Technology-Enabled Feedback on Domestic Energy Consumption: Articulating a Set of Design Concerns

This paper presents the technology enabled feedback on domestic energy consumption that promote awareness and lead to energy savings. This explore an activity-centric view of energy consumption in shared spaces, such as offices. While a focus on changed consumption outcomes will ultimately be the key test of a good device, more systematic user experience and design studies, across a range of settings, might provide more confidence that the devices we're designing are both fit to task and will be acceptable as well as usable. The authors articulate a set of design concerns that frame and focus ongoing research into user experience and more effective feedback display designs.     

The design and evaluation of a photograph-sharing application for rural and urban Kenyan families

Family members in Kenya rely on technology to connect between rural and urban regions, yet little is known about the specific communication challenges they face and how to overcome them through new communication technology design. To explore this topic, we conducted two studies along with design work. First, we conducted an interview-based study that explores how families in Kenya currently used communication technology and the social and technical challenges that they faced in doing so. Our findings showed that family communication focuses on economic support, well-being, and the everyday coordination of activities, yet infrastructure challenges, reduced access to technology, and social situations created communication challenges. Second, we used these results to inform the design and deployment of a system called TumaPicha that supports the sharing of photographs between families who live in rural and low-income urban areas via intermediaries. The goal of the system was to support communication around economic activities while easing issues around connectivity and technology literacy. Third, TumaPicha was deployed over a period of 5 weeks with families in Kenya whose members inhabited both rural and low-income urban areas. Deployment results reveal that families used photographs to share knowledge related to subsistence awareness, village awareness, and health and well-being awareness. This suggests promise for simple media sharing applications in developing countries like Kenya that rely on a mixture of technology and social processes; however, our study also raises challenging questions around privacy and power consumption with new devices and applications.     

Situated design of line-oriented flight training (LOFT): a case study in a Brazilian airline

This paper describes an exploratory situated approach for the design, development, standardization, and implementation of line-oriented flight training (LOFT) in a major airline. LOFT was conceived in aviation industry to be a practical application of crew resource management (CRM) concepts. The situated approach combines a set of methods and techniques from ergonomics and human factors disciplines. These methods were supported by social construction enabling the involvement and participation of different actors of the operational, tactical, and strategic level of the company. Under this framework, situated design is progressively established by socially constructed patterns up to a situated design comprising the construction of scenarios, training tools, procedures, structures, organization, flight documents, operations, and further training management contents. Our findings indicate that LOFT situated design, framed by social construction, can be applied to any aviation system with a specific culture and organization, which may be different from the ones that were implicitly or explicitly taken into account during the development of general LOFT guidelines.     

Sharing experiences through awareness systems in the home

In the current paper we hypothesize that providing peripheral awareness information to remotely located but socially close individuals will yield affective user benefits. An experiment in a controlled home-like environment was conducted to investigate the effects of providing different levels of peripheral awareness information on these affective benefits. In the experiment peripheral awareness aimed to support groups of friends to jointly watch a soccer match at remote locations. The experiment has shown that providing awareness information increases the social presence and the group attraction felt by individuals towards their remote partners. The experiment has provided concrete quantitative and qualitative evidence for the hypothesized benefits of supporting primary relationships through awareness systems and of the relevance of social presence as a requirement in the design of peripheral awareness displays.     

Ambient Awareness to Strengthen the Family Social Network of Older Adults

Social networking sites (SNSs) provide ambient awareness of the interests and activities of friends and relatives helping them sustain and strengthen their social ties. Older adults who are not adopting SNSs might however feel like outsiders within their own families who increasingly rely on these services to socialize. Previous research has shown that situated displays can provide appropriate interfaces for older adults to use digital services. In this paper we explore how situated displays can intuitively provide ambient awareness to strengthen the family social network of older adults. We designed and developed Tlatoque, a situated display, to seamlessly integrate older adults into the SNS used by their relatives. The results of a 21-week deployment study of an initial version of Tlatoque in one extended family showed that the older adult became more conscious of relatives’ activities, which also enriched in-person encounters. However, relatives expected the older adult to reply to their posts in the SNS and Tlatoque lacked mechanisms for the older adult to provide feedback. We re-designed Tlatoque to incorporate means for enabling the older adult to share information back to the SNS. We conducted a second 21-week deployment study with another extended family to evaluate the use of this new version of the system. Our results indicate that the second design was successful in providing ambient awareness to the older adult as well as to her relatives. We conclude that situated displays that provide SNS services can assist the integration of older adults to their social network and contribute to enhance asymmetric relations between the older adult and younger relatives.     

