Facilitating parent-teenager communication through interactive photo cubes

Because most teenagers strive for freedom and try to live autonomously, communication with their parents could be improved. It appeared from a literature review and a diary study that parent-teenager communication primarily addresses teenager-oriented everyday activities. However, it also showed teenagers have a substantial interest in getting to know their parents and their parents’ past. The study described in this paper seeks to address this opportunity by designing a product for parents and teenagers that facilitates communication about the past of the parents. The resulting design, called Cueb, is a set of interactive digital photo cubes with which parents and teenagers can explore individual and shared experiences and are triggered to exchange stories. An evaluation of a prototype of Cueb with four families showed that the participants felt significantly more triggered and supported to share their experiences and tell stories with Cueb’s full functionality (connecting cubes, switching, and locking photographs) than with limited functionality (shaking to display random photographs), similar to more traditional photo media

Exploring interactive systems using peripheral sounds

Our everyday interaction in and with the physical world, has facilitated the development of auditory perception skills that enable us to selectively place one auditory channel in the center of our attention and simultaneously monitor others in the periphery. We search for ways to leverage these auditory perception skills in interactive systems. In this paper, we present three working demonstrators that use sound to subtly convey information to users in an open office. To qualitatively evaluate these demonstrators, each of them has been implemented in an office for three weeks. We have seen that such a period of time, sounds can start shifting from the center to the periphery of the attention. Furthermore, we found several issues to be addressed when designing such systems, which can inform future work in this area.</p

Design for the periphery

In everyday life, we are able to perform various activities simultaneously without consciously paying attention to them. In line with Weiser and Brown s [25] vision of calm technology, we see major opportunities to leverage these skills in interaction with technology by designing interactions that can take place in the periphery of our attention. In order to design such interactions however, a detailed understanding of human attention skills is important. This paper therefore provides an extensive theoretical background on attention theory and links this to the design of interactive systems. The aim is to lay a basis for design-research on interaction design for the periphery

Interactive tangible objects as play pieces in a digital tabletop game

In this paper we present a new type of tangible interface for a digital tabletop game. This interface consists of an interactive tangible object; a play piece representing a bridge in the game ‘Weathergods’ [1]. The game players can not only physically change the appearance of the bridge to manipulate the digital world, the digital world in return can also affect the appearance of this play piece

Making history: intentional capture of future memories

Lifelogging' technology makes it possible to amass digital data about every aspect of our everyday lives. Instead of focusing on such technical possibilities, here we investigate the way people compose long-term mnemonic representations of their lives. We asked 10 families to create a time capsule, a collection of objects used to trigger remembering in the distant future. Our results show that contrary to the lifelogging view, people are less interested in exhaustively digitally recording their past than in reconstructing it from carefully selected cues that are often physical objects. Time capsules were highly expressive and personal, many objects were made explicitly for inclusion, however with little object annotation. We use these findings to propose principles for designing technology that supports the active reconstruction of our future past