping healthcarers in hospitals, rehabilitation centers and nursery homes, as well as empowering people with reduced mobility at home, so that they can autonomously fulfill their daily living activities. The need to function in dynamic human-centered environments poses new research challenges: robotic assistants need to have friendly interfaces, be highly adaptable and customizable, very compliant and intrinsically safe to people, as well as able to handle deformable materials. Besides technical challenges, assistive robotics raises also ethical defies, which have led to the emergence of a new discipline: Roboethics. Several institutions are developing regulations and standards, and many ethics education initiatives include contents on human-robot interaction and human dignity in assistive situations. In this paper, the state of the art in assistive robotics is briefly reviewed, and educational materials from a university course on Ethics in Social Robotics and AI focusing on the assistive context are presented.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Rediscovering architecture : paestum in eighteenth-century architectural experience and theory, by Sigrid de Jong

Book review of: Sigrid de Jong, Rediscovering Architecture: Paestum in Eighteenth-Century Architectural Experience and Theory. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015, 352 pp., 100 color and 185 b/w illus. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978030019575

Design for sustainable behaviour: a quick fix for slower consumption?

The continuous replacement of durable consumer goods and disposal of functioning or repairable products into UK landfills or, increasingly, to developing countries, has resulted in global environmental and social consequences. Small appliances, which are easily disposed of in household waste, typically end up in UK landfills, are shipped to developing countries or otherwise ‘lost’. Very few are recycled or repaired, yet many are still functioning when disposed of. Consumers’ willingness, opportunity and ability to carry out repairs have historically been hampered by a range of complex factors. Design for Sustainable Behaviour (DfSB) aims to reduce the environmental and social impacts of products by moderating users’ interaction with them. This paper explores how DfSB strategies can be used to encourage a behavioural shift towards repair of small electrical household appliances by overcoming identified barriers. The paper pulls together literature on repair practice, highlighting gaps in current knowledge and outlines the findings of an extensive UK household survey focused on both product breakage rates and consumer mending behaviour. Three mending typologies and associated personas resulting from the analysis are combined with three DfSB strategies to develop conceptual design interventions to encourage repair. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential efficacy of the design outcomes from a consumer perspective and the potential ramifications for design practice, whilst considering the wider influences on repair practices beyond design and how these may be addressed

Regrets, I\u27ve Had a Few: When Regretful Experiences Do (and Don\u27t) Compel Users to Leave Facebook

Previous work has explored regretful experiences on social media. In parallel, scholars have examined how people do not use social media. This paper aims to synthesize these two research areas and asks: Do regretful experiences on social media influence people to (consider) not using social media? How might this influence differ for different sorts of regretful experiences? We adopted a mixed methods approach, combining topic modeling, logistic regressions, and contingency analysis to analyze data from a web survey with a demographically representative sample of US internet users (n=515) focusing on their Facebook use. We found that experiences that arise because of users\u27 own actions influence actual deactivation of their Facebook account, while experiences that arise because of others\u27 actions lead to considerations of non-use. We discuss the implications of these findings for two theoretical areas of interest in HCI: individual agency in social media use and the networked dimensions of privacy

Co-designing the next generation of home energy management systems with lead-users

Home energy management systems are widely promoted as essential components of future low carbon economies. It is argued in this paper that assumptions surrounding their deployment, and the methods used to design them, emerge from discredited models of people and energy. This offers an explanation for why their field trial performance is so inconsistent. A first of a kind field trial is reported. Three eco communities took part in a comprehensive participatory design exercise as lead users. The challenge was to help users synchronise their energy use behaviours with the availability of locally generated renewable energy sources. To meet this aim, a set of highly novel Home Energy Management interfaces were co-designed and tested. Not only were the designs radically different to the norm, but they also yielded sustained user engagement over a six-month follow-up period. It is argued that user-centred design holds the key to unlocking the energy saving potential of new domestic technologies, and this study represents a bold step in that direction