Establishing the design knowledge for emerging interaction platforms

While awaiting a variety of innovative interactive products and services to appear in the market in the near future such as interactive tabletops, interactive TVs, public multi-touch walls, and other embedded appliances, this paper calls for preparation for the arrival of such interactive platforms based on their interactivity. We advocate studying, understanding and establishing the foundation for interaction characteristics and affordances and design implications for these platforms which we know will soon emerge and penetrate our everyday lives. We review some of the archetypal interaction platform categories of the future and highlight the current status of the design knowledge-base accumulated to date and the current rate of growth for each of these. We use example designs illustrating design issues and considerations based on the authors’ 12-year experience in pioneering novel applications in various forms and styles

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

Físchlár-DiamondTouch: collaborative video searching on a table

In this paper we present the system we have developed for our participation in the annual TRECVid benchmarking activity, specically the system we have developed, Físchlár-DT, for participation in the interactive search task of TRECVid 2005. Our back-end search engine uses a combination of a text search which operates over the automatic speech recognised text, and an image search which uses low-level image features matched against video keyframes. The two novel aspects of our work are the fact that we are evaluating collaborative, team-based search among groups of users working together, and that we are using a novel touch-sensitive tabletop interface and interaction device known as the DiamondTouch to support this collaborative search. The paper summarises the backend search systems as well as presenting the interface we have developed, in detail

Kiosks 21: a new role for information kiosks?

Discusses and analyses the latest generation of information kiosks, Kiosks 21, which features information provision/promotion, interaction, transaction and relationships. In contrast to their task based predecessors, these kiosks focus on customer service delivery to ‘customers in context’. Five case studies of such kiosks located respectively in an airport, railway station, car rental base, hotel lobby, and shopping mall are analysed to demonstrate the way in which the kiosks are implemented to meet the differing requirements of customers in different contexts. Case studies are analysed in terms of kiosk design and location, user profile, information architecture, interface design, communication, and commerce. A range of areas for research and development are proposed.</p

Acquaintance role for decision making and exchanges in social networks

We model a social network by a random graph whose nodes represent agents and links between two of them stand for a reciprocal interaction; each agent is also associated to a binary variable which represents a dichotomic opinion or attribute. We consider both the case of pair-wise (p=2) and multiple (p>2) interactions among agents and we study the behavior of the resulting system by means of the energy-entropy scheme, typical of statistical mechanics methods. We show, analytically and numerically, that the connectivity of the social network plays a non-trivial role: while for pair-wise interactions (p=2) the connectivity weights linearly, when interactions involve contemporary a number of agents larger than two (p>2), its weight gets more and more important. As a result, when p is large, a full consensus within the system, can be reached at relatively small critical couplings with respect to the p=2 case usually analyzed, or, otherwise stated, relatively small coupling strengths among agents are sufficient to orient most of the system.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

Environmental Education in the Public Sphere: Comparing Practice with Psychosocial Determinants of Behavior and Societal Change

Environmental education of the general public is widely practiced by a variety of types of organizations. Dedicated environmental groups, nature centers, zoos, parks, and other entities work on issues ranging from local threats to air, water, and habitat to global problems such as climate change and deforestation. A great deal of those efforts focus largely on providing information and raising awareness. Behavioral research and change models, however, suggest other factors are important in order to effect change on an individual, regional, or societal level. An analysis of environmental education in practice, examining methods and materials in use, showed the degree to which there were alignments between the content and psychosocial determinants of change, as well as how actions related to change theories. This mixed-methods study of groups doing environmental education in the public sphere compared their practices with the factors shown to help predict pro-environmental behavior, why people change their actions and habits. Through this survey research and multiple case study, increased knowledge and understanding can help inform future efforts at change on critical local, national, and world environmental problems. It can also lead to further research into environmental education, using behavior and change theories