Making grooves with needles: Using e-textiles to encourage gender diversity in embedded audio systems design

Historically, women have been excluded from engineering and computer science disciplines, and interactive audio is no exception. Relatively few women are involved with the designing and building of embedded audio systems with traditional tools such as microprocessors, but when embedded audio systems are built using e-textiles, much larger proportions of women become engaged with technology. In this paper we review theories for this gender disparity and the barriers women face in working with audio technology, and then present a comparison of survey data between an e-textile audio workshop and an audio platform user group. Extrapolating from the case study and the surveyed literature, we propose that flexibility in learning, communal dissemination of knowledge, and gendering of tools are prominent reasons why women engage with technology via e-textiles

Days of our lives: Family experiences of digital technology use

© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. This paper describes findings from a workshop, with 11 parents of children under 12 years of age, that explored family experiences of digital technology use. We found that technology experiences within everyday family life are complicated and interlinked. We highlight four experiences that featured most prominently with our participants: apprehension, ambivalence, compromise and conflict. In addition, we discuss how family values govern these experiences and how families use digital technology. This work contributes to current understandings of how family values guide technology practices. These early findings suggest that deeper understandings of family values; how they are shared, negotiated and put into action, will help inform the design of future technologies that not only support families' practices and activities, but also their experiences and aspirations

Synaesthetic-Translation Tool: Synaesthesia as an Interactive Material for Ideation

While the subject of synaesthesia has inspired various practitioners and has been utilized as a design material in different formats, research has not so far presented a way to apply this captivating phenomenon as a source of design material in HCI. The purpose of this paper is to explore the translative property of synaesthesia and introduce a tangible way to use this intangible phenomenon as an interactive design material source in HCI and design. This paper shares a card-based tool that enables practitioners to use the translative property of synaesthesia for the sake of ideation. It further introduces a potential area of where this tool may be utilized for exploring user experiences. This work has implications for the CHI community as it attempts to share a practical way of using the intangible property of synaesthesia to explore potential user experiences

New Interactions: The relationship between journalists and audiences mediated by Google Glass

From the first studies of wearables inside MIT’s Media Lab decades ago to the smartwatches and smartglasses sold these days as consumer devices, wearables provide clues to better understand new paths to record and distribute information. Google Glass was one of the first immersive products, allowing users to capture and stream information to the Web, creating screen-based micro-interactions displayed in front of the user’s eye or sent to their smartphone. The first-person perspective is not new, but network-enabled Glass creates a novel state of streamed information and images, potentially making the journalist an avatar of the audience. Possibilities also lay in the development of Glass-specific ambient or calm communications—providing users with seamless information updates. Our study explores how Glass, attached to the head of the journalist-broadcaster, creates alternative behaviours in those captured due to its almost-invisible camera. These and other aspects of Glass will be explored during this paper, recalling experiences made across multiple test beds in the United Kingdom, Porto Alegre, Brazil and the Sahara Desert. The lessons acquired from these experiences allow us to understand not only new ways to inform, but new relationships between journalists, newsrooms and the public

Gender and Videogames: The political valency of Lara Croft

The Face: Is Lara a feminist icon or a sexist fantasy? Toby Gard: Neither and a bit of both. Lara was designed to be a tough, self-reliant, intelligent woman. She confounds all the sexist cliches apart from the fact that she’s got an unbelievable figure. Strong, independent women are the perfect fantasy girls—the untouchable is always the most desirable (Interview with Lara’s creator Toby Gard in The Face magazine, June 1997)

Voice interfaces in everyday life

Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) are becoming ubiquitously available, being embedded both into everyday mobility via smartphones, and into the life of the home via ‘assistant’ devices. Yet, exactly how users of such devices practically thread that use into their everyday social interactions remains underexplored. By collecting and studying audio data from month-long deployments of the Amazon Echo in participants’ homes—informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis—our study documents the methodical practices of VUI users, and how that use is accomplished in the complex social life of the home. Data we present shows how the device is made accountable to and embedded into conversational settings like family dinners where various simultaneous activities are being achieved. We discuss how the VUI is finely coordinated with the sequential organisation of talk. Finally, we locate implications for the accountability of VUI interaction, request and response design, and raise conceptual challenges to the notion of designing ‘conversational’ interfaces

Cultural robotics : The culture of robotics and robotics in culture

Copyright 2013 Samani et al.; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly citedIn this paper, we have investigated the concept of "Cultural Robotics" with regard to the evolution o social into cultural robots in the 21st Century. By defining the concept of culture, the potential development of culture between humans and robots is explored. Based on the cultural values of the robotics developers, and the learning ability of current robots, cultural attributes in this regard are in the process of being formed, which would define the new concept of cultural robotics. According to the importance of the embodiment of robots in the sense of presence, the influence of robots in communication culture is anticipated. The sustainability of robotics culture based on diversity for cultural communities for various acceptance modalities is explored in order to anticipate the creation of different attributes of culture between robot and humans in the futurePeer reviewe

In the Living Room: Second Screens and TV Audiences

© The Author(s) 2015. This article is based on a small pilot project exploring the role, function, and meanings of second screens and companion apps for TV audiences that is contextualized by existing academic audience research. This is mapped alongside industry research and academic debate about second screens. The results illustrate some disjunction between industry expectations of usage and viewers' everyday experiences. I argue that industries' tendency to conflate "viewer" with "fan" indicates a less than nuanced understanding of the television/companion app audience. Further, the lean forward/lean back binary applied to digital media users and television audiences respectively points to a problematic not addressed in much industry literature, while the respondents for this research indicate a complex interplay between the pleasures of viewing that incorporates the social and the personal with the second screen and the TV text