Cultural probes and the value of uncertainty

When reason is away, smiles will play. --- Paul Eluard and Benjamin Pére

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

A Methodological Reflection: Deconstructing Cultural Elements for Enhancing Cross-cultural Appreciation of Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage

This paper presents a practical method of deconstructing cultural elements based on the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) perspective to enhance cross-cultural appreciation of Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). The author pioneered this approach during conducting two case studies as a means to enhance appreciation and engagement with Chinese ICH, such as the extraction of elements from traditional Chinese painting and puppetry with potential to support cross-cultural appreciation, as well as the establishment of an elements archive. Through integrating a series of HCI research methods, this approach provides a specific foundational framework that assists non-Chinese people to better understand the cultural significance of Chinese ICH

How Do We Hear in the World?: Explorations in Ecological Acoustics

Everyday listening is the experience of hearing events in the world rather than sounds per se. In this article, I explore the acoustic basis of everyday listening as a start toward understanding how sounds near the ear can indicate remote physical events. Information for sound-producing events and their dimensions is investi­ gated using physical analyses of events to inform acoustic analyses of the sounds they produce. The result is a variety of algorithms which enable the synthesis of sounds made by basic-level events such as impacts, scraping, and dripping, as well as by more complex events such as bouncing, breaking, spilling, and machinery. These algorithms may serve as instantiated hypotheses about the acoustic infor­ mation for events. Analysis and synthesis work together in their development:Just as analyses of the physics and acoustics of sound-producing events may inform synthesis, so listening to the results of synthesis may inform analysis. This raises several issues concerning evaluation, specification, and the tension between formal and informal physical analyses. In the end, however, the fundamental test of these algorithms is in the sounds they produce: I describe them in enough detail here that readers may implement, test, and extend them