Painting the ideal home: using art to express visions of technologically supported independent living for older people in North East England

This paper describes the investigation of the development of future technological products to support older people in everyday living through the agency of a community art group. Recent research has identified a number of challenges facing designers seeking to use traditional participatory design approaches to gather technology requirements data from older people. Here, a project is described that sought to get a group of older people to think creatively about their needs and desires for technological support through the medium of paint. The artistic expression technique described in this article allowed the identification of issues that had also been found by previous research that used a range of different techniques. This indicates that the approach shows promise, as it allows information to be gathered in an environment that is comfortable and familiar using methods already known by the participants and which they find enjoyable. It provides a complement (or possible alternative) to standard protocols and has the potential benefit of extracting even richer information as the primary task for participants is enjoyable in its own right and is not associated with an interrogative process. Furthermore, it is argued that some of the key risks of traditional approaches are lessened or removed by the naturalistic setting of this approach

Building Digital Infrastructures: Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Contextual Triggers

Past IS research suggests it is challenging to build digital infrastructures and then make sure they grow. While more users, innovative services, and new partners spur infrastructure evolution, we know little of the specific contextual triggers that set these generative mechanisms in motion. To this end, we conduct a case study of a digitalized public transport infrastructure to identify such triggers and explore their impact on its evolution. Our study contributes to the extant literature on digital infrastructure evolution in two distinct ways. First, we analyze, define, and propose three contextual triggers that improve our understanding of the generative mechanisms behind infrastructure development and growth. Second, we rely on this conceptual basis to sketch out the initial contours of a novel evolutionary theory of digital infrastructure triggers.

Artificial Intelligence is a Character? Exploring design scenarios to build interface behaviours

The paper aims to illustrate the qualitative results of the first phase of the scenario research about voice interfaces, examining whether it is possible to design them as if they were a theatrical or cinematographic character. The research field intersects interaction design with character design, intended as the narrative construction of a character, and theatrical performances. The experimentation takes advantage of theatre workshops that aims to show, and understand, which are the main characteristics of a vocal interface and how to design them according to a performance approach. The paper ends illustrating how design can address actual opportunities and criticalities about emerging technologies, following a relations-based approach

A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion

Co-located Augmented Play-spaces:Past, Present, and Perspectives

In recent years, many different studies regarding Co-located Augmented Play-spaces (CAPs) have been published in a wide variety of conferences and journals. We present an overview. The work presented in these papers includes end user's perspectives as well as researcher's perspective. We place these within four aspects in this review: 1) Argumentation, the underlying reasons or the higher end goals to investigate interactive play from a user's perspective, 2) Systems, the kind of systems that are created, this includes their intended use which fits the end user's perspective, 3) Evaluation, the way in which the researchers evaluate the system, 4) Contribution, the goal of the studies from the researcher's perspective; what does the study contribute to the research community. CAPs are often multimodal in nature; this survey pays attention to the multimodal characteristics in relation to all four aspects. This overview contributes a clearer view on the current literature, points out where new opportunities lie, and hands us the tools for what we think is important: bringing the end-user and research perspective together in intervention based evaluations. In short, this paper discusses CAPs: their past, the present, and the perspectives

Exploring interactions with physically dynamic bar charts

Visualizations such as bar charts help users reason about data, but are mostly screen-based, rarely physical, and almost never physical and dynamic. This paper investigates the role of physically dynamic bar charts and evaluates new interactions for exploring and working with datasets rendered in dynamic physical form. To facilitate our exploration we constructed a 10x10 interactive bar chart and designed interactions that supported fundamental visualisation tasks, specifically; annotation, filtering, organization, and navigation. The interactions were evaluated in a user study with 17 participants. Our findings identify the preferred methods of working with the data for each task i.e. directly tapping rows to hide bars, highlight the strengths and limitations of working with physical data, and discuss the challenges of integrating the proposed interactions together into a larger data exploration system. In general, physical interactions were intuitive, informative, and enjoyable, paving the way for new explorations in physical data visualizations