In this paper we introduce a novel tangible interface for exploring dynamic equilibria using the metaphor of a traditional balance scale. Rather than comparing and identifying physical weight, our scale can be used for contrasting digital data in different domains. We do this by assigning virtual weight to objects, which physically affects the scale. Our goal is to communicate complex comparison mechanisms, by making them visible and graspable, and expose temporality, by non-instantaneous computation results and over time changes reflected in the behavior of the scale. In this paper we present the interface and discuss the different interaction techniques possible with it.
Many architecture professionals want to assist people living in substandard conditions and those who have been affected by human-made or natural disasters. 2006 TED Prize recipient Cameron Sinclair (co-founder of Architecture for Humanity) sought a way for architecture professionals to work together, from anywhere in the world. Hot Studio, Inc. (San Francisco, USA) collaborated with Sun Microsystems (San Jose, USA) to create the Open Architecture Network (OAN): a web-based, open-source database to support architectural collaboration. Using the OAN, architectural project teams can share, review, and discuss designs, access tools to efficiently manage projects, engage with a community to share and discuss ideas, and more. The OAN launched in April 2007, so details around site adoption and user behavior are limited. By the time of the conference, additional features will launch, and we will have more information about how the site's experience is meeting user needs.
The next big step in video-based life logging is to exploit image processing and context inference from multiple sensors. Automatic segmentation and classification of personal experiences recorded with always-on wearable devices may forge entirely new pragmatics of human interaction. Yet, how do we anticipate social dynamics to tackle critical ethical matters? Are we supposed to fit a design concept onto a to this point non-existent market or technology? We aim to contribute to the digital age discourse by making this emergent domain viable for responsible iterative design approaches. This sketch outlines how we address the novel technology at hand by integrating technical development and design strategies in a convergent full-circle approach.
The mobile phone is one of the most commonly carried pieces of personal, readily accessible digital technologies. Beyond just voice calls, they function as digital cameras, PDAs, internet consoles, and email and instant messaging clients. The demand for improved operating systems and programming languages has given rise to a wide range of hardware and programming APIs. However, the designers of these mobile phone applications are continuously challenged with two inescapable aggravations: (1) how will users locate and download the application to their mobile phone and (2) will the application be compatible with their phone's hardware? We undertook the challenge to discover the design space of mobile phone applications that required no downloading or installation procedure and would operate on any mobile phone regardless of the phone's network, carrier, operating system, age, or hardware. We developed and deployed two such applications - Tree-Map Arrival Information and Group Voting.
Everyone talks about increasing safety, security and privacy on the web. But in spite of decades of work to achieve these ends, people still find it hard to know which individuals they meet on the Internet they can trust. Worse still, many sites, including classified ad giant Craigslist, only function when both parties act honestly, an outcome Game Theory has shown to be least likely in such a situation. If the web is to reach its maximum utility, this Prisoner's Dilemma of the Web must be resolved. In this paper, we detail the causes - and existing remedies for - distrust between individuals on the web. By outlining seven strategies for fostering peer-to-peer trust, we set up a scenario that combines a few of these strategies with Craigslist to create a theoretical model for breaking the web's Prisoner's Dilemma.
Rhetorics of Web 2.0 emphasize the sharing of user generated content. But how much content is actually openly shared? Is the Web really an open arena for content, or more suited to sharing in small groups? Will sharing change as more people become aware of potential legal and social pitfalls? Will media services increasingly be used for personal archive? As designers, we need to understand how individuals are making decisions about what to share, and with whom to share. We need to be cognizant of possible differences in social and cultural norms among different populations. We present a sketch of sharing defaults on a number of well-known social sites, and of user practices in a photo-sharing, social networking site, Flickr. Our project is in its first phase, intended to scope a broader study of sharing practices and drive application design ideation.
