Designing Familiar Open Surfaces

While participatory design makes end-users part of the design process, we might also want the resulting system to be open for interpretation, appropriation and change over time to reflect its usage. But how can we design for appropriation? We need to strike a good balance between making the user an active co-constructor of system functionality versus making a too strong, interpretative design that does it all for the user thereby inhibiting their own creative use of the system. Through revisiting five systems in which appropriation has happened both within and outside the intended use, we are going to show how it can be possible to design with open surfaces. These open surfaces have to be such that users can fill them with their own interpretation and content, they should be familiar to the user, resonating with their real world practice and understanding, thereby shaping its use

A user-centred approach to affective interaction

We have built eMoto, a mobile service for sending and receiving affective messages, with the explicit aim of addressing the inner experience of emotions. eMoto is a designed artifact that carries emotional experiences only achieved through interaction. Following on the theories of embodiment, we argue emotional experiences can not be design in only design for. eMoto is the result of a user-centered design approach, realized through a set of initial brain-storming methods, a persona, a Laban-analysis of body language and a two-tiered evaluation method. eMoto is not a system that could have been designed from theory only, but require an iterative engagement with end-users, however, in combination with theoretical work. More specifically, we will show how we have managed to design an ambiguous and open system that allows for users’ emotional engagement

Using Narratives, Humor, and Social Navigation: An Inspection of two systems

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Social positioning: Designing the Seams between Social, Physical and Digital Space

Mobile settings are not only physically and digitally mediated; they are also inhabited by people - a social space. We argue that careful design exposing the connections, gaps, overlays and mismatches within and between physical, digital and social space allow for a better understanding and thereby mastering of the resulting combined space. Two concepts are explored in MobiTip, a social mobile service for exchanging opinions among peers: intramedia seams concerning network coverage and position technology, and intermedia seams between digitally transmitted tips and the physical, social context surrounding the user. We introduce social positioning as an alternative and complement to the current strive for seamless connectedness and exact positioning in physical space

Design Principals of Social Navigation

8th Delos Workshop on "User Interfaces for Digital Libraries" (on 21 October it will be held in conjuction with the 4th ERCIM Workshop on "User Interfaces for All"), SICS, Kista, Sweden, 21-23 October 1998PERSON

eMoto - Affectively Involving both Body and Mind

It is known that emotions are experienced by both body and mind. Oftentimes, emotions are evoked by sub-symbolic stimuli, such as colors, shapes, gestures, or music. We have built eMoto, a mobile service for sending affective mes-sages to others, with the explicit aim of addressing such sensing. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interac-tion pulls the user into an embodied ‘affective loop’. We present a user study of eMoto where 12 out of 18 subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interac-tion. The study also shows that the designed ‘openness’ and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and under-stood by our subjects

Designing gestures for affective input: an analysis of shape, effort and valence

We discuss a user-centered approach to incorporating affective expressions in interactive applications, and argue for a design that addresses both body and mind. In particular, we have studied the problem of finding a set of affective gestures. Based on previous work in movement analysis and emotion theory [Davies, Laban and Lawrence, Russell], and a study of an actor expressing emotional states in body movements, we have identified three underlying dimensions of movements and emotions: shape, effort and valence. From these dimensions we have created a new affective interaction model, which we name the affective gestural plane model. We applied this model to the design of gestural affective input to a mobile service for affective messages

A Foundation for Emotional Expressivity

To express emotions to others in mobile text messaging in our view require designs that can both capture some of the ambiguity and subtleness that characterizes emotional interaction and keep the media specific qualities. Through the use of a body movement analysis and a dimensional model of emotion experiences, we arrived at a design for a mobile messaging service, eMoto. The service makes use of the sub-symbolic expressions; colors, shapes and animations, for expressing emotions in an open-ended way. Here we present the design process and a user study of those expressions, where the results show that the use of these sub-symbolic expressions can work as a foundation to use as a creative tool, but still allowing for the communication to be situated. The inspiration taken from body movements proved to be very useful as a design input. It was also reflected in the way our subjects described the expressions

Designing for Social Navigation of Food Recipes,

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