Proxemics mobile collocated interactions

Recent research on mobile collocated interactions has been looking at situations in which collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their mobile devices. However, existing practices fail to fully account for the culturally-dependent spatial relationships between people and their digital devices (i.e. the proxemic relationships). Building on the ideas of proxemic interactions, this workshop is motivated by the concept of 'proxemic mobile collocated interactions', to harness new or existing technologies to create engaging and interactionally relevant experiences. Such approaches would allow devices to not only react to presence and interaction, but also other indicators, such as the interpersonal distance people naturally use in everyday life. The aim of this one-day workshop is to bring together a community of researchers, designers and practitioners who are interested in exploring proxemics and mobile collocated interactions

Proxemic mobile collocated interactions

Funding: EPSRC grants EP/G037574/1 and EP/G065802/1 (MP).Recent research on mobile collocated interactions has been looking at situations in which collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their mobile devices. However, existing practices fail to fully account for the culturally-dependent spatial relationships between people and their digital devices (i.e. the proxemic relationships). Building on the ideas of proxemic interactions, this workshop is motivated by the concept of 'proxemic mobile collocated interactions', to harness new or existing technologies to create engaging and interactionally relevant experiences. Such approaches would allow devices to not only react to presence and interaction, but also other indicators, such as the interpersonal distance people naturally use in everyday life. The aim of this one-day workshop is to bring together a community of researchers, designers and practitioners who are interested in exploring proxemics and mobile collocated interactions.Postprin

Measuring interaction proxemics with wearable light tags

The proxemics of social interactions (e.g., body distance, relative orientation) in!uences many aspects of our everyday life: from patients’ reactions to interaction with physicians, successes in job interviews, to effective teamwork. Traditionally, interaction proxemics has been studied via questionnaires and participant observations, imposing high burden on users, low scalability and precision, and often biases. In this paper we present Protractor, a novel wearable technology for measuring interaction proxemics as part of non-verbal behavior cues with# ne granularity. Protractor employs near-infrared light to monitor both the distance and relative body orientation of interacting users. We leverage the characteristics of near-infrared light (i.e., line-of-sight propagation) to accurately and reliably identify interactions; a pair of collocated photodiodes aid the inference of relative interaction angle and distance. We achieve robustness against temporary blockage of the light channel (e.g., by the user’s hand or clothes) by designing sensor fusion algorithms that exploit inertial sensors to obviate the absence of light tracking results. We fabricated Protractor tags and conducted real-world experiments. Results show its accuracy in tracking body distances and relative angles. The framework achieves less than 6 error 95% of the time for measuring relative body orientation and 2.3-cm – 4.9-cm mean error in estimating interaction distance. We deployed Protractor tags to track user’s non-verbal behaviors when conducting collaborative group tasks. Results with 64 participants show that distance and angle data from Protractor tags can help assess individual’s task role with 84.9% accuracy, and identify task timeline with 93.2% accuracy

Designing for Cross-Device Interactions

Driven by technological advancements, we now own and operate an ever-growing number of digital devices, leading to an increased amount of digital data we produce, use, and maintain. However, while there is a substantial increase in computing power and availability of devices and data, many tasks we conduct with our devices are not well connected across multiple devices. We conduct our tasks sequentially instead of in parallel, while collaborative work across multiple devices is cumbersome to set up or simply not possible. To address these limitations, this thesis is concerned with cross-device computing. In particular it aims to conceptualise, prototype, and study interactions in cross-device computing. This thesis contributes to the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)—and more specifically to the area of cross-device computing—in three ways: first, this work conceptualises previous work through a taxonomy of cross-device computing resulting in an in-depth understanding of the field, that identifies underexplored research areas, enabling the transfer of key insights into the design of interaction techniques. Second, three case studies were conducted that show how cross-device interactions can support curation work as well as augment users’ existing devices for individual and collaborative work. These case studies incorporate novel interaction techniques for supporting cross-device work. Third, through studying cross-device interactions and group collaboration, this thesis provides insights into how researchers can understand and evaluate multi- and cross-device interactions for individual and collaborative work. We provide a visualization and querying tool that facilitates interaction analysis of spatial measures and video recordings to facilitate such evaluations of cross-device work. Overall, the work in this thesis advances the field of cross-device computing with its taxonomy guiding research directions, novel interaction techniques and case studies demonstrating cross-device interactions for curation, and insights into and tools for effective evaluation of cross-device systems

