A designerly critique on enchantment

To develop the concept of user experience in HCI, McCarthy et al. introduce the notion of enchantment in interaction design. They describe five sensibilities that support exploration and evaluation in design for enchantment. In this paper, we discuss design for enchantment in light of our approach to design for interaction, called design for meaningful mediation. Based on our experiences from case studies, we argue that ‘considering the whole person with feelings, desires and anxieties’, one of the sensibilities McCarthy et al. formulate, influences the desirability and realisation of the other four sensibilities. By way of case studies, we show how we explored the link between ‘the whole person’ and desired interaction experience in a designerly way. We place enchantment in a context of other interaction experiences and demonstrate possible design techniques relevant to design for interaction experiences, including enchantment.     

Sound,paper and memorabilia: resources for a simpler digital photography

In this paper we reflect on a body of work to develop a simpler form of digital photography. We give three examples of ‘Less is More’ thinking in this area which are directed and inspired by naturalistic user behaviours and reactions to design ideas. Each example happens to review the place of an old technology in the new scheme of things, and challenges a technological trend in the industry. Hence, we consider the role of sound in photography to recommend audiophotographs rather than short video clips as a new media form. We look again at the role of paper in photo sharing and recommend its support and augmentation against the trend towards screen-based viewing. Finally, we consider the role of physical souvenirs and memorabilia alongside photographs, to recommend their use as story triggers and containers, in contrast to explicit multimedia presentations. The implications for simple computing are discussed. This paper originated from the International Forum ‘Less is More—Simple computing in an age of complexity’, 27–28 April 2005, Cambridge UK.     

Swiping paper: the second hand, mundane artifacts, gesture and collaboration

It is widely recognised that paper remains a pervasive resource for collaboration and yet there has been uncertain progress in developing technologies that aim to enhance paper documents with computational capabilities. In this article, we discuss the design of a technology that interweaves developments in hardware and materials, electronics and software, and seeks to create new affinities between digital content and paper. The design of the technology drew from findings from naturalistic studies of the uses of paper, particularly when considering how ‘users’ might ‘interact’ with the augmented technology. We briefly review these studies and discuss the results of an evaluation of the emerging technology. Analysis of the fine details of the conduct of participants in these assessments suggest how, even when we design simple forms of interaction with a device, these can be shaped and transformed by the participation and collaboration of others.     

Wiki-supported collaborative learning in primary education: How a dialogic space is created for thinking together

This paper explores how wikis may be used to support primary education students’ collaborative interaction and how such an interaction process can be characterised. The overall aim of this study is to analyse the collaborative processes of students working together in a wiki environment, in order to see how primary students can actively create a shared context for learning in the wiki. Educational literature has already reported that wikis may support collaborative knowledge-construction processes, but in our study we claim that a dialogic perspective is needed to accomplish this. Students must develop an intersubjective orientation towards each others’ perspectives, to co-construct knowledge about a topic. For this purpose, our project utilised a ‘Thinking Together’ approach to help students develop an intersubjective orientation towards one another and to support the creation of a ‘dialogic space’ to co-construct new understanding in a wiki science project. The students’ asynchronous interaction process in a primary classroom—which led to the creation of a science text in the wiki—was analysed and characterised, using a dialogic approach to the study of CSCL practices. Our results illustrate how the Thinking Together approach became embedded within the wiki environment and in the students’ collaborative processes. We argue that a dialogic approach for examining interaction can be used to help design more effective pedagogic approaches related to the use of wikis in education and to equip learners with the competences they need to participate in the global knowledge-construction era.     

Improving accessibility with user-tailored interfaces

The first stage in the design of a user interface is the quest for its ‘typical user’, an abstract generalization of each user of the application. However, in web systems and other scenarios where the application can be used by dozens of different kinds of users, the identification of this ‘typical user’ is quite difficult, if not impossible. Our proposal is to avoid the construction of interactive dialogs during the design stage, building them dynamically once the specific cognitive, perceptual and motor requirements of the current user are known: that is, during the execution stage. This is the approach used by GADEA, an intelligent user interface management system (UIMS) able to separate the functionality of an application from its interface in real time. The system adapts the components of the interface depending on the information stored in a user model which is continuously updated by a small army of data-gathering agents.     