Lonely and Susceptible: The Influence of Social Exclusion and Gender on Persuasion by an Artificial Agent

Earlier research showed that artificial social agents can influence human behavior. This article argues that, especially under certain circumstances, people are sensitive to persuasion by (artificial) social agents. For example, when people feel socially excluded, they are motivated to increase their social connections with others. It was hypothesized that socially excluded people would attribute more human-likeness and be persuaded more by an artificial agent than socially included people. These hypotheses were investigated in two studies in which participants were either socially included or excluded, after which they performed an energy-saving task while receiving social feedback from an artificial agent. Results did not support the expectation that socially excluded people ascribe more human-likeness to an artificial agent, but they did show the expected effects on behavior change, indicating the importance of including a person’s psychological state in the design of human–agent interactions. Also, in line with earlier findings, female participants were more susceptible to the agent’s feedback than male participants, indicating that a user’s gender may also determine the effectiveness of persuasive technology.     

Let's talk! Socially intelligent agents for language conversationtraining

This paper promotes socially intelligent animated agents for the pedagogical task of English conversation training for native speakers of Japanese. As a novel feature, social role awareness is introduced to animated conversational agents, that are by non-strong affective reasoners, but otherwise often lack the social competence observed in humans. In particular, humans may easily adjust their behavior depending on their respective role in a social setting, whereas their synthetic pendants tend to be driven mostly by emotions and personality. Our main contribution is the incorporation of a “social filter program” to mental models of animated agents. This program may qualify an agent's expression of its emotional state by the social contest, thereby enhancing the agent's believability as a conversational partner. Our implemented system is web-based and demonstrates socially aware animated agents in a virtual coffee shop environment. An experiment with our conversation system shows that users consider socially aware agents as more natural than agents that violate conventional practices     

Socially Distributed Perception: GRACE plays social tag at AAAI 2005

This paper presents a robot search task (social tag) that uses social interaction, in the form of asking for help, as an integral component of task completion. Socially distributed perception is defined as a robot's ability to augment its limited sensory capacities through social interaction. We describe the task of social tag and its implementation on the robot GRACE for the AAAI 2005 Mobile Robot Competition & Exhibition. We then discuss our observations and analyses of GRACE's performance as a situated interaction with conference participants. Our results suggest we were successful in promoting a form of social interaction that allowed people to help the robot achieve its goal. Furthermore, we found that different social uses of the physical space had an effect on the nature of the interaction. Finally, we discuss the implications of this design approach for effective and compelling human-robot interaction, considering its relationship to concepts such as dependency, mixed initiative, and socially distributed cognition. An erratum to this article can be found at

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Analysing situated interaction hazards: an activity-based awareness approach

This paper presents a case for the usefulness of activity theory (AT) for the analysis of situated interaction hazards in safety-related systems. It is suggested here that situation awareness is a safety critical attribute that is acquired and maintained through situated activity or actions. We introduce an activity-based awareness model based on this fundamental premise and we show how the model is consistent with the principles of AT. We also provide an example of the usefulness of AT as a theoretical and practical foundation for the analysis of situated interaction hazards in complex, safety-related systems. Specifically, we describe how the activity-based awareness model and AT principles were applied to an investigation of situation awareness in a military air traffic control system. We show how this approach can also be used to support analyses of general interactive systems use. We suggest that this general approach can be used to support analyses of interactive system use, to inform system design, and mitigate against the situated interaction hazards inherent in safety-related systems, and that this provides evidence that AT can be a useful way of looking at situational hazards in safety-related systems use.     

Socially aware, computation and communication

Although developers of communication-support tools have certainly tried to create products that support group thinking, they usually do so without adequately accounting for social context, so that all too often these systems are jarring and even downright rude. In fact, most people would agree that today's communication technology seems to be at war with human society. Technology must account for this by recognizing that communication is always socially situated and that discussions are not just words but part of a larger social dialogue. This web of social interaction forms a sort of collective intelligence; it is the unspoken shared understanding that enforces the dominance hierarchy and passes judgment about it. We have found nonlinguistic social signals to be particularly powerful for analyzing and predicting human behavior, sometimes exceeding even expert human capabilities. Psychologists have firmly established that social signals are a powerful determinant of human behavior and speculate that they might have evolved as a way to establish hierarchy and group cohesion.     

Collecting and Sharing Location-based Content on Mobile Phones in a Zoo Visitor Experience

The augmentation of visitor experiences with location-based technologies has been available for some time. Through in-depth studies of users during these experiences the field is building a rich picture of user behaviour in relation to certain location-based technologies. However, little work has explored the use of mobile camera phones and 2D barcodes on situated signs and their properties as a way of delivering such augmented visitor experiences. In this paper we present a study of people engaged in such a location-based experience at London zoo in which they use mobile camera phones to read 2D barcodes on signs at the animal enclosures in order to access related content. Through the fieldwork we highlight the social and collaborative aspects of the experience and how particular characteristics of the mobile phone and barcode technology shape these behaviours. The paper also highlights some of the non-instrumental aspects of the location-based experience, in particular in relation to the importance of collecting location-based content. We explore the social aspects of collecting as well as certain competitive elements it introduces into people’s behaviour. This creates an interesting tension in that aspects of the application encourage cooperation and sharing among the visitors whereas others encourage competition. In the course of presenting the fieldwork, we explore this tension further.     

