Visions, Values, and Videos: Revisiting Envisionings in Service of UbiComp Design for the Home

UbiComp has been envisioned to bring about a future dominated by calm computing technologies making our everyday lives ever more convenient. Yet the same vision has also attracted criticism for encouraging a solitary and passive lifestyle. The aim of this paper is to explore and elaborate these tensions further by examining the human values surrounding future domestic UbiComp solutions. Drawing on envisioning and contravisioning, we probe members of the public (N=28) through the presentation and focus group discussion of two contrasting animated video scenarios, where one is inspired by "calm" and the other by "engaging" visions of future UbiComp technology. By analysing the reasoning of our participants, we identify and elaborate a number of relevant values involved in balancing the two perspectives. In conclusion, we articulate practically applicable takeaways in the form of a set of key design questions and challenges.Comment: DIS'20, July 6-10, 2020, Eindhoven, Netherland

New Frontiers of Quantified Self: Finding New Ways for Engaging Users in Collecting and Using Personal Data

In spite of the fast growth in the market of devices and applications that allow people to collect personal information, Quantified Self (QS) tools still present a variety of issues when they are used in everyday lives of common people. In this workshop we aim at exploring new ways for designing QS systems, by gathering different researchers in a unique place for imagining how the tracking, management, interpretation and visualization of personal data could be addressed in the future

Mobility is the Message: Experiments with Mobile Media Sharing

This thesis explores new mobile media sharing applications by building, deploying, and studying their use. While we share media in many different ways both on the web and on mobile phones, there are few ways of sharing media with people physically near us. Studied were three designed and built systems: Push!Music, Columbus, and Portrait Catalog, as well as a fourth commercially available system – Foursquare. This thesis offers four contributions: First, it explores the design space of co-present media sharing of four test systems. Second, through user studies of these systems it reports on how these come to be used. Third, it explores new ways of conducting trials as the technical mobile landscape has changed. Last, we look at how the technical solutions demonstrate different lines of thinking from how similar solutions might look today. Through a Human-Computer Interaction methodology of design, build, and study, we look at systems through the eyes of embodied interaction and examine how the systems come to be in use. Using Goffman’s understanding of social order, we see how these mobile media sharing systems allow people to actively present themselves through these media. In turn, using McLuhan’s way of understanding media, we reflect on how these new systems enable a new type of medium distinct from the web centric media, and how this relates directly to mobility. While media sharing is something that takes place everywhere in western society, it is still tied to the way media is shared through computers. Although often mobile, they do not consider the mobile settings. The systems in this thesis treat mobility as an opportunity for design. It is still left to see how this mobile media sharing will come to present itself in people’s everyday life, and when it does, how we will come to understand it and how it will transform society as a medium distinct from those before. This thesis gives a glimpse at what this future will look like

Living with the user: Design drama for dementia care through responsive scripted experiences in the home

Participation in forms of drama and narrative can provoke empathy and creativity in user-centred design processes. In this paper, we expand upon existing methods to explore the potential for responsive scripted experiences that are delivered through the combination of sensors and output devices placed in a home. The approach is being developed in the context of Dementia care, where the capacity for rich user participation in design activities is limited. In this case, a system can act as a proxy for a person with Dementia, allowing designers to gain experiences and insight as to what it is like to provide care for, and live with, this person. We describe the rationale behind the approach, a prototype system architecture, and our current work to explore the creation of scripted experiences for design, played out though UbiComp technologies.This research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, (AH/K00266X/1) and Horizon Digital Economy Research (RCUK grant EP/G065802/1)

Heuristic Evaluation for Serious Immersive Games and M-instruction

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. Two fast growing areas for technology-enhanced learning are serious games and mobile instruction (M-instruction or M-Learning). Serious games are ones that are meant to be more than just entertainment. They have a serious use to educate or promote other types of activity. Immersive Games frequently involve many players interacting in a shared rich and complex-perhaps web-based-mixed reality world, where their circumstances will be multi and varied. Their reality may be augmented and often self-composed, as in a user-defined avatar in a virtual world. M-instruction and M-Learning is learning on the move; much of modern computer use is via smart devices, pads, and laptops. People use these devices all over the place and thus it is a natural extension to want to use these devices where they are to learn. This presents a problem if we wish to evaluate the effectiveness of the pedagogic media they are using. We have no way of knowing their situation, circumstance, education background and motivation, or potentially of the customisation of the final software they are using. Getting to the end user itself may also be problematic; these are learning environments that people will dip into at opportune moments. If access to the end user is hard because of location and user self-personalisation, then one solution is to look at the software before it goes out. Heuristic Evaluation allows us to get User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) experts to reflect on the software before it is deployed. The effective use of heuristic evaluation with pedagogical software [1] is extended here, with existing Heuristics Evaluation Methods that make the technique applicable to Serious Immersive Games and mobile instruction (M-instruction). We also consider how existing Heuristic Methods may be adopted. The result represents a new way of making this methodology applicable to this new developing area of learning technology