How Can I Help You? Call Centres,Classification Work and Coordination

As a comparatively novel but increasingly pervasive organizational arrangement, call centres have been a focus for much recent research. This paper identifies lessons for organizational and technological design through an examination of call centres and ‘classification work’ – explicating what Star [1992, Systems/Practice vol. 5, pp. 395–410] terms the ‘open black box’. Classification is a central means by which organizations standardize procedure, assess productivity, develop services and re-organize their business. Nevertheless, as Bowker and Star [1999, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge MA: MIT Press] have pointed out, we know relatively little about the work that goes into making classification schema what they are. We will suggest that a focus on classification ‘work’ in this context is a useful exemplar of the need for some kind of ‘meta-analysis’ in ethnographic work also. If standardization is a major ambition for organizations under late capitalism, then comparison might be seen as a related but as-yet unrealized one for ethnographers. In this paper, we attempt an initial cut at a comparative approach, focusing on classification because it seemed to be the primary issue that emerged when we compared studies. Moreover, if technology is the principal means through which procedure and practice is implemented and if, as we believe, classifications are becoming ever more explicitly embedded within it (for instance with the development of so-called ‘semantic web’ and associated approaches to ontology-based design), then there is clearly a case for identifying some themes which might underpin classification work in a given domain.     

Dialogue Abner Shimony–Shimon Malin

Malin proposes a solution to some of the conceptual problems of the foundations of quantum mechanics within the framework of Alfred North Whitehead’s “Philosophy of Organism”. Standard quantum dynamics, governed by the time-dependent Schr?dinger equation, does not provide for the reduction of superpositions of physical states and hence does not account for occurrence of observational data. If consciousness is invoked to explain the results of measurements, it would appear that quantum mechanics is given an anthropocentric interpretation. Reduction of superpositions is achieved without anthropocentrism, according to Malin, by accepting Whitehead’s ontology of “actual occasions”, which are protomental entities independent of and presumably antedating human beings. Furthermore, Whitehead’s philosophy has the great virtue of offering a plausible solution to the profound problem of relating minds to material systems. Shimony is sympathetic to Whitehead’s world view, but with the reservation that it leaves an immense unexplained and unexplored gap between the conjectured “experience” of actual occasions and the high level experience of the human mind.QUPON/QIPC Special Issue     

Exploring agent support at the user interface in e-commerce applications

In this paper, we present some of the results from our ongoing research work in the area of ‘agent support’ for electronic commerce, particularly at the user interface level. Our goal is to provide intelligent agents to assist both the consumers and the vendors in an electronic shopping environment. Users with a wide variety of different needs are expected to use the electronic shopping application and their expectations about the interface could vary a lot. Traditional studies of user interface technology have shown the existence of a ‘gap’ between what the user interface actually lets the users do and the users’ expectations. Agent technology, in the form of personalized user interface agents, can help to narrow this gap. Such agents can be used to give a personalized service to the user by knowing the user’s preferences. By doing so, they can assist in the various stages of the users’ shopping process, provide tailored product recommendations by filtering information on behalf of their users and reduce the information overload. From a vendor’s perspective, a software sales agent could be used for price negotiation with the consumer. Such agents would give the flexibility offered by negotiation without the burden of having to provide human presence to an online store to handle such negotiations. Published online: 25 July 2001     

Intangibles wear materiality via material composition

The importance of material is gradually increasing in human–computer interfaces (HCIs), especially in the design of physical objects that embody digital information. Because digital information is not comprised of physical material (Belenguer et al., in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction, ACM, New York, pp 205–212, 2012) that provides tactile feedback, advancements in HCI research involve combining physical matter with digital representations to embed materiality in immaterial beings. The emergence of new material and transmaterial (Brownell, in transmaterial: a catalog of materials that redefine our physical environment. Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2005) indicates that material is increasingly becoming a priority in the interaction design field. We emphasize the importance of material in interaction design and discuss categories of material properties according to the characteristics of interactive systems. We divide the pre-existing materials of interaction design into three categories: tangible material, intangible material, and computational material. The relationship between tangible and computational materials has been profoundly discussed since the origin of the tangible user interface. However, intangible materials, such as air, light, and magnetism, are commonly disregarded as distinctive categorical materials in interaction design. In this paper, we argue the effectiveness of intangible materials when they are coupled with tangible and computational mediums and discuss the framework for material composition in interaction design. The concept of material composition suggests the modification of a previous perspective in interaction design, which considers that materials must have either physical or digital properties. The framework of material composition proposes various configuration dimensions that correspond to the quality of the materials used. Therefore, we manifest the framework using Inflated Roly-Poly, which is a previously developed interactive artifact, to determine the success of the reconcilement among the constituent materials and to describe the potential for investigating and resolving further implementation issues.     