Awareness systems and the role of social intelligence

This paper discusses awareness systems for supporting informal social relationships, focusing on some of they key concerns for designers and researchers. The discussion is general, but examples highlight the design issues discussed and summarize related empirical results. The paper argues in favor of automated capture of awareness information and suggests that social intelligence is relevant (a) as a design and evaluation criterion for such systems and (b) as a mechanism for supporting users in managing the information sharing by means of awareness systems.     

Supporting Social Interaction in Care Environments: Exploring Stakeholder Perspectives on the Potential of Interactive Technology

This article explores care stakeholders’ perspectives on how interactive technology can help form socially active environments in residential care settings. Based on participatory workshops, involving representatives from multiple stakeholder groups, the authors identify a set of considerations relevant for design of social inclusion technology for care settings. The design considerations relate to the following topics: users, places, themes, value, and role. The authors also present three mock-ups emanating from the workshops, representing the participants’ visions as to how technology can contribute to social interaction by accommodating considerations related to the above topics. The results from this study highlight the importance of social inclusion technology being firmly anchored in the local and collaboratively produced care environment. In particular, their findings illustrate how the local—i.e., the wider social context in which the care residents live, and in which activities and things gain social meaning and value—can offer a rich design space and valuable source of inspiration for social inclusion technology. Potential negative implications of social inclusion technology are also briefly discussed.

The main contribution of this article is an increased understanding of the intimate relationship between designs for social inclusion and the wider social context in which care residents live.     

A computational model for designing energy behaviour change interventions

The conflicting evidence in the literature on energy feedback as a driver for energy behaviour change has lead to the realization that it is a complex problem and that interventions must be proposed and evaluated in the context of a tangled web of individual and societal factors. We put forward an integrated agent-based computational model of energy consumption behaviour change interventions based on personal values and energy literacy, informed by research in persuasive technologies, environmental, educational and cognitive psychology, sociology, and energy education. Our objectives are: (i) to build a framework to accommodate a rich variety of models that might impact consumption decisions, (ii) to use the simulation as a means to evaluate persuasive technologies in-silico prior to deployment. The model novelty lies in its capacity to connect the determinants of energy related behaviour (values, energy literacy and social practices) and several generic design strategies proposed in the area of persuasive technologies within one framework. We validate the framework using survey data and personal value and energy consumption data extracted from a 2-year field study in Exeter, UK. The preliminary evaluation results demonstrate that the model can predict energy saving behaviour much better than a random model and can correctly estimate the effect of persuasive technologies. The model can be embedded into an adaptive decision-making system for energy behaviour change.     

Social enrichment by virtual characters – differential benefits

Abstract It is frequently held forth, within the area of virtual pedagogical characters, that such characters are beneficial for learning as they strengthen the social dimension of electronic learning environments. This article presents more details on this proposal together with a survey of corresponding empirical evidence. In addition, materials from a recently conducted empirical study are presented. Ninety school children, 12–15-year-old, were asked (i) to grade the idea of virtual characters in electronic learning environments and (ii) to chose between a strictly task-oriented, socially 'shallow' and a more socially oriented pedagogical character. The participants were also asked to articulate the reasons behind their answers, and to share their thoughts and opinions on the issues. The results of the study, as well as of several of the studies reviewed, indicate that responses and attitudes towards social aspects of virtual pedagogical characters are highly divergent. In particular, the notion that social dimensions of virtual characters increase learners' motivation and engagement may be less generally applicable in a student population than is sometimes hypothesized. An ensuing design guideline suggests interface solutions with an emphasis on flexibility regarding social orientation and communicative style in virtual characters.     

