Aesthetic Approaches to Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the NordiCHI 2004 Workshop, Tampere, Finland, October 24, 200

Women\u27s experiences of privacy, publicness and place in mediated space

This mixed-method study explored the experiences and understandings of the notions of privacy, publicness and place in mediated space among women who use the internet daily. Mediated space is experienced at the intersection of mass media, including the internet, and the physical environment. In this two-phased study, fourteen women were interviewed and sixty-one completed an online survey. Participants were asked about the physical places they preferred and the activities they undertook, whether for paid work, domestic work or entertainment, such as sending e-mails and gathering information, posting or reading posts on social network sites, shopping, banking, web browsing, watching TV shows and playing games. Women in this study used the locational flexibility afforded by the internet to remain mostly anchored to a preferred location and to create portable private territories in public spaces when necessary. They also maintained a strong awareness of body and physical place, noting that they generally did not see their virtual identity as separate from their physical one, and remained connected to their immediate physical environment, including their location, ambient conditions and changes, and the presence of others. They also found the boundaries between private and public ambiguous, particularly because the privacy or publicness of their physical experience while on the internet was often at odds with their virtual experience. Participants also highlighted the challenge of managing attention and anonymity in mediated space. Whenever possible, participants paired less demanding physical environments with more challenging internet tasks and vice versa. Anonymity was viewed as protective but questionable on the internet. Tied to affective connections, previous experiences and identifiability, privacy and anonymity were described as internal and personal notions rather than tangible or fixed aspects of a location or situation. Finally, participants experienced privacy and publicness as a continuum with multiple levels. Whether in a virtual or physical location, these levels were defined by the type and amount of personal information revealed, and by the relationship maintained with those to whom the information was disclosed

A Human-Machine Interface Based on Eye Tracking for Controlling and Monitoring a Smart Home Using the Internet of Things

Não consta

The Experimental Application of an Occupant Tracking Technology in Domestic Post-Occupancy Evaluation

From 1971 to 2004, the UK population increased by 6.5% to 59.8 million while the number of homes increased by 30% to 24.2 million. Despite this growth, the industry is still accused of delivering homes that are overly expensive, environmentally unsustainable and deficient in number. The wish of the Government is that by 2016 the number of annual new additions in England will have increased by a third to 200,000, though there is little planned to assess how they meet the changing lifestyle needs of consumers. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) has proposed that post-occupancy evaluation (POE) should be regarded as the preferred means of assessment; though a standard approach has yet to be developed for housing. Parallel to this, consumer surveys, including those carried out in this thesis, consistently report that 70% or more of buyers would pay more for an energy efficient home, which is generally regarded as one of the most important characteristics of a good home. However, the vast majority of existing homeowners are unable or unwilling to pay for the modifications that their homes require. In this thesis the connection is made that POE is also the most appropriate tool to investigate whether the supposed roader benefits of sustainability, such as improved comfort, lifestyle and energy security, can be evidenced in a quantifiable way so that they could be promoted to motivate homeowners to collectively improve the performance of the sector. The efficiency of space use is emerging as an aspect of sustainability of special importance, and the density of new developments increased from 25 to 40 homes per hectare in the years 1997 to 2004. The culmination of this thesis is therefore a substantial experiment undertaken to inform interior layout designers, whereby the daily movements of a household of 4 were remotely tracked using a radio frequency identification (RFID) system. This application of RFID for space use POE was a novel one, and the data was collected in a more discreet and objective way than is possible using the preferred sociology techniques of interviews or ethnography. Although some technical concerns developed during the experiment, an estimated 94% of the desired data was accurately collected. The demonstrated conclusion was that recognisable patterns within the tracking data are insightful and can assist house designers to arrange spaces more effectively. Also that tracking systems could affect building energy efficiency directly if comfort heating, cooling and lighting are targeted to only those areas that are known to be occupied by a building management system. These conclusions were then expanded upon by a survey that demonstrated how a portfolio of household behaviours could be beneficial as a tool for designing efficient and sustainable interior spaces in the future

SUMMARY Private and Public Digital Domestic Spaces

With the introduction of information and communication technologies into our homes and the different physical and communicative expressions this implies for our living spaces the concepts of being private and of being public becomes crucial. In this paper we introduce the design pattern language, developed by Christopher Alexander in the 1970s, in order to handle these problems systematically. The presentation formally follows Alexander’s structure in five cases all related to practical experiments on being private and public at home. We start with a number of concrete user situations related to human-computer interaction. Social and communicative phenomena or possibilities end up in novel design patterns at the interface between an architectural and a technological perspective. The novel patterns presented are primarily based on experiences from practical work on the development of a conceptual dwelling of the future, comHOME, designed and constructed as a full-scale model of a flat. By creating different zones for video-mediated communication, comZONES, the user can control the private and public digital areas varying in time and space. The novel patterns refer to two separate levels. On the first level a specific pattern, called "PRIVATE AND PUBLIC DIGITAL SPACES", is designed as a conceptual floor plan layout. This plan distributes private and public digital spaces for video-mediated communication over the flat. At a second level, four patterns show the integration of the specific comZONES aiming at solving four specific problems with video-mediated communication at home. Our intention is to describe the application of design patterns as a method for analysing and solving novel problems encountered with the introduction of information and communication technologies in our homes. The video-mediated set-ups are not dealt with in depth. They serve mainly as designs that make it possible to apply the design patterns.