Entertaining situated messaging at home

Leisure and entertainment-based computing has been traditionally associated with interactive entertainment media and game playing, yet the forms of engagement offered by these technologies only support a small part of how we act when we are at leisure. In this paper, we move away from the paradigm of leisure technology as computer-based entertainment consumption, and towards a broader view of leisure computing. This perspective is more in line with our everyday experience of leisure as an embodied, everyday accomplishment in which people artfully employ the everyday resources in the world around them in carrying out their daily lives outside of work. We develop this extended notion of leisure using data from a field study of domestic communication focusing on asynchronous and situated messaging to explore some of these issues, and develop these findings towards design implications for leisure technologies. Central to our discussion on the normal, everyday and occasioned conduct of leisure lie the notions of playfulness and creativity, the interweaving of the worlds of work and leisure, and in the creation of embodied displays of affect, all of which may be seen manifested in the use of messaging artefacts. This view of technology in support of leisure-in-the-broad is strongly divergent from traditional entertainment computing models in its coupling of the mechanics of the organisation of everyday life to the ways that we make entertainment for ourselves. This recognition allows us to draw specific implications for domestic situated messaging technologies, but also more generally for technology design by tying activities that we tend to regard as purely functional to other multifaceted and leisure-related purposes

Exploring the Affective Loop

Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al. 2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we express. Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated /eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/ (Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction, /harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/ /timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and experiences of the interaction

Assessing haptic properties for data representation

This paper describes the results of a series of forced choice design experiments investigating the discrimination of material properties using a PHANToM haptic device. Research has shown that the PHANToM is effective at displaying graphical information to blind people, but the techniques used so far have been very simple. Our experiments showed that subjects' discrimination of friction was significantly better than that of stiffness or the spatial period of sinusoidal textures, over the range of stimuli investigated. Thus, it is proposed that graphical data could be made more easily accessible to blind users by scaling the data values to friction rather than shape or size, as in traditional bar charts

Looking for fraud in digital footprints: sensemaking with chronologies in a large corporate investigation

During extended sensemaking tasks people typically create external representations that integrate information and support their thinking. Understanding the variety, role and use of these is important for understanding sensemaking and how to support it effectively. We report a case-study of a large, document-based fraud investigation undertaken by a law firm. We focus on the construction and use of integrated representations in the form of chronologies. We show how these supported conjecture recording, focussing on time-periods, identifying gaps, identifying connections and reviewing interpretations. We use our findings to highlight limitations of a previous analysis of representations in sensemaking which regards this as schema definition and population. The findings also argue for search tools designed to identify date references in documents, for the support of ad-hoc event selections, and the support of linking between integrating representations and source documents

Gravity well: underwater play

More and more technology supports utilitarian interactions in altered gravity conditions, for example underwater and during Zero-G flights. Extending this, we are interested in digital play in these conditions, and in particular see an opportunity to explore underwater bodily games. We present an interactive shallow-water system that supports bodily play through water-movement interactions: Gravity Well. Through designing the system and combining aquabatic principles with exertion game design strategies, we identified a set of design tactics for underwater play based on the relationship between the afforded type, and level, of bodily exertion relative to pressure change and narcosis. With our work, we aim to inspire designers to utilize the unique characteristics of bodily interactions underwater and guide them in developing digital play in altered gravity domains

Predicting human interruptibility with sensors, in

A person seeking someone else’s attention is normally able to quickly assess how interruptible they are. This assessment allows for behavior we perceive as natural, socially appropriate, or simply polite. On the other hand, today’s computer systems are almost entirely oblivious to the human world they operate in, and typically have no way to take into account the interruptibility of the user. This paper presents a Wizard of Oz study exploring whether, and how, robust sensor-based predictions of interruptibility might be constructed, which sensors might be most useful to such predictions, and how simple such sensors might be. The study simulates a range of possible sensors through human coding of audio and video recordings. Experience sampling is used to simultaneously collect randomly distributed self-reports of interruptibility. Based on these simulated sensors, we construct statistical models predicting human interruptibility and compare their predictions with the collected self-report data. The results of these models, although covering a demographically limited sample, are very promising, with the overall accuracy of several models reaching about 78%. Additionally, a model tuned to avoiding unwanted interruptions does so for 90 % of its predictions, while retaining 75 % overall accuracy

Providing end-user facilities to simplify ontology-driven web application authoring

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Interacting with Computers. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Interacting with Computers, Interacting with Computers 17, 4 (2007) DOI: 10.1016/j.intcom.2007.01.006Generally speaking, emerging web-based technologies are mostly intended for professional developers. They pay poor attention to users who have no programming abilities but need to customize software applications. At some point, such needs force end-users to act as designers in various aspects of software authoring and development. Every day, more new computing-related professionals attempt to create and modify existing applications in order to customize web-based artifacts that will help them carry out their daily tasks. In general they are domain experts rather than skilled software designers, and new authoring mechanisms are needed in order that they can accomplish their tasks properly. The work we present is an effort to supply end-users with easy mechanisms for authoring web-based applications. To complement this effort, we present a user study showing that it is possible to carry out a trade-off between expressiveness and ease of use in order to provide end-users with authoring facilities.The work reported in this paper is being partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (MCyT), projects TIN2005-06885 and TSI2005-08225-C07-06