Slow, Unaware Things Beyond Interaction

In this chapter we provide an overview of concepts and methods that have become part of our approach to gain a broader and deeper understanding of the relations between humans and technology. Over the years, our efforts have been to move past the field of interaction design’s dominant focus on human interaction with technology to develop a design-oriented understanding of human relations with technology. In our view, this begins by looking at technology beyond its functional, utilitarian, or instrumental value toward a broader set of perceptions and meanings. This theme is emblematic of a broader shift in interaction design and HCI. The first edition of this book contributed significantly to a trajectory in which designers and researchers see technology as a matter of experiences that are fun (Blythe and Hassenzahl in The semantics of fun: differentiating enjoyable experiences, 91–100, 2003), rich (Overbeeke et al. in Let’s make things engaging, 7–17, 2003), embodied (Dourish in Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2004), somaesthetic (Höök et al. in Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2016), spatio-temporal (McCarthy and Wright in Technology as experience. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2004), hedonic (Hassenzahl in The thing and i: understanding the relationship between user and product. 31–42, 2003), reflective (Sengers and Gaver in Proceedings of the 6th conference on designing interactive systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 99–108, 2006), and ludic (Gaver et al. in CHI’04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 885–900, 2004). However, understanding technology through more than solely a functional lens is only one part of more deeply viewing and inquiring into human-technology relations. We believe it is necessary to also understand people’s relations to technology beyond interaction and engineered experiences of technology. In the context of funology, we aim to critically and generatively contribute to the investigations of the experiences of technology to go beyond both instrumentalism and interaction. In many respects, interaction, like functionality, is too narrow of a lens for both understanding and influencing people’s experiences and relations to technology through design. Interaction is only one form of technology relations that happens explicitly, in present time, and consciously (Verbeek in What things do: philosophical reflections on technology, agency, and design. Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, University Park, Pa, 2015). What about relations to technology that manifest over time, incrementally, knowingly and unknowingly (or somewhere in between) that become part of our everyday lives

Theory of Robot Communication: II. Befriending a Robot over Time

In building on theories of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), Human-Robot Interaction, and Media Psychology (i.e. Theory of Affective Bonding), the current paper proposes an explanation of how over time, people experience the mediated or simulated aspects of the interaction with a social robot. In two simultaneously running loops, a more reflective process is balanced with a more affective process. If human interference is detected behind the machine, Robot-Mediated Communication commences, which basically follows CMC assumptions; if human interference remains undetected, Human-Robot Communication comes into play, holding the robot for an autonomous social actor. The more emotionally aroused a robot user is, the more likely they develop an affective relationship with what actually is a machine. The main contribution of this paper is an integration of Computer-Mediated Communication, Human-Robot Communication, and Media Psychology, outlining a full-blown theory of robot communication connected to friendship formation, accounting for communicative features, modes of processing, as well as psychophysiology.Comment: Hoorn, J. F. (2018). Theory of robot communication: II. Befriending a robot over time. arXiv:cs, 2502572(v1), 1-2

Resonating Experiences of Self and Others enabled by a Tangible Somaesthetic Design

Digitalization is penetrating every aspect of everyday life including a human's heart beating, which can easily be sensed by wearable sensors and displayed for others to see, feel, and potentially "bodily resonate" with. Previous work in studying human interactions and interaction designs with physiological data, such as a heart's pulse rate, have argued that feeding it back to the users may, for example support users' mindfulness and self-awareness during various everyday activities and ultimately support their wellbeing. Inspired by Somaesthetics as a discipline, which focuses on an appreciation of the living body's role in all our experiences, we designed and explored mobile tangible heart beat displays, which enable rich forms of bodily experiencing oneself and others in social proximity. In this paper, we first report on the design process of tangible heart displays and then present results of a field study with 30 pairs of participants. Participants were asked to use the tangible heart displays during watching movies together and report their experience in three different heart display conditions (i.e., displaying their own heart beat, their partner's heart beat, and watching a movie without a heart display). We found, for example that participants reported significant effects in experiencing sensory immersion when they felt their own heart beats compared to the condition without any heart beat display, and that feeling their partner's heart beats resulted in significant effects on social experience. We refer to resonance theory to discuss the results, highlighting the potential of how ubiquitous technology could utilize physiological data to provide resonance in a modern society facing social acceleration.Comment: 18 page

