Hi guys, this is the real time notes from the crit:

IDII Crit
25/3/04, Ivrea (Italy)

Favor Link(Andrea/Jenn)________

Location sharing.
The service allows people to share their location with a group of peers to echange favor because maybe at the location there is the possibility of doing something or picking up materials. This justify the mobility and specific usage for the new mean.

The system works upon chat invitation based on place availability. The chat justify the request for a favour.

Preferences are the main engine of the system.

The process inclluded an initial investigations with interviews. The data from these frist inquiry is then plotted in different format to come out with an idea that they share the same schedule, more or less.

After they rpoceded with formal interviews to validate the initial concept and to look at the dynamics of their social networks. Again the outcome of this work is casted into different visual format ot put in evidence interesting aspect of this.

From this they tried to realise a fast prototype to design a service that could eventually overcome or help the issues of the mums’ work.

From the fast prototype they schetched a mockup interface and relate this interface with an interaction scenario.

The prototype stage refined the language and the interface flow.

—-CRIT—–
> It is not clear the kind of language of the interface. Also, it is not clear how the system deal with group membership and group dynamics. In other words it is not clear how to move from a group to another or how the system handel the fact that people belongs to different groups.

> How do you define location is another important issues. The system, in fact, is designed in the way that the location name is provided by the system, so it is encripted in the network architecture, or it can be extracted from a GPS positioning, but without specifying how.

theLINK-connecting Remote Friends(tom/erez)___________
Connections into the social networks to reduce the isolation. A link can be established between connections and activities. It is about connecting physical location with people ….

The focus of the project was cell phones and game systems. The core concept was to invite a friend in the system to participate a particular activity like a game online. So the system supported the user in the creation and the managment of these reminders.

The process involved the interviews of people involved with childcare like parents, doctors, teacher … From this they moved into defining some play style related to sick children and health children.

Brainstorming around these concepts, they desinged some interactive environment to henance the connections of the children with remote users or other children through the game. 3 scenarion: the igloo, the enhanced game room, the shared multi-game experience.

Other enhanced scenario were the Shared Wall, or Remote games of tech mats or shared radio controlled cars. The best experience they thought about was an enhanced networked game.

—–CRIT——

> One of the strenght of the project may be the wall concept rather than the igloo concept. In fact the mathaphor is from the private intimate space to the shared, performance, connected space.

> It is not clearr what is the core of the desing. An example would have engaged the audience.

> Is this really about sick people? It is not clear how this fits in the environment of the hospital. The way it was presented did not focused on the specificity of the system. < This was intentional because we did not want to stigmatise the sickness of the children or to make a difference evident. Circles of Care(ruth/bernd/ruth)____________ Circles of care are group of people / objects which halps in time of need. Once a person subscribe to the circles of care s/he has to specify who are the people s/he wants to take care of. The service is contextualised in a cell software which helps people to get in touch wuith their social network and organise actions or events for them, like oranise a TV watch event, managing the invitations. The TV event is then broadcasted to the hospital as well with SMS communiication. A second scenario of distance communication. A wish list can be used to order presents and to send the presents to the sick person. A third scenario is related to distance communication. Is possible, using the system to organise a sing along event. Is possible to choose a specific song, sing it, invite people to the event. Then people at different location and at different time can add the song to the track. The process. Post it mapping of health event. Interviews about health issues. Experience prototype with hospitalised patiens. Learning. -> “have the right to have your little things”.

——–CRIT——–
> What is the idea of the circles of care? It is related to specific locations? The circles of care don’t deal with the hospital, or the nurses or the doctor. So, really it is really a system for managing social networks and a particular attention to the health status of the members of the network.

> How do you gather the participants on the interface?

> Is there a continuity from hospital usage with home usage of the system.

> Instead to think the interface from the task point of view maybe it is better to structure the interface starting from the grouping. What are the options which the circles of care can suggest in the box?

> The representation of the network is not clear. Is it well represented for the friends that a person is hospitalised. But is not simmetric for the hospitalised person.

> There is not continuum of usage between F1 content and the speed of SMS.

Private lives in public health(matty/ben)_____________

“germs freacks” are the target of the project, to make invisible things visible, like “Laura left the bathroom without washing hands.” If you use UV lights you can make invisible dirt to become visible. They showed dirty stuff to people to see their reactions and to uncover the psychological perception people have.

Syndromic surveillange -> people mapping of germs?

This mapping of germs may be very useful if there is a flu going around. The way a person get the news about a flu around is indirect and driven by mass media. So the ideas is that it would be usefull to have some direct access over these kind of information.

One of the prototype was a map of SanFrancisco with these psecific information on top related to the health level on specific areas. A second prototype was the post codes of London map. They came out with an interactive map where users could see the simulation of the level of the immunity, or how long people are sick at home, or the number of medicinals bought, etc. On the map si possible to see the progression of the germs in the city with the risk level.

The idea, then is to make a web-based services (Healthwatch) that could laverage the level of health around a particular area of the city. The system will show at the last check what area were affected and the progression the flu had.

The user interface has to be improved. Do some testing with users. The authors received good feedback from doctors in relation to the democratic access to data. A possible expansion is to caorrelate these data with other informattions like the social level of a certain area.

The collection of data and model was taken from the British Health System(?). The treatement of this information may be critical.

——CRIT——
> If some of the data being feedbaccked to other partners (government)? Say I can relate the usage of a certain remedy with the effect of that remedy on the particular flu, etc.

> How do you connect this representation with actions? < Area where we provide this information as "tips". > Is it possible to customis the interaction with the information.

> Is this information design or interaction design? The transaction between the user and the screen is not really interactive.

