Collaborative Practices that Support Creativity in Design

Design is a ubiquitous, collaborative and highly material activity. Because of the embodied nature of the design profession, designers apply certain collaborative practices to enhance creativity in their everyday work. Within the domain of industrial design, we studied two educational design departments over a period of eight months. Using examples from our fieldwork, we develop our results around three broad themes related to collaborative practices that support the creativity of design professionals: 1) externalization, 2) use of physical space, and 3) use of bodies. We believe that these themes of collaborative practices could provide new insights into designing technologies for supporting a varied set of design activities. We describe two conceptual collaborative systems derived from the results of our study

Activity-Centric Computing Systems

• Activity-Centric Computing (ACC) addresses deep-rooted information management problems in traditional application centric computing by providing a unifying computational model for human goal-oriented ‘activity,’ cutting across system boundaries. • We provide a historical review of the motivation for and development of ACC systems, and highlight the need for broadening up this research topic to also include low-level system research and development. • ACC concepts and technology relate to many facets of computing; they are relevant for researchers working on new computing models and operating systems, as well as for application designers seeking to incorporate these technologies in domain-specific applications

Tangible user interfaces : past, present and future directions

In the last two decades, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as a new interface type that interlinks the digital and physical worlds. Drawing upon users' knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, TUIs show a potential to enhance the way in which people interact with and leverage digital information. However, TUI research is still in its infancy and extensive research is required in or- der to fully understand the implications of tangible user interfaces, to develop technologies that further bridge the digital and the physical, and to guide TUI design with empirical knowledge. This paper examines the existing body of work on Tangible User In- terfaces. We start by sketching the history of tangible user interfaces, examining the intellectual origins of this field. We then present TUIs in a broader context, survey application domains, and review frame- works and taxonomies. We also discuss conceptual foundations of TUIs including perspectives from cognitive sciences, phycology, and philoso- phy. Methods and technologies for designing, building, and evaluating TUIs are also addressed. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limita- tions of TUIs and chart directions for future research

Supporting Device Discovery and Spontaneous Interaction with Spatial References

The RELATE interaction model is designed to support spontaneous interaction of mobile users with devices and services in their environment. The model is based on spatial references that capture the spatial relationship of a user’s device with other co-located devices. Spatial references are obtained by relative position sensing and integrated in the mobile user interface to spatially visualize the arrangement of discovered devices, and to provide direct access for interaction across devices. In this paper we discuss two prototype systems demonstrating the utility of the model in collaborative and mobile settings, and present a study on usability of spatial list and map representations for device selection

Sensing and visualizing spatial relations of mobile devices

Location information can be used to enhance interaction with mobile devices. While many location systems require instrumentation of the environment, we present a system that allows devices to measure their spatial relations in a true peer-to-peer fashion. The system is based on custom sensor hardware implemented as USB dongle, and computes spatial relations in real-time. In extension of this system we propose a set of spatialized widgets for incorporation of spatial relations in the user interface. The use of these widgets is illustrated in a number of applications, showing how spatial relations can be employed to support and streamline interaction with mobile devices

Akram Khan re-writes ‘Radha’: The ‘hypervisible’ cultural identity in Kylie Minogue’s ‘Showgirl’

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 19(1), 23 - 34, 2009 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/07407700802655265.This paper attempts to analyze the British Asian dancer/choreographer Akram Khan's choreography of Samsara for Kylie Minogue's “homecoming” version of the 2006 Showgirl tour as an intellectual commentary on the 1906 American modern dance piece Radha by Ruth St Denis. On the surface Khan's choreography can be seen to reiterate some of the same Orientalist tropes that St Denis was accused of, within a popular “low”-culture context. Acknowledging this trope I scrutinize Khan's key choreographic strategies that challenge the potentially feminist reading of St Denis’ Radha by successfully reinstating the marriage plot within his choreography. More significantly, he makes “hypervisible,” the source culture of Kathak and the body of authority (himself) in the cultural exchange that shapes this choreographic project. Through an analysis of Khan's choreographic endeavor and a reevaluation of the power play between male and female bodies in the space, I wish to extrapolate Khan's intellectual vision within Samsara as an expression and assertion of the place of diasporic identity and cultural exchange within Western popular culture. I frame my paper within the preexistent frameworks from scholars like Sally Banes, Priya Srinivasan, Edward Said, Kobena Mercer, Rustom Bharucha and Philip Auslander

Dynamic Composite Data Physicalization Using Wheeled Micro-Robots

This paper introduces dynamic composite physicalizations, a new class of physical visualizations that use collections of self-propelled objects to represent data. Dynamic composite physicalizations can be used both to give physical form to well-known interactive visualization techniques, and to explore new visualizations and interaction paradigms. We first propose a design space characterizing composite physicalizations based on previous work in the fields of Information Visualization and Human Computer Interaction. We illustrate dynamic composite physicalizations in two scenarios demonstrating potential benefits for collaboration and decision making, as well as new opportunities for physical interaction. We then describe our implementation using wheeled micro-robots capable of locating themselves and sensing user input, before discussing limitations and opportunities for future work