Contributions published at People and Computing Lab (Elaine May Huang)

Networked public displays are being portrayed as “a new communication medium for the 21st century”, potentially having the same impact on society as radio, TV, and the Internet. In order to understand how this new medium can impact the society this paper uses a (small) part of Marshall McLuhan's media theory, i.e., the interplay between the figure - the medium - and the ground - the context in which the medium operates - and how the figure amplifies otherwise invisible effects of the ground. By analyzing environmental/urban research on interactions and processes in public spaces this paper infers the effects of the ground - public space - amplified through the figure - networked public displays - on its audience, showing why this new medium is fitted for affecting and enriching place-based communities. Overall, this paper contributes to the theory of networked urban/public displays and their use as a communication medium.

Furniture is the building block of the spaces we inhabit. Its design and its functions shape how we use spaces, as individuals and as groups. While being an integral part of our lives, furniture is unaware of what happens around it. But what if furniture could change its appearance? What situations should it respond to? How might it communicate its state to those around it? Can we use emotional expression for such communication? To find and explore roles for interactive furniture in domestic spaces, we built EmotoCouch: a provocative prototype that uses combinations of color, patterns, and haptics designed to convey emotions. We gathered feedback to the concept of an emotional couch from an online study with 138 participants and in a laboratory study with 14 parent-child pairs. Our findings identify promising future directions, use cases, and opportunities for the use of emotion for expressive communication by furniture.

People respond emotionally to other people, animals, or even objects like furniture. While current furniture is static in appearance, embedded electronics can enable furniture to change its appearance. A couch could show excitement during a party or anger when a pet scratches it. But would emotional furniture delight or annoy people? To explore the potential for emotional furniture, we built EmotoCouch. Through colored light, visual patterns, and haptic feedback, EmotoCouch expresses six emotional states: Excited, Happy, Calm, Depressed/Sad, Afraid, and Angry. This video describes the construction of EmotoCouch, feedback gathered through surveys and user interviews, and shows example EmotoCouch usage situations.

A considerable amount of research has been carried out towards making long-standing smart home visions technically feasible. The technologically augmented homes made possible by this work are starting to become reality, but thus far living in and interacting with such homes has introduced significant complexity while offering limited benefit. As these technologies are increasingly adopted, the knowledge we gain from their use suggests a need to revisit the opportunities and challenges they pose. Synthesizing a broad body of research on smart homes with observations of industry and experiences from our own empirical work, we provide a discussion of ongoing and emerging challenges, namely challenges for meaningful technologies, complex domestic spaces, and human-home collaboration. Within each of these three challenges we discuss our visions for future smart homes and identify promising directions for the field.

Mobility and independence are key aspects for self-determined living in today's world and demographic change presents the challenge to retain these aspects for the aging population. Augmented Reality (AR) user interfaces might support the elderly, for example, when navigating as pedestrians or by explaining how devices and mobility aids work and how they are maintained. This poster reports on the results of practical field tests with elderly subjects testing handheld AR applications. The main finding is that common handheld AR user interfaces are not suited for the elderly because they require the user to hold up the device so the back-facing camera captures the object or environment related to which digital information shall be presented. Tablet computers are too heavy and they do not provide sufficient grip to hold them over a long period of time. One possible alternative is using head-mounted displays (HMD). We present the promising results of a user test evaluating whether elderly people can deal with AR interfaces on a lightweight HMD. We conclude with an outlook to improved handheld AR user interfaces that do not require continuously holding up the device, which we hope are better suited for the elderly.alternative

The progress of technological development and the resulting rapid replacement of end-user devices has brought increasing issues of electronics waste upon our society. Interaction designers and researchers within the field of human-computer interaction have begun to tackle issues of environmental sustainability in recent years, including the problem of obsolescence. By considering the experiential aspects of obsolescence and the ways in which interaction design could have an impact on experience, the field presents promising approaches with potential to contribute to and complement current materials-focused solutions. In this chapter, we report on a survey of sustainable human-computer interaction research that investigates or addresses issues of obsolescence, presenting challenges as well as opportunities for interaction designers to contribute to solving these issues

