A Roadmap for Activated Motivation in HCI

Everyday, millions of people use technologies like their fitbit, smartwatch, or smartphone for self\--improve\-ment. These devices and their associated apps have become both inexpensive and pervasive; they monitor our shopping habits, physical activity, and ecological footprint and visualize that data to help us reflect on our limitations, to set and make progress towards goals, and recognize achievements. The potential impacts of these technologies are immense; to improve our finances, to educate ourselves and develop new skills, and to improve our health and the health of our planet. However, research has cast doubt on their effectiveness \cite{Cho2021, Rapp2019, Zimmerman2021, JOHNSON2016}. That is, people tend to lose motivation for self-improvement over time, and ultimately fail to meet their personal goals. To address these shortcomings, I will explore how we can use established theories of human motivation to develop novel technologies that motivate change, to provoke self-reflection and persistence, and to promote our health and well-being

Designing for Cross-Device Interactions

Driven by technological advancements, we now own and operate an ever-growing number of digital devices, leading to an increased amount of digital data we produce, use, and maintain. However, while there is a substantial increase in computing power and availability of devices and data, many tasks we conduct with our devices are not well connected across multiple devices. We conduct our tasks sequentially instead of in parallel, while collaborative work across multiple devices is cumbersome to set up or simply not possible. To address these limitations, this thesis is concerned with cross-device computing. In particular it aims to conceptualise, prototype, and study interactions in cross-device computing. This thesis contributes to the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)—and more specifically to the area of cross-device computing—in three ways: first, this work conceptualises previous work through a taxonomy of cross-device computing resulting in an in-depth understanding of the field, that identifies underexplored research areas, enabling the transfer of key insights into the design of interaction techniques. Second, three case studies were conducted that show how cross-device interactions can support curation work as well as augment users’ existing devices for individual and collaborative work. These case studies incorporate novel interaction techniques for supporting cross-device work. Third, through studying cross-device interactions and group collaboration, this thesis provides insights into how researchers can understand and evaluate multi- and cross-device interactions for individual and collaborative work. We provide a visualization and querying tool that facilitates interaction analysis of spatial measures and video recordings to facilitate such evaluations of cross-device work. Overall, the work in this thesis advances the field of cross-device computing with its taxonomy guiding research directions, novel interaction techniques and case studies demonstrating cross-device interactions for curation, and insights into and tools for effective evaluation of cross-device systems

Communication in engineering teams: personal interactions and role assignment

NEED – Communication is understood to be a key professional soft skill for engineers, but the components of communication are defined poorly. The literature on engineering communication is devoted primarily to formal information flows, the medium of communication, and technical documentation. There is comparatively little attention on the process, cognitive and organisational aspects. PURPOSE – The overall objective of this thesis was to develop a model of casual role assignment in the engineering context. Specifically, to identify how participants of engineering project meetings choose and acquire communication behavioural patterns. APPROACH – The research approach used mixed methods – a quantitative exploratory study followed by inductive qualitative analysis. The research consisted of four phases. First, a survey (questionnaire) was used to explore levels of satisfaction in communication of engineering team members (phase 1). Next, a new observational study method was developed to capture behavioural interactions within project meetings (phase 2). This is called the interaction diagram methodology. This methodology was then applied together with a structured interview, questionnaire, and Big Five personality test, to observational studies on student engineers (phase 3), and engineers in consulting firms (phase 4). FINDINGS – This thesis made several original contributions. First, a novel observational method was developed that provides a graphical representation of the interaction flow during meetings and a procedure to quickly analyse communication situations, identify group roles, and compare group activity at different meetings. Second, a new set of 12 team roles was identified for participants at project meetings. These were based on the literature, and further modified by our observations. We proposed that Social sensitivity and Personal satisfaction from communication interact, resulting in four broad levels of team outcome. The best is Team coherence, and the lesser outcomes are identified as Reluctant cohesiveness, Parallel compensation, and Behavioural divergence. Third, observations of team behaviour lead to a new insight into the process of team role assignment, and the creation of a new theoretical construct. This is the Team role circumplex. While circumplexes exist elsewhere in psychology and human development, there is no prior work in the area of engineering team roles. Key features of the new circumplex are the identification of two axes against which all the roles may be placed: Personal Agency/ Communion and Social engagement/ Social Disengagement. Fourth, communication at project meetings at university and in commercial engineering firms was compared and several distinctions in communication patterns were identified. For example, official positions consist mostly of predefined communications in industrial organisations, whereas at university participants have more freedom to choose their communication style. Furthermore, factors influencing project team communication (temporal and permanent) were determined and analysed. These factors included the communication setting of the meeting, team size, location inside meeting places, styles of supervision, and personality and demographic factors (gender differences in communication preferences of engineers). It was observed that participants of engineering project meetings adjusted their communication style to the behaviour of other people or to different communication settings. We supposed that this happens at three different levels: micro-level (grounding processes in conversation), mezzo-level (emotional and rational regulation) and macro-level (over an extended period of time)