Capturing, Exploring and Sharing People's Emotional Bond with Places in the City using Emotion Maps

The vision of ubiqitous computing is becoming increasingly realized through smart city solutions. With the proliferation of smartphones and smartwatches, alongside the rise of the quantified-self movement, a new technological layer is being added to the urban environment. This framework offers the possibility to capture, track, measure, visualize, and augment our experience of the urban environment. However, to that end, there is a growing need to better understand the triangular relationship between person, place, and technology. Urban HCI studies are increasingly focused on emotion and affect in order to create a better understanding of people's experience of the city, and investigate how technology could potentially play a role in augmenting this lived urban experience. For one example, artist Christian Nold used wearable technology to measure people's arousal levels as they walked freely through the urban environment, identifying locations in the city that evoked an emotional response from people. After these walks, people's arousal levels were superimposed on a map of the city and participants were asked to interpret their own data, resulting in aggregated, fully annotated, and beautifully visualized emotion maps of the city. Based on a systematic review of emotions maps in existing literature, this paper discusses the strengths, limitations and potential of capturing, representing, exploring and sharing this personal, geo-located emotion data with other people using emotion maps. This is part of a PhD project which seeks to understand how people's experiences of places in the urban environment are meaningful to them on a personal level. Although our analysis seems to indicate that emotion maps in their current form are only of limited efficacy in accurately capturing, representing and communicating the profound, complex emotional bond that people have with personally meaningful places in the city, there appears to be potential for the use of emotion maps as a provocation in a speculative design approach

Serious ‘Slow’ Game Jam - A Game Jam Model for Serious Game Design

The Serious ‘Slow’ Game Jam (SSGJ) is a new model for use in serious game design and research. Game jams contribute to creative, innovative and collaborative design, however, game jams for serious purposes require an alternative model that integrates domain experts within the jammer community to ensure the validity of their designs and content. Furthermore, a rigorous yet accessible design methodology is required to balance pedagogic and game aspects to support jammers, as well as to assist researchers in subsequent analysis and evaluation. A standard entertainment game jam model does not afford support for these aspects. The SSGJ model addresses these needs through an inclusive, collaborative, and creative framework for multidisciplinary teams, which includes: encouraging reflection and knowledge exchange; improving content validity; and providing continuous support and mentoring to participants. Reflection on the model highlights the importance of framing serious game jams as explicitly educational activities and embedding them into existing training contexts. The SSGJ model contributes to a collaborative serious game design methodology for the wider research community, irrespective of application domains

Walking & talking: Probing the urban lived experience

With ubiquitous mobile computing devices spreading throughout the urban environment of everyday life, there is a growing need to better understand person-place relationships and how technology can play a role in this urban experience. To this end, we propose a mobile methodology called Walking & Talking, an observed walking tour with participants through the city, which makes it easy and motivating for them to discuss their personal relationships with a place. The paper will describe a case study where the method was successfully applied to elicit rich, contextualized and intimate data, making it a useful research tool for the fields of urban interaction design and mobile & location aware technology

Let's Make this Fun!:Activities to Motivate Children and Teens to Complete Qestionnaires

Research in human-robot interaction and HCI frequently uses questionnaires, but these are boring, and participants, particularly children and teenagers, lack motivation to complete them. To improve participants' enjoyment, engagement, and motivation during this process, we propose adding a fun activity afterwards, where a completed questionnaire is needed for participation. We trialed several ideas during a slow game jam with 11-16-year-olds and a participatory design workshop for zoomorphic robots with 8-11-year-olds. Initial observations suggest these ideas were engaging for participants, helped with quick questionnaire completion, and helped build rapport between the researchers and participants. Therefore, we present guidelines for researchers wanting to use a fun activity or a series of fun activities like this. Further investigation is needed to establish if this approach has an impact on response quality.</p

Walking &amp; talking:Probing the urban lived experience

\u3cp\u3eWith ubiquitous mobile computing devices spreading throughout the urban environment of everyday life, there is a growing need to better understand person-place relationships and how technology can play a role in this urban experience. To this end, we propose a mobile methodology called Walking &amp; Talking, an observed walking tour with participants through the city, which makes it easy and motivating for them to discuss their personal relationships with a place. The paper will describe a case study where the method was successfully applied to elicit rich, contextualized and intimate data, making it a useful research tool for the fields of urban interaction design and mobile &amp; location aware technology.\u3c/p\u3