We present findings from a qualitative study with 28 participants of the dyadic intercultural communication tensions professionals experience in Face-to-Face (FTF) and Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) workplace interactions. We identify four categories of intercultural communication tensions that emerged most frequently in our dataset including range of emotional expression, level of formality, "fixed" versus flexible appointments and task versus social-orientation. We discuss how these tensions manifested in FTF and CMC media and unravel the ways media supports or hinders intercultural communication. We present the adaptations participants made to mitigate such tensions and offer implications for design. Our findings demonstrate that the most frequently occurring intercultural communication tensions manifested in both FTF and CMC, regardless of the medium used. This indicates that cultural communication challenges will persist no matter the medium, highlighting the opportunity for technologies to better support workplace intercultural communication.

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In automation and power industry, proper training of operators and maintenance personnel is crucial to prevent possible failures and hazardous situations. Since trained personnel improve both availability and productivity, companies give high priority on developing their training concept, especially the integration of theoretical and practical learning. Companies look at potential solutions and adapting innovative methods to serve their employees and customers a better training methodology. Studies suggest that the state-of-art technology augmented reality (AR) can successfully bridge the gap between the theoretical and practical training, and show us how the real and virtual environment can be overlayed to fulfill different learning and teaching objectives and requirements. In this work, we particularly study an existing training concept of ABB Switzerland, a leading engineering company in automation industry, and used their resources to investigate the possible opportunities for AR. We identify the potential areas where this novel technology could improve the training. In order to see the impact of AR in the industrial context, we design and develop a functional prototype of a mobile application and evaluate the potential use. Results from both related work and user studies show that AR can contribute to teaching and learning processes by seamlessly bringing relevant and contextual information into the training scene, which was not possible or hard to achieve with the existing methods and resources.

Previous work in the area of home automation shows that the inhabitants' comfort when interacting with a smart home can be improved by using an extended calendar view to present the user the effects of automation. By the means of an empirical study, literature review and an expert design workshop this work investigates how these effects are understood by potential users and what are the eventual corrections that they will like to make. Findings show that users are often limited in their interaction by the well-established calendar mental models they have. Well known actions like dragging or editing events prove useful also in the context of home automation; however, more complex actions require design changes that address this psychological bias. In the light of these findings, this work proposes a set of designs that will enable users to better understand and make use of the calendar as an interface between the human and the home. These recommendations consider the conceptual differences between the regular calendar and a home calendar and they are especially relevant given the ever increasing complexity of the systems that augment our environment.

The field of Sustainable HCI has grown significantly in recent years, yielding a great body of knowledge about sustainable interaction design. However, this knowledge has led to a similar outcome to many other theoretical contributions in the broader domain of HCI: there are only few examples of its direct application to practice. We looked at design research literature from outside of HCI and gathered insights about the work practice of real-world designers to help uncover potential barriers to transferal. In order to increase acceptance and applicability of Sustainable HCI design knowledge for design practice, we argue that Sustainable HCI researchers have to tailor their theoretical contributions to the application domain’s practices in order to reach a broader audience and achieve higher impact. We conclude with recommendations for how to better present and communicate design knowledge to the real world design practitioners.

Smart homes with advanced building technologies can react to sensor triggers in a variety of preconfigured ways. These rules are usually only visible within designated configuration interfaces. For this reason inhabitants who are not actively involved in the configuration process can be taken by surprise by the effects of such rules, such as for example the unexpected automated actions of lights or shades. To provide these inhabitants with better means to understand their home, as well as to increase their motivation to actively engage with its configuration, we propose Casalendar, a visualization that integrates the status of smart home technologies into the familiar interface of a calendar. We present our design and initial findings about the application of a temporal metaphor in smart home interfaces.

