Combining software engineering and design thinking practices in the ideation process of augmented digital experiences

Designing augmented and tangible experiences that intertwine human practices and expectations, interaction spaces and complex digital artifacts is a complex and multifaceted task that relies upon iterative and multidisciplinary ideation processes. Design thinking techniques have been traditionally used in ideation of such digital artifacts. In this paper, we posit that integrating some software engineering practices can improve ideation by providing a structure to the process and helping to build a shared and permanently documented design rationale. It is not a matter of software engineering versus design thinking but a question of developing a holistic understanding of technological development where discipline and creativity, rationality and emotions and quality centered and people centered coexist. Based on this assumption, we conceived a software tool called CoDICE that offers a virtual co-design space where augmented digital experiences are documented and analyzed in a shared and distributed way. The paper discusses how CoDICE contributes to alleviate some problems of co-design events including the need to support multiple co-design spaces, make explicit the co-design process and its goals, support documentation, justify design decisions, explore multiple ideas and generate a shared representation of the outcomes. Two scenarios are used to illustrate the tool utility: short-term co-design workshops in which the tool enabled multidisciplinary teams of novice designers to explore and structure their ideas and a long-term co-design project where the tool facilitated traceability, documentation, the reuse of design components and the shared elaboration of the design rationale and evolution of the deployed technologies.meSch project European Commission FP7 (600851

ECCE Toolkit: Prototyping Sensor-Based Interaction

Building and exploring physical user interfaces requires high technical skills and hours of specialized work. The behavior of multiple devices with heterogeneous input/output channels and connectivity has to be programmed in a context where not only the software interface matters, but also the hardware components are critical (e.g., sensors and actuators). Prototyping physical interaction is hindered by the challenges of: (1) programming interactions among physical sensors/actuators and digital interfaces; (2) implementing functionality for different platforms in different programming languages; and (3) building custom electronic-incorporated objects. We present ECCE (Entities, Components, Couplings and Ecosystems), a toolkit for non-programmers that copes with these issues by abstracting from low-level implementations, thus lowering the complexity of prototyping small-scale, sensor-based physical interfaces to support the design process. A user evaluation provides insights and use cases of the kind of applications that can be developed with the toolkit.This research project has been partially funded by the EU FP7 project meSch (Grant agreement 600851) and national Spanish project CREAx (TIN2014-56534-R). We thank participants of the TEI 2014 studio and the DEI Laboratory staff and students at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid for their valuable feedback

Light on horizontal interactive surfaces: Input space for tabletop computing

In the last 25 years we have witnessed the rise and growth of interactive tabletop research, both in academic and in industrial settings. The rising demand for the digital support of human activities motivated the need to bring computational power to table surfaces. In this article, we review the state of the art of tabletop computing, highlighting core aspects that frame the input space of interactive tabletops: (a) developments in hardware technologies that have caused the proliferation of interactive horizontal surfaces and (b) issues related to new classes of interaction modalities (multitouch, tangible, and touchless). A classification is presented that aims to give a detailed view of the current development of this research area and define opportunities and challenges for novel touch- and gesture-based interactions between the human and the surrounding computational environment. © 2014 ACM.This work has been funded by Integra (Amper Sistemas and CDTI, Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation) and TIPEx (TIN2010-19859-C03-01) projects and Programa de Becas y Ayudas para la Realización de Estudios Oficiales de Máster y Doctorado en la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 2010

SEMA4A: An ontology for emergency notification systems accessibility

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Expert Systems with Applications. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. Reaching this goal is challenging due to users’ diversity: people with disabilities, elderly and children, and other vulnerable groups. Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a typhoon approaching) so the ability to transmit notifications to different kind of users is a crucial feature for such systems. In this work an ontology was developed by investigating different sources: accessibility guidelines, emergency response systems, communication devices and technologies, taking into account the different abilities of people to react to different alarms (e.g. mobile phone vibration as an alarm for deafblind people). We think that the proposed ontology addresses the information needs for sharing and integrating emergency notification messages over distinct emergency response information systems providing accessibility under different conditions and for different kind of users.Ministerio de Educación y Cienci

Coproduction as an Approach to Technology-Mediated Citizen Participation in Emergency Management

Social and mobile computing open up new possibilities for integrating citizens’ information, knowledge, and social capital in emergency management (EM). This participation can improve the capacity of local agencies to respond to unexpected events by involving citizens not only as first line informants, but also as first responders. This participation could contribute to build resilient communities aware of the risks they are threatened by and able to mobilize their social capital to cope with them and, in turn, decrease the impact of threats and hazards. However for this participation to be possible organizations in charge of EM need to realize that involving citizens does not interfere with their protocols and that citizens are a valuable asset that can contribute to the EM process with specific skills and capabilities. In this paper we discuss the design challenges of using social and mobile computing to move to a more participatory EM process that starts by empowering both citizens and organizations in a coproduction service envisioned as a partnership effort. As an example, we describe a case study of a participatory design approach that involved professional EM workers and decision makers in an effort to understand the challenges of using technology-based solutions to integrate citizen skills and capabilities in their operation protocols. The case study made it possible to identify specific roles that citizens might play in a crisis or disaster and to envision scenarios were technologies could be used to integrate their skills into the EM process. In this way the paper contributes to the roles and the scenarios of theory-building about coproduction in EM services.This work is supported by the project emerCien grant funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2012-09687) and by the grant PRX15/00184 funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education

