HCITools:strategies and best practices for designing, evaluating and sharing technical HCI toolkits

Over the years, toolkits have been designed to facilitate the rapid prototyping of novel designs for graphical user interfaces, physical computing, fabrication, tangible interfaces and ubiquitous computing. However, although evaluation methods for HCI are widely available, particular techniques and approaches to evaluate technical toolkit research are less well developed. Moreover, it is unclear what kind of contribution and impact technical toolkits can bring to the larger HCI community. In this workshop we aim to bring together leading researchers in the field to discuss challenges and opportunities to develop new methods and approaches to design, evaluate, disseminate and share toolkits. Furthermore, we will discuss the technical, methodological and enabling role of toolkits for HCI research

Security Lessons Learned Building Concept Apps for webinos

Concept applications provide a means for tackling security infrastructure problems. Not only do they provide feedback to infrastructure design, they can also inform subsequent research activities. However, to directly influence the architectural design of infrastructure, designers need to engage in the engineering of apps, rather than just their broad design. By doing so, additional problems can be identified that might otherwise be missed using human-centered design alone. In this paper, we describe four security lessons learned from engineering the Kids in Focus concept app for the EU FP 7 webinos project. These illustrate how detailed design activities can highlight broader infrastructure problems that might otherwise have gone unnoticed

EagleSense:tracking people and devices in interactive spaces using real-time top-view depth-sensing

Real-time tracking of people's location, orientation and activities is increasingly important for designing novel ubiquitous computing applications. Top-view camera-based tracking avoids occlusion when tracking people while collaborating, but often requires complex tracking systems and advanced computer vision algorithms. To facilitate the prototyping of ubiquitous computing applications for interactive spaces, we developed EagleSense, a real-time human posture and activity recognition system with a single top-view depth sensing camera. We contribute our novel algorithm and processing pipeline, including details for calculating silhouetteextremities features and applying gradient tree boosting classifiers for activity recognition optimised for top-view depth sensing. EagleSense provides easy access to the real-time tracking data and includes tools for facilitating the integration into custom applications. We report the results of a technical evaluation with 12 participants and demonstrate the capabilities of EagleSense with application case studies

The Stuffness of Research Through Design

This essay questions the inquiring power of stuff in a Research through Design (RtD) practice (Zimmerman, Forlizzi and Evenson, 2011; Gaver, 2012). I will introduce the concept of stuffness as a way through which this may be discussed. This contributes to the RtD in Situ workshop at DIS 2020 (Jenkins et al., 2020) which continues a thread of conversation of doing thing-based design research initiated at CHI 2016 (Jenkins et al., 2016, 2017, 2020; Andersen et al., 2019)

An Approach to Addressing the Usability and Local Relevance of Generic Enterprise Software

Designing for usability and locally relevant features for end-users in generic ‘product’ or ‘packaged’ enterprise software projects is challenging. On the generic level, designers must aim at supporting variety, which is contradictory to the specificity needed to make user interfaces usable, and functionality relevant to end-users within specific organizational contexts. Also, addressing these concerns during the implementation of generic software is difficult due to limitations in the design flexibility of the software, time and resource constraints, possible maintenance issues following customization, and a lack of design methods appropriate for the context of software implementation. Reporting from an ongoing Action Design Research project following a global generic health software, this paper conceptualizes a Generic Software Design Lab that aims to equip design on the level of software implementation with flexibility, tools, and methods to efficiently localize generic software. By conceptualizing the approach and discussing how it works to strengthen implementation-level designers’ ability to address usability and local relevance, the paper contributes with learnings to research and practice related to design, development, and implementation of generic software

Generic Enterprise Software Implementation as Context for User-Oriented Design: Three Conditions and their Implications for Vendors

User-oriented approaches to designing IT are consistently promoted by academic and practitioner literature. These orients the design process around the specific practices and needs of end-users to build usable and relevant systems. However, an increasingly relevant but little explored context for the design of IT is that of implementing generic enterprise software solutions. In this paper, we explore conditions for user-oriented design during the implementation of generic enterprise software. Our empirical data is based on an ongoing engaged research project, where we work with the vendor of a global generic software solution and a set of implementation specialist groups (ISGs). Together, we explore how user-oriented design during implementation of the software solution can be supported and promoted. The paper contributes to the body of knowledge on the design and implementation of generic enterprise software by identifying several challenges and three conditions for user-oriented design in this context. The conditions are: the project configuration, the implementation practices of the ISGs, and the features and adaption capabilities of the generic software solution. We further contribute by discussing their implications for vendors who want to support and promote user-oriented design during implementation of their software solutions

