BARTER:promoting local spending behavior

In the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, there is renewed interest in strategies for ensuring the future economic success of nations in a globalized marketplace. One of the main ideas being championed by governments is to promote growth by encouraging local spending, although it is not clear how to motivate this behavioral shift. Local currency initiatives are increasingly popular, though due to certain practicalities are rarely successful in fostering long term and widespread change in spending behaviors. We report on the development of a persuasive system (BARTER) that leverages mobile and ubiquitous technology to overcome some of the limitations of local currencies, while also providing users with the insight needed to determine for themselves how local spending may benet their community

Ebookness

Since the mid-2000s, the ebook has stabilized into an ontologically distinct form, separate from PDFs and other representations of the book on the screen. The current article delineates the ebook from other emerging digital genres with recourse to the methodologies of platform studies and book history. The ebook is modelled as three concentric circles representing its technological, textual and service infrastructure innovations. This analysis reveals two distinct properties of the ebook: a simulation of the services of the book trade and an emphasis on user textual manipulation. The proposed model is tested with reference to comparative studies of several ebooks published since 2007 and defended against common claims of ebookness about other digital textual genres

Investigating Genres and Perspectives in HCI Research on the Home

The home and domestic experiences have been studied from multiple points of view and disciplines, with an array of methodologies in the past twenty-five years in HCI. Given the attention to the home and the volume of research, what further areas of research might there be? Based on a critical analysis of 121 works on the topic, we present seven genres of domestic technology research in HCI: social routines in the home, ongoing domestic practices, the home as a testing ground, smart homes, contested values of a home, the home as a site for interpretation, and speculative visions of the home. We articulate dominant research perspectives in HCI, and we offer two complementary perspectives about how to investigate the domestic experience in future research: the material perspective and the first person perspective

Slow, Unaware Things Beyond Interaction

In this chapter we provide an overview of concepts and methods that have become part of our approach to gain a broader and deeper understanding of the relations between humans and technology. Over the years, our efforts have been to move past the field of interaction design’s dominant focus on human interaction with technology to develop a design-oriented understanding of human relations with technology. In our view, this begins by looking at technology beyond its functional, utilitarian, or instrumental value toward a broader set of perceptions and meanings. This theme is emblematic of a broader shift in interaction design and HCI. The first edition of this book contributed significantly to a trajectory in which designers and researchers see technology as a matter of experiences that are fun (Blythe and Hassenzahl in The semantics of fun: differentiating enjoyable experiences, 91–100, 2003), rich (Overbeeke et al. in Let’s make things engaging, 7–17, 2003), embodied (Dourish in Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2004), somaesthetic (Höök et al. in Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2016), spatio-temporal (McCarthy and Wright in Technology as experience. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2004), hedonic (Hassenzahl in The thing and i: understanding the relationship between user and product. 31–42, 2003), reflective (Sengers and Gaver in Proceedings of the 6th conference on designing interactive systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 99–108, 2006), and ludic (Gaver et al. in CHI’04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 885–900, 2004). However, understanding technology through more than solely a functional lens is only one part of more deeply viewing and inquiring into human-technology relations. We believe it is necessary to also understand people’s relations to technology beyond interaction and engineered experiences of technology. In the context of funology, we aim to critically and generatively contribute to the investigations of the experiences of technology to go beyond both instrumentalism and interaction. In many respects, interaction, like functionality, is too narrow of a lens for both understanding and influencing people’s experiences and relations to technology through design. Interaction is only one form of technology relations that happens explicitly, in present time, and consciously (Verbeek in What things do: philosophical reflections on technology, agency, and design. Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, University Park, Pa, 2015). What about relations to technology that manifest over time, incrementally, knowingly and unknowingly (or somewhere in between) that become part of our everyday lives

Games as (not) culture: a critical policy analysis of the economic agenda of Horizon 2020

This article presents a critical examination of European policy in relation to gamification. We begin by describing how gamification “traveled” as an idea, evolving from controversial yet persuasive buzzword to legitimate policy priority. We then focus on how gamification was represented in Horizon 2020: the flagship European Research & Development program from 2014 to 2020, worth nearly €80 billion of funding. The article argues that the ethically problematic aspects of gamification were removed through a process of policy capture that involved its assimilation in an established European network of research and small and medium enterprise (SME) actors. This process of “ethical neutering” is also observable in the actual funding calls, where the problematic assumptions of gamification around agency and manipulation are made invisible through a superficial commitment to vague and ill-defined criteria of responsible research and innovation

A Philosophy of “Doing” in the Digital

Playing in counterpoint with the general theoretical orientation of the book, this chapter does not focus its attention on the recording and archiving capabilities of the digital medium. Instead, it proposes an understanding of the digital medium that focuses on its disclosing various forms of “doing.” Gualeni’s chapter begins by offering an understanding of “doing in the digital” that methodologically separates “doing as acting” from “doing as making.” After setting its theoretical framework, the chapter discusses an “interactive thought experiment” designed by the author that is analyzed as a digital artifact leveraging both dimensions of “doing in the digital” for philosophical purposes. In extreme synthesis, one could say that this chapter is about several kinds of soups