Dealing with mobility: Understanding access anytime, anywhere

The rapid and accelerating move towards the adoption and use of mobile technologies has increasingly provided people and organisations with the ability to work away from the office and on the move. The new ways of working afforded by these technologies are often characterised in terms of access to information and people ‘anytime, anywhere’. This paper presents a study of mobile workers that highlights different facets of access to remote people and information, and different facets of anytime, anywhere. Four key factors in mobile work are identified from the study: the role of planning, working in ‘dead time’, accessing remote technological and informational resources, and monitoring the activities of remote colleagues. By reflecting on these issues, we can better understand the role of technology and artefact use in mobile work and identify the opportunities for the development of appropriate technological solutions to support mobile workers

Is the writing on the wall for tabletops?

We describe an ethnographic study that explores how low tech and new tech surfaces support participation and collaboration during a workshop breakout session. The low tech surfaces were post-it notes and large sheets of paper. The new tech surfaces were writeable walls and a multi-touch tabletop. Four groups used the different surfaces during three phases: i) brief presentation of position papers and discussion of themes, ii) the creation of a group presentation and iii) a report back session. Participation and collaboration varied depending on the physical, technological and social factors at play when using the different surfaces. We discuss why this is the case, noting how new shareable surfaces may need to be constrained to invite participation in ways that are simply taken for granted because of their familiarity when using low tech materials

Articulating a Patient-Centered Design Space for Cancer Journeys

Cancer journeys, encompassing patients’ cancer experiences through survivorship, are complex and diverse. Individuals must cope with numerous physical and emotional challenges, balancing clinical tasks alongside responsibilities of daily life. Understanding the breadth of factors that contribute to a patient’s cancer experience presents a critical challenge in developing holistic patient-centered technology. To further our understanding of the cancer journey, we conducted focus groups and interviews with 31 breast cancer patients. We present a cancer journey framework depicting the responsibilities, challenges, and personal impacts patients face while transitioning from diagnosis through post-treatment survivorship. Through this work, we aim to aid the development of health tools that consider a patient’s cancer journey and health needs more broadly, supporting patient’s health management alongside the complexities and priorities of daily life

Design for network communities

Collaboration has long been of considerable interest in the CHI community. This paper proposes and explores the concept of network communities as a crucial part of this discussion. Network communities are a form of technology-mediated environment that foster a sense of community among users. We consider several familiar systems and describe the shared characteristics these systems have developed to deal with critical concerns of collaboration. Based on our own experience as designers and users of a variety of network communities, we extend this initial design space along three dimensions: the articulation of a persistent sense of location, the boundary tensions between real and virtual worlds, and the emergence and evolution of community.

Context-Aware Computing with Sound

We propose audio networking: using ubiquitously available sound hardware (i.e. speakers, sound-cards and microphones) for low-bandwidth, wireless networking. A variety of location- and context-aware applications that use audio networking are presented including a location system, a pick-and-drop interface and a framework for embedding digital attachments in voice notes or telephone conversations. Audi

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. © 2010 Springer-Verlag

The effective combination of haptic and auditory textural information

With the increasing availability and quality of auditory and haptic means of interaction, it is not unusual to incorporate many modalities in interfaces rather than the purely visual. The user can be powerfully affected however when information presented in different modalities are combined to become multimodal. Providing interface designers with the means to implement haptic-audio interfaces might result in adverse effects to interaction unless they are also equipped with structured knowledge on how to select effective combinations of such information. This work introduces `Integration of Information' as one important dimension of haptic-audio interaction and explores its effects in the context of multimodal texture perception. The range and resolution of available textures through force feedback interaction is a design consideration that might benefit from the addition of audio. This work looks at the effect of combining auditory and haptic textures on people's judgment of the roughness of a virtual surface. The combined haptic-audio percepts will vary in terms of how congruent they are in the information they convey regarding the frequency of bumps or ridges on the virtual surface. Three levels of integration (conflicting, redundant, or complementary) are described and their possible implications discussed in terms of enhancing texture perception with force-feedback devices. Keywords: Haptic, audio, force-feedback, texture perception, multimodal information processing, intersensory integration