Modeling and real-time simulation architectures for virtual prototyping of off-road vehicles

Virtual Reality-based simulation technology has evolved as a useful design and analysis tool at an early stage in the design for evaluating performance of human-operated agricultural and construction machinery. Detecting anomalies in the design prior to building physical prototypes and expensive testing leads to significant cost savings. The efficacy of such simulation technology depends on how realistically the simulation mimics the real-life operation of the machinery. It is therefore necessary to achieve ‘real-time’ dynamic simulation of such machines with operator-in-the-loop functionality. Such simulation often leads to intensive computational burdens. A distributed architecture was developed for off-road vehicle dynamic models and 3D graphics visualization to distribute the overall computational load of the system across multiple computational platforms. Multi-rate model simulation was also used to simulate various system dynamics with different integration time steps, so that the computational power can be distributed more intelligently. This architecture consisted of three major components: a dynamic model simulator, a virtual reality simulator for 3D graphics, and an interface to the controller and input hardware devices. Several off-road vehicle dynamics models were developed with varying degrees of fidelity, as well as automatic guidance controller models and a controller area network interface to embedded controllers and user input devices. The simulation architecture reduced the computational load to an individual machine and increased the real-time simulation capability with complex off-road vehicle system models and controllers. This architecture provides an environment to test virtual prototypes of the vehicle systems in real-time and the opportunity to test the functionality of newly developed controller software and hardware.     

Product features and task effects on experienced richness, control and engagement in voicemail browsing

A recent focus is on creating engaging user experiences with digital products and services such as voicemail. This study aims to design towards increased levels of engagement in voicemail browsing by using the ‘Richness, Control and Engagement’ (RC & E) framework. This framework explains the levels of engagement in terms of the levels of richness and control that are shaped by the features of a product and the user’s expertise. A product was developed that utilized gestures and sound to access digital voicemail contents. An experiment was conducted in which 28 participants interacted with the product while varying (1) the number of features of the user interface, (2) the amount of voicemail content and (3) the type of task. Results showed that the levels of engagement could be predicted according to the levels of richness and control experienced when a task-term was added to the framework. Implications of the refined RC & E framework for interaction design practice are discussed.     

Design for emergence: experiments with a mixed reality urban playground game

In this paper we present our work in the design of ubiquitous social experiences, aiming to foster group participation and spontaneous playful behaviours in a city environment. We outline our approach of design for emergence: to provide just enough of a game context and challenge for people to be creative, to extend and enrich the experience of play through their interaction in the real world. CitiTag is our mixed reality testbed, a wireless location-based multiplayer game based on the concept of playground ‘tag’. We describe the design and implementation of CitiTag and discuss results from two user studies.     

A ‘smart house’ is not a home: The domestication of ICTs

This paper discusses the domestication of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), particularly their use, in UK households reporting on research undertaken between 1998 and 2004. Issues raised are linked to the dominant discourse of the ‘digital divide’, which in the UK means engaging with ICTs in a ‘meaningful’ way to ensure the economic and social well-being of UK plc (public limited company—in the UK this refers to companies whose shares can be sold to the public. The acronym is used here ironically to indicate the motivation of the government to brand and promote the UK as a whole.). Utilising a framework of understanding digital inequality and the ‘deepening divide’, domestication theory is applied to discuss motivational, material and physical, skills and usage access in the gendered household, critically contrasting this approach to ‘smart house’ research. This qualitative enquiry contributes to the neglected area of domestication studies in Information Systems research.     

Physigrams: modelling devices for natural interaction

This paper explores the formal specification of the physical behaviour of devices ‘unplugged’ from their digital effects. By doing this we seek to better understand the nature of physical interaction and the way this can be exploited to improve the design of hybrid devices with both physical and digital features. We use modified state transition networks of the physical behaviour, which we call physiograms, and link these to parallel diagrams of the digital state. These are used to describe a number of features of physical interaction exposed by previous work and relevant properties expressed using a formal semantics of the diagrams. As well as being an analytic tool, the physigrams have been used in a case study where product designers used and adapted them as part of the design process.     

Tangibles for learning: a representational analysis of physical manipulation

Manipulatives—physical learning materials such as cubes or tiles—are prevalent in educational settings across cultures and have generated substantial research into how actions with physical objects may support children’s learning. The ability to integrate digital technology into physical objects—so-called ‘digital manipulatives’—has generated excitement over the potential to create new educational materials. However, without a clear understanding of how actions with physical materials lead to learning, it is difficult to evaluate or inform designs in this area. This paper is intended to contribute to the development of effective tangible technologies for children’s learning by summarising key debates about the representational advantages of manipulatives under two key headings: offloading cognition—where manipulatives may help children by freeing up valuable cognitive resources during problem solving, and conceptual metaphors—where perceptual information or actions with objects have a structural correspondence with more symbolic concepts. The review also indicates possible limitations of physical objects—most importantly that their symbolic significance is only granted by the context in which they are used. These arguments are then discussed in light of tangible designs drawing upon the authors’ current research into tangibles and young children’s understanding of number.     