Minimal design for human–agent communication

Robots have been envisaged as both workers and partners of humans from the earliest period in their history. Therefore, robots should become artificial entities that can socially interact with human beings in social communities. Recent advances in technology have added various functions to robots. The development of actuators and grippers show us infinite possibilities for factory automation, and robots can now walk and perform very smoothly. All of these functions have been developed as solutions for improving robot movement and performance. However, there are many remaining problems in the communication between robots and humans. Communication robots provide one approach to the realization of embodied interfaces. Furthermore, the unsolved problems of human–robot communication can be clarified by adopting the concept of subtractive methods. In this article, we consider the minimal design of robots from the viewpoint of designing communication. By minimal design, we mean eliminating the nonessential portions and keeping only the most fundamental functions. We expect that the simple and clean nature of minimally designed objects will allow humans to interact with these robots without becoming uninterested too quickly. By exploiting the fact that humans have “a natural dislike for the absence of reasoning,” artificial entities built according to minimal design principles can extract the human drive to relate with others. We propose a method of designing a robot that has “character” and is situated in a social context from the viewpoint of minimal design. This work was presented in part at the 10th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, February 4–6, 2005     

Embedding intelligent eco-aware systems within everyday things to increase people’s energy awareness

There is a lack of energy consumption awareness in working spaces. People in their workplaces do not receive energy consumption feedback nor do they pay a monthly invoice to electricity providers. In order to enhance workers’ energy awareness, we have transformed everyday shared electrical appliances which are placed in common spaces (e.g. beamer projectors, coffee-makers, printers, screens, portable fans, kettles, and so on) into persuasive eco-aware everyday things. The proposed approach lets these appliances report their usage patterns to a Cloud-server where the data are transformed into time-series and then processed to obtain the appliances’ next-week usage forecast. Autoregressive integrated moving average model has been selected as the potentially most accurate method for processing such usage predictions when compared with the performance exhibited by three different configurations of Artificial neural networks. Our major contribution is the application of soft computing techniques to the field of sustainable persuasive technologies. Thus, consumption predictions are used to trigger timely persuasive interactions to help device users to operate the appliances as efficiently, energy-wise, as possible. Qualitative and quantitative results were gathered in a between-three-groups study related with the use of shared electrical coffee-makers at workplace. The goal of these studies was to assess the effectiveness of the proposed eco-aware design in a workplace environment in terms of energy saving and the degree of affiliation between people and the smart appliances to create a green-team relationship.     

The prospects of labour-oriented science and research in the nineties

A series of decisions covering agriculture as well as industrial and regional policy fundamentally affect the very own interests of the dependently employed. For some years, the trade unions of all European countries have been on the defensive, undergoing a legitimation crisis. The improvement of the social charter and of the rights of the European Parliament are not sufficient to overcome this crisis and to secure a human, social, ecological and democratic future. For this reason, the order of the day must not only be a socially and ecologically compatible design for technology, but a socially and ecologically oriented one. There is certainly an enormous quantity of accompanying research within the European Community, but it is doubtful in how far this research takes into account the requirements of the majority of the population.     

Transforming society by transforming technology: the science and politics of participatory design

This article attempts to shed historical light on some of the social, political, and ethical issues that have arisen from two disparate perspectives on technology which have both come to integrate an explicit consideration of social factors into systems design. It presents two distinct historical traditions which have contributed to the current field of participatory design methodologies—Joint Application Design (JAD^®), and the British “socio-technical systems” and Scandinavian “collective resources” approaches—and which in practice integrated the end-users in different ways consequent upon their differing perspectives on workers, professional relationships to technology, and stated goals. One interest in examining the independent development of methodologies from these two perspectives is that, despite their differences, the approaches ultimately converged on a set of shared concerns and very similar practices.The paper also examines the relation of these traditions to transformations in the theorization of business organization and trends of corporate restructuring which helped to secure a place for variants of related methodologies in major US and multinational corporations. It concludes with an examination of some broader issues in the relationship between technology and society and the prospects for the critical study of technology. I argue that participatory design and its related methodologies are best understood as a model for involving users, designers and the technology itself in a process of technological development. Rather than seeing participatory design as merely the insertion of public dialog within technological design practices, as several observers have done, we should see it as a model for the critical practice of developing technological designs.     

Social Network-Aware Interfaces as Facilitators of Innovation

Achieving continuous innovation in organizations requires a balance between exploiting yet acquired knowledge and exploring new knowledge.In addition to having the adequate resources,change and innovation capabilities require specific management support and organizational structures.Recent research has pointed out the importance of social network structure and of the activity of agents that work across domains or disciplines in the innovation-oriented behaviour of organizations.As a consequence,information systems should ideally be able to support the analysis,development and management of such social structure for the benefit of organizational objectives.Current social network interfaces provide an established mental model to workers that can be hypothesized to be adequate for supporting activities that foster innovative behaviour.That behaviour is facilitated through exposing the activities of other workers across organizational structures.This paper reports on the design of a user interface specifically targeted to manage the social aspects of innovation based on some aspects of Hargadon’s model of innovation and knowledge brokering.The emergent nature of interactions in social network sites is used as the metaphor to foster situated cognition.The interface design assessment is described and some metrics for innovative behaviour that could be derived for such an interface are sketched.