User experience for multi-device ecosystems: challenges and opportunities

Smart devices have pervaded every aspect of humans' daily lives. Though single device UX products are relatively successful, the experience of cross-device interaction is still far from satisfactory and can be a source of frustration. Inconsistent UI styles, unclear coordination, varying fidelity, pairwise interactions, lack of understanding intent, limited data sharing and security, and other problems typically degrade the experience in a multi-device ecosystem. Redesigning the UX, tailored to multi-device ecosystems to enhance the user experience, turns out to be challenging but at the same time affording many new opportunities. This workshop brings together researchers, practitioners and developers with different backgrounds, including from fields such as computationally design, affective computing, and multimodal interaction to exchange views, share ideas, and explore future directions on UX for distributed scenarios, especially for those heterogeneous cross-device ecosystems. The topics cover but are not limited to distributed UX design, accessibility, cross-device HCI, human factors in distributed scenarios, user-centric interfaces, and multi-device ecosystems

Designing and theorizing co-located interactions.

This paper gives an interwoven account of the theoretical and practical work we undertook in pursuit of designing co- located interactions. We show how we sensitized ourselves to theory from diverse intellectual disciplines, to develop an analytical lens to better think about co-located interactions. By critiquing current systems and their conceptual founda- tions, and further interrelating theories particularly in regard to performative aspects of identity and communication, we develop a more nuanced way of thinking about co-located interactions. Drawing on our sensitivities, we show how we generated and are exploring, through the process of design, a set of co-located interactions that are situated within our social ecologies, and contend that our upfront theoretical work enabled us to identify and explore this space in the first place. This highlights the importance of problem fram- ing, especially for projects adopting design methodologies

Human-centred computer architecture: redesigning the mobile datastore and sharing interface

This dissertation develops a material perspective on Information & Communication Technologies and combines this perspective with a Research through Design approach to interrogate current and develop new mobile sharing interfaces and datastores. through this approach I open up a line of inquiry that connects a material perspective of information with everyday sharing and communication practices as well as with the mobile and cloud architectures that increasingly mediate such practices. With this perspective, I uncover a shifting emphasis of how data is stored on mobile devices and how this data is made available to apps through sharing interfaces that prevent apps from obtaining a proper handle of data to support fundamentally human acts of sharing such as giving. I take these insights to articulate a much wider research agenda to implicate, beyond the sharing interface, the app model and mobile datastore, data exchange protocols, and the Cloud. I formalise the approach I take to bring technically and socially complex, multi-dimensional and changing ideas into correspondence and to openly document this process. I consider the history of the File abstraction and the fundamental grammars of action this abstraction supports (e.g. move, copy, & delete) and the mediating role this abstraction – and its graphical representation – plays in binding together the concerns of system architects, programmers, and users. Finding inspiration in the 30 year history of the file, I look beyond the Desktop to contemporary realms of computing on the mobile and in the Cloud to develop implications for reinvigorated file abstractions, representations, and grammars of actions. First and foremost, these need to have a social perspective on files. To develop and hone such a social perspective, and challenge the assumption that mobile phones are telephones – implying interaction at a distance – I give an interwoven account of the theoretical and practical work I undertook to derive and design a grammar of action – showing – tailored to co-present and co-located interactions. By documenting the process of developing prototypes that explore this design space, and returning to the material perspective I developed earlier, I explore how the grammars of show and gift are incongruent with the specific ways in which information is passed through the mobile’s sharing interface. This insight led me to prototype a mobile datastore – My Stuff – and design new file abstractions that foreground the social nature of the stuff we store and share on our mobiles. I study how that stuff is handled and shared in the Cloud by developing, documenting, and interrogating a cloud service to facilitate sharing, and implement grammars of actions to support and better align with human communication and sharing acts. I conclude with an outlook on the powerful generative metaphor of casting mobile media files as digital possessions to support and develop human-centred computer architecture that give people better awareness and control over the stuff that matters to them

Voice interfaces in everyday life

Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) are becoming ubiquitously available, being embedded both into everyday mobility via smartphones, and into the life of the home via ‘assistant’ devices. Yet, exactly how users of such devices practically thread that use into their everyday social interactions remains underexplored. By collecting and studying audio data from month-long deployments of the Amazon Echo in participants’ homes—informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis—our study documents the methodical practices of VUI users, and how that use is accomplished in the complex social life of the home. Data we present shows how the device is made accountable to and embedded into conversational settings like family dinners where various simultaneous activities are being achieved. We discuss how the VUI is finely coordinated with the sequential organisation of talk. Finally, we locate implications for the accountability of VUI interaction, request and response design, and raise conceptual challenges to the notion of designing ‘conversational’ interfaces