A pseudo-sensitivity based discrete-variable approach to structural topology optimization with multiple materials

An algorithm has been developed which uses material as a discrete variable in multi-material topology optimization and thus provides an alternative to traditional methods using material interpolation and level-set approaches. The algorithm computes ‘pseudo-sensitivities’ of the objective and constraint functions to discrete material changes. These are used to rank elements, based on which a fraction of elements are selected for material ID modification during the optimization iteration. The algorithm is of general applicability and avoids frequent matrix factorizations so that it is applicable to large structural problems. In addition to the conventionally used evolutionary and morphogenesis approaches for iteration, a new iteration scheme of ‘resubstitution’ which combines the two approaches is presented. The application and functioning of the algorithm is demonstrated through case studies and comparisons with a few benchmark problems, showing its capability in providing mass-optimal topologies under stiffness constraints for various structural problems where multiple materials are considered.     

Some Kind of Analogtivity: anti-simulation through design

This paper discusses and explores issues surrounding current approaches to the design of technological products and offers two critical design proposals for presentation and debate. Primarily driven by contemporary theoretical writings and thoughts on the subject of ‘technology’ and ‘simulation’, currently being offered by leading thinkers on these subjects and expressed as ‘technological objects’; they are the result of a critical investigation into the emerging design issues surrounding ‘interaction’ and ‘transparency’. By using ‘popular’ language of product design as a vehicle, they exist as ‘cultural offerings’ exploring an alternative future for technological products not necessarily governed by science and economics.     

Demonstrating the Cognitive Plausibility of Interactive System Specifications

Much of the behaviour of an interactive system is determined by its user population. This paper describes how assumptions about the user can be brought into system models in order to reason about their behaviour. We describe a system model containing reasonable assumptions about the user as being ‘cognitively plausible’. Before asserting the plausibility of a model however we must first be able to make the assumptions made in that model inspectable. There is a tension between the inspectability of user assumptions and the tractability of models; inspectable models tend to not be very tractable and vice versa. We describe how we can get round this tension, by deriving tractable models from explicit user assumptions. The resulting models may not of themselves be very inspectable to human-factors workers, but the process by which they are derived is inspectable. Hence we claim that we can have both tractability and inspectability. We exemplify our claims using a simple cognitive model and ‘Meeting Maker’, an interactive electronic diary system. Received March 2000 / Accepted in revised form July 2000     

DSM as a knowledge capture tool in CODE environment

A design structure matrix (DSM) provides a simple, compact, and visual representation of a complex system/ process. This paper shows how DSM, a system engineering tool, is applied as a knowledge capture (acquisition) tool in a generic NPD process. The acquired knowledge (identified in the DSM) is provided in the form of Questionnaires, which are organized into five performance indicators of the organization namely ‘Marketing’, ‘Technical’, ‘Financial’, ‘Resource Management’, and ‘Project Management’. Industrial application is carried out for knowledge validation. It is found form the application that the acquired knowledge helps NPD teams, managers and stakeholders to benchmark their NPD endeavor and select areas to focus their improvement efforts (up to 80% valid).     

Rethinking the cross-cultural interaction architecture

The paper is an exploration for a conceptual framework for cross-cultural interfacing. The roots of this exploration lie in my personal, functional, social and cultural experiences, and cross-cultural encounters. These encounters in many ways reflect the networking journey of AI & Society, promoting and stimulating the human-centred debate in cross-cultural settings. As a ‘cross-cultural holon’, AI & Society has been questioning the given orthodoxy of the ‘one best way’ and the culture of the ‘exact language’ since its inception 21 years ago. My observation is that even though we now live in a world of multimodal interactive media technologies, some how the interface design has not moved much beyond the functional (observed reality) worldview of our interactions. Even at the functional level, the design perspective remains bounded by the observed reality. It is thus no surprise that when it comes to designing interaction technologies for social and cultural domains such as health care, work, employment, life long learning, the design mainly hovers around the functional skill training, mechanical feedback and objectified evaluation. When we move beyond the functional worldview, and explore our interactions within social and cultural domains, we encounter both the reality (objectified world) and actuality (experienced world) of interactions. At this level, the challenge of the interface is not just coping with the interaction spaces of reality and actuality but also with the ‘in-between’ space of actuality–reality gaps. We explore how the concept of symbiosis enables the interaction in the gaps between actuality and reality, how the concept of the ‘culture of the artificial enables the sharing and pooling experiences, how the concept of valorisation’ enables to find a coherence (commonality) between interactions, and how the concept of cultural holon is used to conceptualise the network architecture of cross-cultural interactions. It is proposed that the way forward to designing cross-cultural interfaces is to first seek a conceptual framework for cross-cultural interaction spaces, and then use this framework to design interfacing systems and tools.