Through results gathered from a large-scale online survey, this paper empirically investigates the assessment of aesthetic in 11 common data visualization techniques. Visualizations represented in this study were generated from an identical hierarchical dataset and visually normalized to avoid unwanted implications of default application parameters or personal preferences. Results from subjective participant response shows data visualizations that portray non-orthogonal, organic qualities, receive higher aesthetic rankings. Provided rationale further correlate these qualities with animate attributes of motion, growth and evolution, positively affecting the perception of their beauty.
Social media websites like flickr and del.icio.us enable collaboration by allowing users to easily share content on the web through tagging. To provide a similar advantage to the enterprise, we have designed a tagging system for audio conversations. We are developing telephonic interfaces, where participants of a spoken conversation can opt to archive and share it. We have also developed a web-based visual interface that enables annotation, search, and retrieval of archived conversations. In this interface, we have focused on visualizing relationships between users, tags and conversations, which will enable efficient searching and browsing, and more importantly, provide contextualized interaction histories. A pilot user study, conducted using simulated data, showed that our social network visualization was effective.
Recycling bins are grossly underutilized products as well as being often misused. The EPA estimates that while 75 percent of Americans trash contents can be recycled, only 25 percent actually is [3]. In addition, contamination of recyclables, either from food items or other non-recyclables, is a widespread problem. In Washington University, for example, almost 70 percent of material contents in recycling bins are deemed unusable due to contamination [6]. Three factors that greatly affect recycling behaviors are awareness, convenience, and opportunity. Using observational and interview data, and informed by the literature, we present here our preliminary findings regarding user recycling behaviors. From this data we have developed a holistic solution to help increase purposeful recycling behaviors on a college campus.
This paper reports on research-driven design of social technologies. It describes an exploratory field study evaluating and re-conceiving blogging technologies - a mobile phone, a mobile blog, a Weblog and synchronization software - to support personal change, in this case quitting smoking. We briefly describe the design of the blogging technologies and summarise the outcomes of their extended use by four people trying to quit smoking in terms of technology usage, domestication and acceptance and, smoking cessation. We then document some notable features of failure, both of the technology and the quit attempts, describing how understanding the nuances and subtleties of failure highlights important design considerations. Finally, we present some methodological and design recommendations emerging from: a design workshop involving the participants in the field study; and a desktop design exercise.
'Bowl' is a simple token-based media player designed as a self-contained interface for children between 2--4. The project focuses on the use of tangible interfaces for handling media in relevant physical and social contexts - in this case the home environment. An initial investigation of containers leads to the consideration of bowls as interfaces for viewing, sharing and presenting media. Subsequent investigation of everyday objects leads to the use of toys and a range of familiar items as tokens with relationships to media. The resulting prototype and extensive user-testing shows strong relationships between playful activities and media consumption. The project extends a rich history of previous work in token-based interfaces by implementing a long-term, iterative design and testing process in contextually relevant situations.
"Being Mondrian" is a public installation aimed for interactive drawing utilizing a novel tangible interface. Abstract painting has been conceived as a monopoly permitted to professional artists with special techniques. However, at the same time, such art works are so apparently simple that ordinary people dare to think to simulate them. To substantiate the dream of being an artist, we proposed a set of interactive drawing system composed of "Drawing Kit" and "Mondrian Stage". People can draw black lines and colored rectangles generated by the intersection of the lines as they put the Kit, the tangible interface, on the Stage which plays a role as both a functional and a representational space. Through this interactive drawing system, we did not intend to let people to merely copy Mondrian's masterpiece, but create their own digital artworks.
To design successful user experiences for Google's communication products, it is important for us to understand their users' communication behaviours beyond what they do with the product itself. To make informed design decisions, product development teams often require us to build this understanding in a matter of weeks. This paper describes a research technique for building an understanding of people's social networks and communication tools by only spending 60 minutes each with a small number of research participants. It also describes examples of the type of insights this technique can yield.