Designing for the Infrastructure of the Supply Chain of Malay Handwoven Songket in Terengganu

The growing HCI interest in developing contexts and cultural craft practices is ripe to focus on their under-explored homegrown sociotechnical infrastructures. This paper explores the creative infrastructural actions embedded within the practices of songket's supply chain in Terengganu, Malaysia. We report on contextual interviews with 92 participants including preparation workers, weavers, designers, merchants, and customers. Findings indicate that increased creative infrastructural actions are reflected in these actors' resourcefulness for mobilizing information, materials, and equipment, and for making creative artifacts through new technologies weaved within traditional practices. We propose two novel approaches to design in this craft-based infrastructure. First, we explore designing for the social layer of infrastructure and its mutually advantageous exploitative relationships rooted in culture and traditions. Second, we suggest designing for roaming value-creation artifacts, which blend physical and digital materializations of songket textile design. Developed through a collaborative and asynchronous process, we argue that these artifacts represent less-explored vehicles for value co-creation, and that sociotechnical infrastructures as emerging sites of innovation could benefit from HCI research

Software architectural support for tangible user interfaces in distributed, heterogeneous computing environments

This research focuses on tools that support the development of tangible interaction-based applications for distributed computing environments. Applications built with these tools are capable of utilizing heterogeneous resources for tangible interaction and can be reconfigured for different contexts with minimal code changes. Current trends in computing, especially in areas such as computational science, scientific visualization and computer supported collaborative work, foreshadow increasing complexity, distribution and remoteness of computation and data. These trends imply that tangible interface developers must address concerns of both tangible interaction design and networked distributed computing. In this dissertation, we present a software architecture that supports separation of these concerns. Additionally, a tangibles-based software development toolkit based on this architecture is presented that enables the logic of elements within a tangible user interface to be mapped to configurations that vary in the number, type and location of resources within a given tangibles-based system

Evaluation Strategies for HCI Toolkit Research

Toolkit research plays an important role in the field of HCI, as it can heavily influence both the design and implementation of interactive systems. For publication, the HCI community typically expects toolkit research to include an evaluation component. The problem is that toolkit evaluation is challenging, as it is often unclear what ‘evaluating’ a toolkit means and what methods are appropriate. To address this problem, we analyzed 68 published toolkit papers. From our analysis, we provide an overview of, reflection on, and discussion of evaluation methods for toolkit contributions. We identify and discuss the value of four toolkit evaluation strategies, including the associated techniques that each employs. We offer a categorization of evaluation strategies for toolkit researchers, along with a discussion of the value, potential limitations, and trade-offs associated with each strategy

End user programming of awareness systems : addressing cognitive and social challenges for interaction with aware environments

The thesis is put forward that social intelligence in awareness systems emerges from end-Users themselves through the mechanisms that support them in the development and maintenance of such systems. For this intelligence to emerge three challenges have to be addressed, namely the challenge of appropriate awareness abstractions, the challenge of supportive interactive tools, and the challenge of infrastructure. The thesis argues that in order to advance towards social intelligent awareness systems, we should be able to interpret and predict the success or failure of such systems in relationship to their communicational objectives and their implications for the social interactions they support. The FN-AAR (Focus-Nimbus Aspects Attributes Resources) model is introduced as a formal model which by capturing the general characteristics of the awareness-systems domain allows predictions about socially salient patterns pertaining to human communication and brings clarity to the discussion around relevant concepts such as social translucency, symmetry, and deception. The thesis recognizes that harnessing the benefits of context awareness can be problematic for end-users and other affected individuals, who may not always be able to anticipate, understand or appreciate system function, and who may so feel their own sense of autonomy and privacy threatened. It introduces a set of tools and mechanisms that support end-user control, system intelligibility and accountability. This is achieved by minimizing the cognitive effort needed to handle the increased complexity of such systems and by enhancing the ability of people to configure and maintain intelligent environments. We show how these tools and mechanisms empower end-users to answer questions such as "how does the system behave", "why is something happening", "how would the system behave in response to a change in context", and "how can the system’s behaviour be altered" to achieve intelligibility, accountability, and end-user control. Finally, the thesis argues that awareness applications overall can not be examined as static configurations of services and functions, and that they should be seen as the results of both implicit and explicit interaction with the user. Amelie is introduced as a supportive framework for the development of context-aware applications that encourages the design of the interactive mechanisms through which end-users can control, direct and advance such systems dynamically throughout their deployment. Following the recombinant computing approach, Amelie addresses the implications of infrastructure design decisions on user experience, while by adopting the premises of the FN-AAR model Amelie supports the direct implementation of systems that allow end-users to meet social needs and to practice extant social skills