Mining Patterns for Web-based Emergency Management Systems

6 pages, 1 figure.-- Contributed to: 4th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM2007, Delft, the Netherlands, May 13-16, 2007).Design patterns describe problems that occur recurrently, and specify the core of the solution in such a way that we can (re)use it in different contexts and applications. Although, web-based Emergency Management Systems domain is still in its nascent stages, there are design principles, real systems and design patterns from other related areas that can be a valuable source of knowledge to mine design patterns. From these sources we have created a patterns catalogue to assist novice designers on discovering what issues should be addressed to develop useful and successful systems. In this paper, we present the mining process and some patterns as example.This work is supported by the ARCE++ project (TSI2004-03394) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education (MEC) and a cooperation agreement between "Universidad Carlos III de Madrid" and "Dirección General de Protección Civil y Emergencias" (Ministry of the Interior).Publicad

Software support for multitouch interaction: the end-user programming perspective

Empowering users with tools for developing multitouch interaction is a promising step toward the materialization of ubiquitous computing. This survey frames the state of the art of existing multitouch software development tools from an end-user programming perspective.This research has been partially funded by the EUFP7 project meSch (grant agreement 600851 and CREAx grant (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity TIN2014-56534-R

Designing Mobile Applications for Emergency Response: Citizens Acting as Human Sensors

When an emergency occurs, citizens can be a helpful support for the operation centers involved in the response activities. As witnesses to a crisis, they initially can share updated and detailed information about what is going on. Moreover, thanks to the current technological evolution people are able to quickly and easily gather rich information and transmit it through different communication channels. Indeed, modern mobile devices embed several sensors such as GPS receivers, Wi-Fi, accelerometers or cameras that can transform users into well-equipped human sensors. For these reasons, emergency organizations and small and medium enterprises have demonstrated a growing interest in developing smart applications for reporting any exceptional circumstances. In this paper, we present a practical study about this kind of applications for identifying both limitations and common features.This work is supported by the project emerCien grant funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2012-09687)

A literature-based approach to annotation and browsing of Web resources

The emerging Semantic Web technologies critically depend on the availability of shared knowledge representations called ontologies, which are intended to encode consensual knowledge about specific domains. Currently, the proposed processes for building and maintaining those ontologies entail the joint effort of groups of representative domain experts, which can be expensive in terms of co-ordination and in terms of time to reach consensus. In this paper, literature-based ontologies, which can be initially developed by a single expert and maintained continuously, are proposed as preliminary alternatives to group-generated domain ontologies, or as early versions of them. These ontologies encode domain knowledge in the form of terms and relations along with the (formal or informal) bibliographical resources that define or deal with them, which makes them specially useful for domains in which a common terminology or jargon is not soundly established. A general-purpose metamodelling framework for literature-based ontologies - which has been used in two concrete domains - is described, along with a proposed methodology and a specific resource annotation approach. In addition, the implementation of a RDF-based Web resource browser - that uses the ontologies to guide the user in the exploration of a corpus of digital resources- is presented as a proof of concept

Personalized Alert Notifications and Evacuation Routes in Indoor Environments

The preparedness phase is crucial in the emergency management process for reaching an adequate level of readiness to react to potential threats and hazards. During this phase, emergency plans are developed to establish, among other procedures, evacuation and emergency escape routes. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can support and improve these procedures providing appropriate, updated and accessible information to all people in the affected zone. Current emergency management and evacuation systems do not adapt information to the context and the profile of each person, so messages received in the emergency might be useless. In this paper, we propose a set of criteria that ICT-based systems could achieve in order to avoid this problem adapting emergency alerts and evacuation routes to different situations and people. Moreover, in order to prove the applicability of such criteria, we define a mechanism that can be used as a complement of traditional evacuation systems to provide personalized alerts and evacuation routes to all kinds of people during emergency situations in working places. This mechanism is composed by three main components: CAP-ONES for notifying emergency alerts, NERES for defining emergency plans and generating personalized evacuation routes, and iNeres as the interface to receive and visualize these routes on smartphones. The usability and understandability of proposed interface has been assessed through a user study performed in a fire simulation in an indoor environment. This evaluation demonstrated that users considered iNeres easy to understand, to learn and to use, and they also found very innovative the idea to use smartphones as a support for escaping instead of static signals on walls and doors