Experience, engagement and social interaction at a steam locomotive multimodal interactive museum exhibit

This paper describes the on-going study of an interactive multimodal museum exhibit about a steam-powered locomotive at the Riverside Transport Museum in Glasgow, UK. We examine the role of multimodal interaction relating to effects on (1) visitors' experience of the exhibit, (2) engagement with the subject matter, (3) social interaction and (4) engagement with the exhibit itself. We discuss key questions of our study, a set of initial findings, reflections and future work

Studying multimodal interaction at an interactive museum exhibit on steampower locomotive

This paper discusses an ongoing study of a multimodal installation on the subject matter of steam power locomotives at a transport museum in Glasgow, Scotland. The key issue of the study is the role of multimodal interaction in museum visitors’ experience of exhibits, their engagement with the topic and the exhibit. The paper describes the approach taken to answer these questions which has so far involved observational studies

Involving the museum visitor community in designing exhibits

Museum and other cultural heritage practice increasingly recognizes the value and importance of involving local communities in the design and delivery of the cultural services they access. Commonly, where exhibits are concerned, museums and other organisations will make use of expert panels drawn from particular demographics to evaluate exhibits in structured moderated sessions. This paper considers how the design and evaluation might be done in a more integrated participatory fashion and presents some experiences of protoyping sessions conducted on the museum floor. Our findings lead us to argue for more consideration of the value of co-design workshops on the museum of gallery floor with visitors

Strategies for Engaging Communities in Creating Physical Civic Technologies

Despite widespread interest in civic technologies, empowering neighbourhoods to take advantage of these technologies in their local area remains challenging. This paper presents findings from the Ardler Inventors project, which aimed to understand how neighbourhoods can be supported in performing roles normally carried out by researchers and designers. We describe the end-to-end process of bringing people together around technology, designing and prototyping ideas, and ultimately testing several devices in their local area. Through this work, we explore different strategies for infrastructuring local residents' participation with technology, including the use of hackathon-like intensive design events and pre-designed kits for assembly. We contribute findings relating to the ability of these strategies to support building communities around civic technology and the challenges that must be addressed.Publisher PD

Investigating the effect of sensory concurrency on learning haptic spatiotemporal signals

A new generation of multimodal interfaces and interactions is emerging. Drawing on the principles of Sensory Substitution and Augmentation Devices (SSADs), these new interfaces offer the potential for rich, immersive human-computer interactions, but are difficult to design well, and take time to master, creating significant barriers towards wider adoption. Following a review of the literature surrounding existing SSADs, their metrics for success and their growing influence on interface design in Human Computer Interaction, we present a medium term (4-day) study comparing the effectiveness of various combinations of visual and haptic feedback (sensory concurrencies) in preparing users to perform a virtual maze navigation task using haptic feedback alone. Participants navigated 12 mazes in each of 3 separate sessions under a specific combination of visual and haptic feedback, before performing the same task using the haptic feedback alone. Visual sensory deprivation was shown to be inferior to visual & haptic concurrency in enabling haptic signal comprehension, while a new hybridized condition combining reduced visual feedback with the haptic signal was shown to be superior. Potential explanations for the effectiveness of the hybrid mechanism are explored, and the scope and implications of its generalization to new sensory interfaces is presented.PostprintPeer reviewe

Prototyping a Voice Enabled Internet: a practitioner's guide

A workbook documenting the development of prototypes exploring a voice enabled internet

Fighting fires and powering steam locomotives : Distribution of control and its role in social interaction at tangible interactive museum exhibits

We present a video-analysis study of museum visitors’ interactions at two tangible interactive exhibits in a transport museum. Our focus is on groups’ social and shared interactions, in particular how exhibit setup and structure influence collaboration patterns. Behaviors at the exhibits included individuals focusing beyond their personal activity towards companions’ interaction, adults participating via physical interaction, and visitors taking opportunities to interact when companions moved between sections of the exhibit or stepped back from interaction. We demonstrate how exhibits’ physical configuration and interactive control engendered behavioral patterns. Systematic analysis reveals how different configurations (concerning physical-spatial hardware and interactive software) distribute control differently amongst visitors. We present four mechanisms for how control can be distributed at an interactive installation: functional, temporal, physical and indirect verbal. In summary, our work explores how mechanisms that distribute control influence patterns of shared interaction with the exhibits and social interaction between museum visitor companion

Entangled Threads:Exploring the value and significance of bringing a craft ethos to debates around the IoT/connected things.

Alongside the benefits of a world in which more and more things are internet connected (i.e., the IoT), scaffolded by increasingly powerful AI systems, there is a growing recognition of a flipside to this vision of the future. Issues associated with privacy, transparency, legibility and trust have been widely recognized – which the Mozilla Foundation has encapsulated in their Internet Health Reports [13]. This workshop will explore these tensions and concerns through the lens of craft, both as a practice and a conceptual ethos. We will use embroidery as a craft-oriented ‘thinking through making’ activity as the foundation for discussions of our craft characteristics of which consist of; bespokeness, localism, embodiment, provenance, authenticity, and care. Participants will gain a rich understanding of debates around IoT while being engaged in a ‘thinking through doing’ embodied approach to gaining new insights and leave with their own hand embroidered badge.<br/

Prototyping Things:Reflecting on Unreported Objects of Design Research for IoT

Prototypes and other ‘things’ have had many uses in HCI research—to help understand a problem, as a stepping stone towards a solution, or as a final outcome of a research process. However, within the messy context of a research through design project, many of these roles do not form part of the final research narratives, restricting the ability of other researchers to learn from this practice. In this paper we revisit prototypes used in three different design research projects, conducted over a period when the Internet of Things emerged into everyday life, exploring complex hidden relationships between the internet, people and physical objects. We aim to explore the unreported roles that prototypes played in these projects, including brokering relationships with participants and deconstructing opaque technologies. We reflect on how these roles align with existing understandings of prototypes in HCI, with particular attention to how these roles can contribute to design around IoT