e-Spective: pervasive computing presenting a new perspective of the city

As urban environments become increasingly hybrid physical and digital spaces, designing for public computing in city contexts requires researchers and practitioners to explore the intersections between spatial and physical context, sociality and pervasive computing technologies. This paper presents the e-Spective research project bringing together expertise from the fields of architecture, sociology, human-computer interaction, and computer science to explore inner city socialising and to design and evaluate in situ a public pervasive computer system prototype facilitating sociality by adding to a city precinct a digital layer of information about people, places and activities adapted to each individual user’s own physical and social context. Making invisible dimensions of the inhabited physical space around you visible, the prototype system augments the city and contributes to the ongoing reshaping of urban life by facilitating new kinds of behaviour and situated social interactions in public spaces

A longitudinal review of Mobile HCI research Methods

This paper revisits a research methods survey from 2003 and contrasts it with a survey from 2010. The motivation is to gain insight about how mobile HCI research has evolved over the last decade in terms of approaches and focus. The paper classifies 144 publications from 2009 published in 10 prominent outlets by their research methods and purpose. Comparing this to the survey for 2000-02 show that mobile HCI research has changed methodologically. From being almost exclusively driven by engineering and applied research, current mobile HCI is primarily empirically driven, involves a high number of field studies, and focus on evaluating and understanding, as well as engineering. It has also become increasingly multi-methodological, combining and diversifying methods from different disciplines. At the same time, new opportunities and challenges have emerged

Indexicality:understanding mobile human-computer interaction in context

A lot of research has been done within the area of mobile computing and context-awareness over the last 15 years, and the idea of systems adapting to their context has produced promising results for overcoming some of the challenges of user interaction with mobile devices within various specialized domains. However, today it is still the case that only a limited body of theoretically grounded knowledge exists that can explain the relationship between users, mobile system user interfaces, and their context. Lack of such knowledge limits our ability to elevate learning from the mobile systems we develop and study from a concrete to an abstract level. Consequently, the research field is impeded in its ability to leap forward and is limited to incremental steps from one design to the next. Addressing the problem of this void, this article contributes to the body of knowledge about mobile interaction design by promoting a theoretical approach for describing and understanding the relationship between user interface representations and user context. Specifically, we promote the concept of indexicality derived from semiotics as an analytical concept that can be used to describe and understand a design. We illustrate the value of the indexicality concept through an analysis of empirical data from evaluations of three prototype systems in use. Based on our analytical and empirical work we promote the view that users interpret informatio