Persuasive technology to motivate healthy behavior is a growing area of research within HCI and ubiquitous computing. The emergence of commercial wearable devices for tracking health- and fitness-related activities arguably represents the first widespread adoption of dedicated ubiquitous persuasive technology. The recent ubiquity of commercial systems allows us to learn about their value and use in truly “in the wild” contexts and understand how practices evolve over long-term, naturalistic use. We present a study with 30 participants who had adopted wearable activity-tracking devices of their own volition and had continued to use them for between 3 and 54 months. The findings, which both support and contrast with those of previous research, paint a picture of the evolving benefits and practices surrounding these emerging technologies over long periods of use. They also serve as the basis for design implications for personal informatics technologies for long-term health and fitness support.

The current master thesis is part of a larger PhD project, “Understanding and augmenting a paper arrangement-based process”, which aims to enhance the traditional paper based approaches in the HCI field with virtual elements. This thesis will study the use of Kinect in detecting and analyzing human position in relation with a wall containing an affinity diagram. With the collected users history data, the thesis will research different ways of visualizing and interacting with the visualization, focusing on displaying changes made in a specific selected region of the wall in a specific time frame. The visualization will be specially designed for being projected using a normal projector on a wall, overlapping with the existing affinity diagram. Interaction with the visualization will be done using the Microsoft Kinect sensor, the sensor being situated a few meters behind the person. Keywords: Kinect sensor, projector, user history data, visualization, augment

The invention is related to a method of presenting a digital information related to a real object, comprising determining a real object, providing a plurality of presentation modes, wherein the plurality of presentation modes comprises an augmented reality mode, and at least one of a virtual reality mode and an audio mode, providing at least one representation of a digital information related to the real object, determining a spatial relationship between a camera and a reference coordinate system under consideration of an image captured by the camera, selecting a presentation mode from the plurality of presentation modes according to the spatial relationship, and presenting the at least one representation of the digital information using the selected presentation mode.

The progress of technological development and the resulting rapid replacement of end-user devices has brought increasing issues of electronics waste upon our society. Interaction designers and researchers within the field of human-computer interaction have begun to tackle issues of environmental sustainability in recent years, including the problem of obsolescence. By considering the experiential aspects of obsolescence and the ways in which interaction design could have an impact on experience, the field presents promising approaches with potential to contribute to and complement current materials-focused solutions. In this chapter, we report on a survey of sustainable human-computer interaction research that investigates or addresses issues of obsolescence, presenting challenges as well as opportunities for interaction designers to contribute to solving these issues.

By 2020, depression will be the disease with the second-highest financial demand. Health monitor devices that have recently coming to customer markets may support treatment and reduce costs. This thesis tries to identify sensing opportunities in an inpatient facility. Therefore, a three-days at a psychiatric hospital and four interviews with therapists have been conducted. Eleven general findings are presented. Design opportunities and implications are discussed. A list of indicators for elevated suicidal-risk is compiled. And four fields of application for smart pedometers are introduced.

We present two early prototypes of a system that couples an augmented wall of paper notes with multiple handheld devices in order to support the process of affinity diagramming. Our system allows multiple users to work together simultaneously, freely interacting with potentially thousands of physical notes directly, and with a coupled digital representation of the same notes via a smart phone, tablet or PC. We propose the affinity diagramming process as a use-case well suited for distributed user interfaces.

I investigate the practices of affinity diagramming, a method for qualitative data analysis and idea generation, and the factors that lead HCI researchers and practitioners to usually perform it on paper rather than on digital devices. Based on my findings, I propose that Ubicomp technology can be used to create an implicit interaction system that allows users to preserve their preferred practices, while offering the benefits of a digital system. Initial prototypes have been built; a more complete prototype system and evaluation of the solution remain to be completed.

HomeSys 2013 will be an inspiring, interactive, crossdisciplinary workshop for anyone conducting research into technology in homes. This includes anyone building novel systems, applications, or devices for the home, or studying existing or novel technology use in domestic settings, or anyone else with an interest in the intersection between technology and the home. Attendance at the workshop will not be limited, anyone may register and attend. To ensure any interactive and enjoyable exchange of ideas during the workshop, we have 4 contribution types: Visionary Presentations, Reflective Presentations, Videos and Posters. To encourage interactivity and discussion, the workshop will have plenary sessions for visionary and reflective presentations, in addition to posters and videos, a keynote, discussant-led panels and a breakout session