Awareness and stock market participation

The paper documents lack of awareness of financial assets in the 1995 and 1998 Bank of Italy Surveys of Household Income and Wealth. It then explores the determinants of awareness, and finds that the probability that survey respondents are aware of stocks, mutual funds and investment accounts is positively correlated with education, household resources, long-term bank relations and proxies for social interaction. Lack of financial awareness has important implications for understanding the stockholding puzzle and for estimating stock market participation costs. Klassifikation: E2, D8, G

The Constitutional Right to Free Communication of the Institutionalized Resident

This article comes from the notes and comments section of the North Carolina Central Law Journal from 1973. Justified by the generic first amendment protection to unabridged expression and association, a United States citizen cannot be unreasonably denied the right to communicate by mail; by telephone; with legal counsel; with the opposite sex; with others. In most states where such a citizen becomes mentally ill, the person may be involuntarily civilly committed. Although there is no justification for such a commitment beyond the fact that the individual is sick and is in need of care, often the individual\u27s first amendment freedoms are restricted while a resident of a mental institution. This article will focus on the extent to which such restrictions violate the constitutional right of free expression and association, e.g. by mail, by telephone, with legal counsel, with the opposite sex, by general visitation

Trust in social machines: the challenges

The World Wide Web has ushered in a new generation of applications constructively linking people and computers to create what have been called ‘social machines.’ The ‘components’ of these machines are people and technologies. It has long been recognised that for people to participate in social machines, they have to trust the processes. However, the notions of trust often used tend to be imported from agent-based computing, and may be too formal, objective and selective to describe human trust accurately. This paper applies a theory of human trust to social machines research, and sets out some of the challenges to system designers

Implicit cognitions in awareness: Three empirical examples and implications for conscious identity.

open accessAcross psychological science the prevailing view of mental events includes unconscious mental representations that result from a separate implicit system outside of awareness. Recently, scientific interest in consciousness of self and the widespread application of mindfulness practice have made necessary innovative methods of assessing awareness during cognitive tasks and validating those assessments wherever they are researched. Studies from three areas of psychology, self-esteem, sustainability thinking, and the learning of control systems questioned the unconscious status of implicit cognitions. The studies replicated published results using methods of investigating (a) unselective learning of a control task (b) implicit attitudes using IAT, and (c) the Name-letter effect. In addition, a common analytic method of awareness assessment and its validation was used. Study 1 demonstrated that learned control of a dynamic system was predicted by the validity of rules of control in awareness. In Study 2, verbal reports of hesitations and trial difficulty predicted IAT scores for 34 participants’ environmental attitudes. In Study 3, the famous Name-letter effect was predicted by the validity of university students’ reported awareness of letter preference reasons. The repeated finding that self knowledge in awareness predicted what should be cognitions outside of awareness, according to the dual processing view, suggests an alternative model of implicit mental events in which associative relations evoke conscious symbolic representations. The analytic method of validating phenomenal reports will be discussed along with its potential contribution to research involving implicit cognitions

Mapping Big Data into Knowledge Space with Cognitive Cyber-Infrastructure

Big data research has attracted great attention in science, technology, industry and society. It is developing with the evolving scientific paradigm, the fourth industrial revolution, and the transformational innovation of technologies. However, its nature and fundamental challenge have not been recognized, and its own methodology has not been formed. This paper explores and answers the following questions: What is big data? What are the basic methods for representing, managing and analyzing big data? What is the relationship between big data and knowledge? Can we find a mapping from big data into knowledge space? What kind of infrastructure is required to support not only big data management and analysis but also knowledge discovery, sharing and management? What is the relationship between big data and science paradigm? What is the nature and fundamental challenge of big data computing? A multi-dimensional perspective is presented toward a methodology of big data computing.Comment: 59 page