Facilitating parent-teenager communication through interactive photo cubes

Because most teenagers strive for freedom and try to live autonomously, communication with their parents could be improved. It appeared from a literature review and a diary study that parent-teenager communication primarily addresses teenager-oriented everyday activities. However, it also showed teenagers have a substantial interest in getting to know their parents and their parents’ past. The study described in this paper seeks to address this opportunity by designing a product for parents and teenagers that facilitates communication about the past of the parents. The resulting design, called Cueb, is a set of interactive digital photo cubes with which parents and teenagers can explore individual and shared experiences and are triggered to exchange stories. An evaluation of a prototype of Cueb with four families showed that the participants felt significantly more triggered and supported to share their experiences and tell stories with Cueb’s full functionality (connecting cubes, switching, and locking photographs) than with limited functionality (shaking to display random photographs), similar to more traditional photo media

Sens-Us: Designing Innovative Civic Technology for the Public Good

How can civic technology be designed to encourage more public engagement? What new methods of data collection and sharing can be used to engender a different relationship between citizens and the state? One approach has been to design physical systems that draw people in and which they can trust, leading them to give their views, opinions or other data. So far, they have been largely used to elicit feedback or votes for one or two questions about a given topic. Here, we describe a physical system, called Sens-Us, which was designed to ask a range of questions about personal and sensitive information, within the context of rethinking the UK Census. An in-the-wild study of its deployment in a city cultural center showed how a diversity of people approached, answered and compared the data that had been collected about themselves with others. We discuss the findings in relation to the pros and cons of using this kind of innovative technology when wanting to promote civic engagement or other forms of public engagement

Diagnosis of embedded software using program spectra

Automated diagnosis of errors detected during software testing can improve the efficiency of the debugging process, and can thus help to make software more reliable. In this paper we discuss the application of a specific automated debugging technique, namely software fault localization through the analysis of program spectra, in the area of embedded software in high-volume consumer electronics products. We discuss why the technique is particularly well suited for this application domain, and through experiments on an industrial test case we demonstrate that it can lead to highly accurate diagnoses of realistic errors

SmallTalk: Using tangible interactions to gather feedback from children

Gathering opinions from young children is challenging and different methods have been explored. In this paper we investigated how tangible devices can be used to gather feedback from children in the context of a theater performance. We introduce SmallTalk, a tangible survey system designed for use within a theater space to capture what children, aged 4 to 9, thought of a live performance they had just seen. We describe how the system was designed to build on previous feedback methods that had been tried; while at the same time meeting the constraints of the challenging theater context. We present results from seven deployments of SmallTalk and based on these we briefly discuss its value as a method for evaluating the theater performance. We then look at how the results validated the system design and present several design implications that more generally relate to tangible feedback systems for children

Revision of the European Ecolabel Criteria for: Hand dishwashing detergents Preliminary Report

The EU Ecolabel criteria for hand dishwashing detergents are under revision. This revision process will take into account the current market conditions and the EU Ecolabel criteria will aim at addressing the most important environmental impacts of the hand dishwashing detergents in a life cycle perspective. The identification of the main hotspots is carried out in this study by means of an initial extensive literature review and subsequent LCA studies. LCA studies showed that the largest contribution to the environmental impact profile of hand dishwashing detergents is - by far - the use phase, particularly the energy needed to heat the water. For some impact categories, the sourcing of raw materials and the end of life are also important. Based on the normalisation assessment, by far the most important impact categories for hand dishwashing detergents in Europe are natural land transformation and fossil depletion. The study reveals that there are several improvement opportunities such reduction in the wash temperature or used of concentrated detergents. Changes in the detergent formulation can also reduce the impacts in different categories.JRC.J.5-Sustainable Production and Consumptio

Physikit: Data Engagement Through Physical Ambient Visualizations in the Home

Internet of things (IoT) devices and sensor kits have the potential to democratize the access, use, and appropriation of data. Despite the increased availability of low cost sensors, most of the produced data is "black box" in nature: users often do not know how to access or interpret data. We propose a "human-data design" approach in which end-users are given tools to create, share, and use data through tangible and physical visualizations. This paper introduces Physikit, a system designed to allow users to explore and engage with environmental data through physical ambient visualizations. We report on the design and implementation of Physikit, and present a two-week field study which showed that participants got an increased sense of the meaning of data, embellished and appropriated the basic visualizations to make them blend into their homes, and used the visualizations as a probe for community engagement and social behavior