Enhancing Creativity in Interaction Design: Alternative Design Brief

This paper offers a critique of the design brief as it is currently used in teaching interaction design and proposes an alternative way of developing it. Such a design brief requires the exploration of alternative application domains for an already developed technology. The paper presents a case study where such a novel type of design brief has been offered to the students taking part in a collaborative design project and discusses how it supported divergent thinking and creativity as well as helped enhancing the learning objectives

Using Frustration in the Design of Adaptive Videogames

In efforts to attract a wider audience, videogames are beginning to incorporate adaptive gameplay mechanics. Unlike the more traditional videogame, adaptive games can cater the gaming experience to the individual user and not just a particular group of users as with the former. Affective videogames, games that respond to the user's emotional state, may hold the key to creating such gameplay mechanics. In this paper we discus how the emotion frustration may be used in the design of adaptive videogames and the ongoing research into its detection and measurement

Artefact Ecologies: Supporting Embodied Meeting Practices with Distance Access

Frameworks such as activity theory, distributed cognition and structuration theory, amongst others, have shown that detailed study of contextual settings where users work (or live) can help the design of interactive systems. However, these frameworks do not adequately focus on accounting for the materiality (and embodiment) of the contextual settings. Within the IST-EU funded AMIDA project (Augmented Multiparty Interaction with Distance Access) we are looking into supporting meeting practices with distance access. Meetings are inherently embodied in everyday work life and that material artefacts associated with meeting practices play a critical role in their formation. Our eventual goal is to develop a deeper understanding of the dynamic and embodied nature of meeting practices and designing technologies to support these. In this paper we introduce the notion of "artefact ecologies" as a conceptual base for understanding embodied meeting practices with distance access. Artefact ecologies refer to a system consisting of different digital and physical artefacts, people, their work practices and values and lays emphasis on the role artefacts play in embodiment, work coordination and supporting remote awareness. In the end we layout our plans for designing technologies for supporting embodied meeting practices within the AMIDA project. \u

Affective Videogames and Modes of Affective Gaming: Assist Me, Challenge Me, Emote Me

In this paper we describe the fundamentals of affective gaming from a physiological point of view, covering some of the origins of the genre, how affective videogames operate and current conceptual and technological capabilities. We ground this overview of the ongoing research by taking an in-depth look at one of our own early biofeedback-based affective games. Based on our analysis of existing videogames and our own experience with affective videogames, we propose a new approach to game design based on several high-level design heuristics: assist me, challenge me and emote me (ACE), a series of gameplay "tweaks" made possible through affective videogames

Evaluating research assessment: metrics-based analysis exposes implicit bias in REF2014 results

The recent UK research assessment exercise, REF2014, attempted to be as fair and transparent as possible. However, Alan Dix, a member of the computing sub-panel, reports how a post-hoc analysis of public domain REF data reveals substantial implicit and emergent bias in terms of discipline sub-areas (theoretical vs applied), institutions (Russell Group vs post-1992), and gender. While metrics are generally recognised as flawed, our human processes may be uniformly worse

To err is AI

In this work, we analyze the different contexts in which one chooses to integrate artificial intelligence into an interface and the implications of this choice in managing user interaction. While AI in systems can provide significant benefits, it is not infallible and can make errors that seriously affect users. We aim to understand how to design more robust human-AI systems so that these initial AI errors do not lead to more catastrophic failures. To prevent failures, it is essential to detect errors as early as possible and have clear mechanisms to repair them. However, detecting errors in AI systems can be challenging. Therefore, we examine various approaches to error detection and repair, including post-hoc estimation, the use of traces and ambiguity, and multiple sensor layers

Qualitative–Quantitative Reasoning: Thinking Informally About Formal Things

Qualitative–quantitative reasoning is the way we think informally about formal or numerical phenomena. It is ubiquitous in scientific, professional and day-to-day life. Mathematicians have strong intuitions about whether a theorem is true well before a proof is found – intuition that also drives the direction of new proofs. Engineers use various approximations and can often tell where a structure will fail. In computation we deal with order of magnitude arguments in complexity theory and data science practitioners need to match problems to the appropriate neural architecture or statistical method. Even in the supermarket, we may have a pretty good idea of about how much things will cost before we get to the checkout. This paper will explore some of the different forms of QQ–reasoning through examples including the author’s own experience numerically modelling agricultural sprays and formally modelling human–computer interactions. We will see that it is often the way in which formal and mathematical results become useful and also the importance for public understanding of key issues including Covid and climate change. Despite its clear importance, it is a topic that is left to professional experience, or sheer luck. In early school years pupils may learn estimation, but in later years this form of reasoning falls into the gap between arithmetic and formal mathematics despite being more important in adult life than either. The paper is partly an introduction to some of the general features of QQ-reasoning, and partly a ‘call to arms’ for academics and educators