> Does it really help to provide this information? How people use these tips or info and how do you know the behaviour proposed is correct. The ethical/control aspect is missing in the project (i.e., paranoia).

I’d like to get to know you well(christian/nathan)_____________
The project started from the cognitive approach to dealing with stress and then we came back to the prediction and mesuring topic.

The project idea is to mesure and predic: an almanac (compendium for predictions). The more the almanac grows the better it gets for predicting.

The important part of mesuring is that you have to mesure what matter. Measuring can be passive and active.

Similar solutions to balanced cards: Thoughtware, Excecutive Dashboards, Whisper numbers, PeopleSoft (HR), Crystal reports …

The service begins the level of happines of the emploees. Then with the data you can look at emerging patterns during a gestation period. Then you can take decision on what and how to mesure during the period of, say, “happiness”, and relate the other data in relation with the happines period (install secondary measurements). The comparison analysis is the important part of the game to predict when and how “happines” happens for employees. unsing the system is possible to find problems and to correct critical apsect of the work.

An initial prototype is an interface where the user can see all the different monitored parameters. A function of this interface is the ability of making predictions.

An assumption of this project is that people may use this tool to learn about the way they work or the crucial aspect of their daily routine.

———CRIT———
> How do you measure happyness? It may be critical to define psychological dimensions. Does accumulated data works if you generalise the level of happyness?

> How managment is going to use this information? How this is related to the almanac? Is this providing some kind of feedbacck to the sysstem of managing the work?

> Doing the testing in the institute is not really meaningful of a stressing situation. You should have conducted the study on the call center next door.

Share-Aware(patray/anurag)_________________
The project is concentrated on the correcct habit of using computers, helping people to be aware of their posture and changes in their activity. The idea is to provide reminder and assesment to the user.

The prototype consist of an icon showing the correct sitting position in front of the screen. Every time the user is sitting uncorretly an alert pops on the screen. In addition a cumulative visualization is offered to understand the effect of all the day.

They did some usability testing out of the prototype to understand what was the perception of real user out of the services. In addition the datalog can be shared with ergonomics experts.

Some services in the broader view can be for children or the university students.

The reflection process brough them to scale down the initial problem definition and focus on a specific critical situation. Then they did a background research around the theme of ergonomics and occupational therapist. Compare with existing products (ScreamSaver).

——-CRIT——-
> This is an hardware software project but you did not mention the business model behind.

> The whole system can be coustomised to the specific need of the user.

> It is possible to immagine this service within a company to increase the level of health of their employee.

> It is maybe possible to embed this concept in existing interfaces like “Clippy” for Microsoft Word.

smetti(holli/noel)_______________
quitting smoking. -> smokender challenge
confesSMS -> sending an SMS to confess the smoking of a cigarette

Smetti is a web portal which facilitate smokers in their challenge of quitting. Allows others to follow the evolution. The first part is to invite someone to a challenge.

On the portal (www.smetti.com), Log-in, questionnaire, call a friend, invite spectators, challenge starts and everyone participates, …

On the business model, the companies which produce stuff for quitting smoking may be interested in founding a services like this.

Finding time to complete the web site and to test with real users.

——CRIT——
> There is a loss which happened from the paper version to the web interface.

> The part of the imputing data is the weak part of the project.

> This doesn’t solve completely the issue of cheating.

> The role of the friends/spectator was not flashed out.

Train Doors(ethan/giovanni/oznur/simone)_______________
improving well-being of italy’s pendolari(train commuters)
Commuters share the same space for the same time for years. The concept is a Mobile Forum where SMS are the way of broadcasting messaging.

One example of service may be car sharing, which is agreed over SMS and negotiated the same way. One of the limits is spamming. To avoid this they suggest a social rating system. The concept behind is the concept of “familiar stranger”: if you see the same person over and over, you will fell to know the person in a certain way. The familiarity of a person is defined with his picture, is commuter status, and the familiarity rating (social). Fmiliarity is used to filter, to evaluare someone and to target outgoing messages.

From the business model, there are several partners involved in the process, like Alenia spazio which is going to provide network infostructure in trains, Trenitalia which is in the center of the project.

The process involved interviewing potential users and the creation of cards with ad-hac proto services. Like a wake up services via SMS. They find some links (i.e., craigslist). Then they conducted a user testing.

——–CRIT——–
> Usage of technology can change cultural habits. How do you immagine the user to swap their position in the train?

Cleaning air in a mega city(maya/miriel)____________
Providing a small scale solution to improve the quality of life, non isolating, mobile, emergent.

Airplant is constituted by enzimes which cleans the air as you breathe. Another goal of the project is to teach children how to use the air plant. The concept they thought about is a ball that resemble a world wich is cleaned the more the more the children dress the airplant. Inside the ball there are creatures or character that are fighting. The concept behind is to teach the concept of responsability. Other concepts that can be incorporated may be reproductions rules.

The process involved some environment with people from an hostile environment and a zig-zag between different techniques and scenario creation, game desing, etc…

——CRIT——
> This kind of technology may be enbedded inside clothes or in less intrusive stuff.

> What is the relation between the air plant and the ball? The air plant clean the air around the head.

BELINK(akeni)____________
This is a community for foreign people abroad. The community provides aid on different topics for people that don’t talk the country language. Is a community that is helping each other. There is a mediator in between that helps for translation.

——CRIT——-
> Passion is necessary a drawback?

> The presence of mediator can be an help for the interaction and to represent a kind of archive. So it is possible to imagine a variety of services connected to the mere translation feature.

> How the interaction with people, helped yuo to shape the initial concept?

> What would be the business model? The user would pay a montly fee.

Barbara -> responsabile area progetti