Turning Up the Heat on Energy Monitoring in the Home

The use of domestic electrical energy monitoring systems is becoming more common however gas usage has received comparatively little attention. This paper presents a new technique for monitoring gas-powered heating and hot water usage in the home integrated into a prototype energy monitoring platform. Compared to usual meter-based approaches this technique provides finer-grained usage data and uses simple temperature sensors. The main motivation for this work is to provide more meaningful energy information to users for inclusion in novel mobile and embedded applications. This is part of ongoing work which aims to reduce energy use among teenagers in the UK and make lasting attitude changes. The development and findings from a prototype deployed in a typical UK house over 7 days are presented. The findings highlight the utility of the technique and simplicity of the sensing approach. The novel requirements that inspired the development of this technique are also presented

Constructing the Cool Wall: A Tool to Explore Teen Meanings of Cool

This paper describes the development and exploration of a tool designed to assist in investigating ‘cool’ as it applies to the design of interactive products for teenagers. The method involved the derivation of theoretical understandings of cool from literature that resulted in identification of seven core categories for cool, which were mapped to a hierarchy. The hierarchy includes having of cool things, the doing of cool activities and the being of cool. This paper focuses on a tool, the Cool Wall, developed to explore one specific facet of the hierarchy; exploring shared understanding of having cool things. The paper describes the development and construction of the tool, using a heavily participatory approach, and the results and analysis of a study carried out over 2 days in a school in the UK. The results of the study both provide clear insights into cool things and enable a refined understanding of cool in this context. Two additional studies are then used to identify potential shortcomings in the Cool Wall methodology. In the first study participants were able to populate a paper cool wall with anything they chose, this revealed two potential new categories of images and that the current set of images covered the majority of key themes. In the second study teenagers interpretations of the meaning of the images included in the Cool Wall were explored, this showed that the majority of meanings were as expected and a small number of unexpected interpretations provided some valuable insights

Too Cool at School - Understanding Cool Teenagers

Cool can be thought about on three levels; the having of cool things, the doing of cool stuff and the being of cool. Whilst there is some understanding of cool products, the concept, of being cool is much more elusive to designers and developers of systems. This study examines this space by using a set of pre-prepared teenage personas as probes with a set of teenagers with the aim of better understanding what is, and isn’t cool about teenage behaviours. The study confirmed that teenagers are able to rank personas in order of cool and that the process of using personas can provide valuable insights around the phenomenon of cool. The findings confirm that cool is indeed about having cool things but in terms of behaviours cool can be a little bit, but not too, naughty

Constructing the Cool Wall: A tool to explore teen meanings of cool

This paper describes the development and exploration of a tool designed to assist in investigating ‘cool’ as it applies to the design of interactive products for teenagers. The method involved the derivation of theoretical understandings of cool from literature that resulted in identification of seven core categories for cool, which were mapped to a hierarchy. The hierarchy includes having of cool things, the doing of cool activities and the being of cool. This paper focuses on a tool, the Cool Wall, developed to explore one specific facet of the hierarchy; exploring shared understanding of having cool things. The paper describes the development and construction of the tool, using a heavily participatory approach, and the results and analysis of three studies. The first study was carried out over 2 days in a school in the UK. The results of the study both provide clear insights into cool things and enable a refined understanding of cool in this context. Two additional studies are then used to identify potential shortcomings in the Cool Wall methodology. In the second study participants were able to populate a paper cool wall with anything they chose, this revealed two potential new categories of images and that the current set of images covered the majority of key themes. In the third study teenagers interpretations of the meaning of the images included in the Cool Wall were explored, this showed that the majority of meanings were as expected and a small number of unexpected interpretations provided some valuable insights

Working Ethically in Participatory Research with Children

In this paper we present the ABCD framework for working ethically with children and young people in participatory design studies. This framework covers A – Agreement and consent made between all participants and interested parties; B – Behaviour of the research team towards the activities, requiring them to examine their motivations and to be honest in their interactions with children; C – Classroom experience in participatory sessions during which children are encouraged to discuss the nature of their participation, and D – Dissemination of the work and planning appropriate follow on activities to ensure that children are informed about the outputs from their contributions. We discuss the process by which we developed the framework, the challenges raised by working in this way with children and the role of values in participatory research

Understanding teen UX: Building a Bridge to the future

UX is a widely explored topic within HCI and has a large practitioners' community. However, the users considered in research and practice, are most often adults - since adults represent the largest technology market share. However teenagers represent a growing market of unique users, and more needs to be understood about this population, from a UX perspective. The theme of this workshop is Building a Bridge to the Future and the aim is to gather together academics and UX practitioners, interested in teen users specifically, in order to discuss experiences, understandings, insights and methods that we can use to comprehend teen UX now and explore how this may lead to the creation of better interactive products in the future. The workshop will also foster new collaborations, and define new research agendas to grow the research and literature in this area

Respecting, Facilitating and Recognising Children's Contributions in HCI (Extended Abstract)

Child Computer Interaction is concerned with the research, design, and evaluation of interactive technologies for children. Working with children in HCI is rewarding and fun but managing that work so that children are kept comfortable and can participate in meaningful ways is not always easy. This course is based on over 20 years’ experience of working with children in research, design, and evaluation. It will provide attendees with practical tips to organise sessions with children, with signposts to methods for research, design, and evaluation, and will specifically consider the ethics of children's participation with checklists to support us in doing our most ethical work possible

Capturing and Considering Idea Development in School Pupils’ Design Activities

There are many ways to look at the efficacy and value of the inclusion of children in design activities within HCI. Whilst the experience of participation can be highly beneficial for children, there is value, even if it is only to confirm the merit of the children's participation, in looking at the process of ideation and in considering to what extent children can ideate. Whilst design is by nature untethered, being able to capture and consider the diversity of design ideas across multiple design teams and to look at how such ideas are developed, can facilitate reflection and potentially improve practice. This work explores the diversity of ideas and the iterative development of ideas during the incremental design of a mobile game with 26 teen informants working in small groups over four design sessions. A method to visualize the evolution of ideas across design sessions is presented. Groups’ behaviors are mapped to three positions according to how conservative and how innovative the participants were. We explore the implications of our work for practitioners and researchers

The Iowa Homemaker vol.22, no.8

Keeping Up With Today, Virginia Brainard, page 4 Letter from Overseas, Martha Kitchen, page 5 Nutrition in the Nursery, Phyllis Lee, page 6 Iowa Staters Feed Wartime Washington, Eileen Dudgeon, page 7 What’s New in Home Economics, Helen Horton, page 8 We Britons Tighten Our Belts, Mr. and Mrs. Sharp, page 10 In a Teacher’s World, Betty Roth, page 11 Across Alumnae Desks, Mary Ellen Sullivan, page 12 Alums in the News, Janet Russell, page 14 We Recommend, Eileen Dudgeon, page 15 Textiles See Action, Ann Mason, page 1