Keeping up appearances : interpretation of tangible artifact design

The design and interaction of physical game artifacts is becoming increasingly important for the design of digital tabletop games. In this paper a study is described investigating the differences in interpretations of realistic and abstract game artifacts comparing children and adults. A game was created on a digital tabletop as a carrier for the user evaluation presented in this paper. The appearance of the game artifacts was explored and a family of each of the artifacts was created. The interpretations of each of the individual artifacts and their different visual appearances were tested to determine whether children rank and interpret the functionalities of the artifacts differently than adults. The results showed that overall the understanding of abstract artifacts compared to realistic ones was best for both children and adults. It also indicated there was no significant difference in the interpretations of the realistic and abstract artifacts between children and adults

Persuasive Technology in the Real World: A Study of Long-Term Use of Activity Sensing Devices for Fitness

Persuasive technology to motivate healthy behavior is a growing area of research within HCI and ubiquitous computing. The emergence of commercial wearable devices for tracking health- and fitness-related activities arguably represents the first widespread adoption of dedicated ubiquitous persuasive technology. The recent ubiquity of commercial systems allows us to learn about their value and use in truly “in the wild” contexts and understand how practices evolve over long-term, naturalistic use. We present a study with 30 participants who had adopted wearable activity-tracking devices of their own volition and had continued to use them for between 3 and 54 months. The findings, which both support and contrast with those of previous research, paint a picture of the evolving benefits and practices surrounding these emerging technologies over long periods of use. They also serve as the basis for design implications for personal informatics technologies for long-term health and fitness support

Children's haptic experiences of tangible artifacts varying in hardness

In this paper we describe our investigations on the role of material hardness in the haptic experience of tangible artifacts. Without seeing the artifacts children had to rank their experience on a scale of two antonyms while touching and holding these artifacts. In this experiment it was shown that children have no problem ranking hardness. Two groups could be identified: soft artifacts were found to be cute, speedy and warm, e.g., and hard artifacts boring, sad and old-fashioned. We think that paying attention to this factor in the design of tangible user interfaces for children can improve their experience