We explore the opportunities and constraints for sharing personal and 'social group' communications through the use of multi-location interactive image displays and mobile image capture devices. Accordingly, we seek to provide a better understanding of the use of such technologies in supporting close tie relationships through the implementation of Collage, an interactive image display. Collage has been designed for immediate and lightweight modes of sharing though synchronous and asynchronous interaction between users and digital images/text. We report on the results of a technology probe with three related families over a ten-week period. Through interviews and participant data we provide a rich account of their use with the system, emergent practices and usability issues that enabled and limited their experience of sharing digital family images. We also show evidence for user driven resolution of ambiguities in the system as an enabler of new experiences - What might be called "happy coincidences".
With the growing use of personal and ubiquitous computing technology, an increase is seen in utilizing aesthetic aspects for designing interactive systems. The use of aesthetic interpretations, however, has differed in different applications, often lacking a coherent and holistic meaning of aesthetics. In this paper we provide an account on aesthetics, utilizing the pragmatist perspective, which can be used as a framework to design for aesthetic experience in interactive systems. We discuss seven major themes of aesthetic experience. Using our framework we discuss two design examples. In the first example - Panorama, the framework is used to inform the design process and making design decisions for supporting aesthetic social awareness in an academic work environment. In the second example - Virtual Dancer, the framework is used to analyze the aesthetics of an entertainment experience and to elicit further improvements. In the end we discuss the role of aesthetics in the design of interactive systems.
In this sketch, we present a design research approach which led to the development of Zync, a synchronized video player that provides a social viewing experience for online videos. This approach utilizes an iterative design process, focuses on research pragmatics over semantics, and examines the landscape of existing tools and technologies to identify the best venue for deployment. In lieu of creating an entirely new collaboration tool, we chose to build Zync as a plug-in module for a popular instant messaging (IM) client to help foster conversations where they normally occur. Zync augments the IM experience by enabling the inclusion of online videos within these conversations. Based on Zync usage data, we identified three classes of people who share videos via IM, obtained insight into what people want to watch, and created a framework to understand how people behave and hold conversations in synchronicity with temporal media.
Designing for an aging population challenges many conventional notions of traditional product design and requires a more detailed description of the attributes that define the breadth of "product" manifestations. By their very nature, products and systems designed for the aging population must better connect their functionality with the user's abilities, environment, and living practices. This approach requires interdisciplinary methods aimed at designing for user experience, focusing on interaction rather than packing each appliance with features and gadgets. Through the careful scripting of product interactions supported by visual form language, meaningful experiences can be generated to improve user confidence and efficiency which ultimately yield empowerment. This Design Research Study uses a collaborative project between Carnegie Mellon School of Design and GE Appliances to introduce some emerging themes and approaches in universal design to empower the aging population in support of autonomous living.
Matchmaking has moved online. More and more people actively seekromantic partners using specialized dating websites. Afteridentifying potential partners on the Internet, “onlinedaters” invest considerable time, effort and emotion gettingoffline setting up activities, locations and times to meetface-to-face. And once offline, daters spend a lot of moneyexploring the potential for compatibility with people met online.While online dating services have optimized the profile-basedsearch and match component of “matchmaking”, few offersupport for the time-consuming and potentially nerve-wrackingprocess of planning those first face-to-face meetings. Thisresearch sketch introduces an ongoing project aimed at helpingpeople who meet online connect offline.
Normally, the paradigm used to study user experience is based on the hypothetic-deductive method but this paradigm can present disadvantages like low results reliability or difficulties to carry out field studies. In this article, a method based on the Socratic paradigm is suggested for analyzing the user-product psychological relationship. Nowadays the Socratic paradigm is only used in some post-modern psychology schools, which applies Socratic techniques for psychological exploration and treatment. Based on this principle an expert-to-expert conversation is established between psychologist and patient. The user can be an expert in the usage of a product whilst the interviewer is an expert in UX studies. Thus, much more reliable information of the user-product relationship can be obtained. Applying this paradigm as a constructive and systematic event allows for increasing the reliability in qualitative user experience studies.
