Antonio Scarponi sent me this very interesting link on conceptual devices: Conceptual Devices consider design as a social engagement. Its projects operate through a shift of symbolic values due to the social utility and social responsibility of arts and design in contemporary society. Conceptual Devices is currently a network based structure of collaborations set up on specific projects.

RIKEA (a manual about how to make a free market set with Ikea re-assembled furniture) received an honorable mention at the International Architecture Biennale, within the exhibition Squat City.

Consolvo, S., McDonald, D. W., and Landay, J. A. Theory-driven design strategies for technologies that support behavior change in everyday life. In CHI ’09: Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (New York, NY, USA, 2009), ACM, pp. 405–414. [PDF]

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This paper describes psychological theories that can help and inform the design of persuasive technologies. The starting assumption of the authors is that in the design of persuasive technology a critical design component is often ignored: namely, that the proposed technologies often must effectively integrate into the individual’s everyday life and that they impact the individual’s social world.

According to the authors, the design of persuasive technologies should draw goal-setting theory [Locke and Latham, 2002], which describes how individuals respond to different types of goals and thus which tend to motivate well. For example, the individual must have decided that the goal is important to her and that it is easy to gauge her progress and know when she has met the goal. Feedback and incentives should bve provided at intermediary steps and not only when she finally meet the goal.

The Transtheoretical Model [Prochaska et al., 1992] describes the stages through which an individual progresses to intentionally modify addictive or other problematic behaviors: precontemplation, no intention to change in the foreseable future; contemplation, seriously considering changing; preparation, intends to take action in the next month; action, has performed the desired behavior consistently for less than six months; and maintenance, where the desired behavior has been performed for more than six months.

The theory of Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [Gofman, 1959] describes how individuals attempt to managethe impressions they want others to have of them. The performance encompasses all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presencebefore a particular set of observers. A given performance has two regions: front and backstage. Other important concepts include dramatic realization (when the individual draws attention to facts that may go unnoticed), misrepresentation (individuals may bebe incented to misrepresent facts), and secret consmption (acted actions that are incompatible with ideal standards).

According to the authors, technology to encourage lifestyle behavior change must support fundamental impression management needs. Technology may also need to enable the individual to misrepresent something about her behavior perhaps to support secret consumption.

The Cognitive Dissonance theory [Festinger, 1957] explains what happens when an individual realizes that her attitudes and behaviors are inconsistent. When that happens the individual experience discomfort, or dissonance. Therefore, the individual will be motivated to reduce or eliminate the dissonance. The more important the beliefs are to the individual, the more likely she will try to reduce the dissonance.

Therefore, the author conclude that technology should hep the individual remain focused on her commitment to change and her relevant pattern of behavior. The awareness provided by the technology should be persistently available and easy to access.

Fogg, B. Persuasive computers: perspectives and research directions. In CHI ’98: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (New York, NY, USA, 1998), ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., pp. 225–232. [PDF]

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This paper contain a seminal definition of the domain of persuasive technologies, named captology. The author defines five different perspective on computers and persuasion. His original definition of persuasion is: an attempt to shape, reinforce, or change behaviors, feelings, or thoughts about an issue, object or action. According to the author, the persuasive nature of technology does not reside with the object itself. Instead, the persuasive nature of technology depends on the context of creation, distribution, and adoption. In particular contexts, technology inherits a type of intent from human actors. Finally, the paper lists seven research directions for captology.

Palen, L., and Aaløkke, S. Of pill boxes and piano benches: “home-made” methods for managing medication. In CSCW ’06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work (New York, NY, USA, 2006), ACM, pp. 79–88. [PDF]

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This paper describes an ethnographic study of how elders manage their medication with the objective of informing the design of in-home assistive health technology to support medication adherence. The authors describe many strategies that elderly uses to organize their medication many of which leverage a kind of socially distributed cognition. For instance, the position of the pillboxes in a cabinet is used to remember the sequence at which the medications have to be taken during the day.

These findings inform five design principles: 1) assistive IT should support personalized medication management systems that can be distributed across the home using spatial arrangements in places that support rutines; 2) computation should benefit elders in the management of their medications; 3) systems should provide windows of inference for remote assistance (e.g., when health care workers see that the place is messy and understand that something is wrong with the elderly); 4) technology should respect the privacy and dignity of the user; and 5) “health” should be conceptualized to be broader in scope than what occurs in the context of a doctor-patient exchange.

Survival analysis is a branch of statistics which deals with death in biological organisms and failure in mechanical systems. This topic is called reliability theory or reliability analysis in engineering, and duration analysis or duration modeling in economics or sociology. More generally, survival analysis involves the modelling of time to event data; in this context, death or failure is considered an “event” in the survival analysis literature. Another example of time to event modeling could be the rate or time to which former convicts commit a crime again after they’ve been released. In this case, the ‘event’ of interest would be committing a crime. Many concepts in Survival analysis have been explained by the Counting Process Theory, which has emerged more recently. The flexibility of a counting process is that it allows modeling multiple (or recurrent) events. This type of modeling fits very well in many situations (e.g. people can go to jail multiple times, alcoholics can start and stop drinking multiple times, people can get married and get a divorce many times).

Survival analysis attempts to answer questions such as: what is the fraction of a population which will survive past a certain time? Of those that survive, at what rate will they die or fail? Can multiple causes of death or failure be taken into account? How do particular circumstances or characteristics increase or decrease the odds of survival?

[more]

Chiu, M.-C., Chang, S.-P., Chang, Y.-C., Chu, H.-H., Chen, C. C.-H., Hsiao, F.-H., and Ko, J.-C. Playful bottle: a mobile social persuasion system to motivate healthy water intake. In Proceedings of UbiComp’09 (Orlando, FL, USA, September 30 – October 3 2009). [PDF]

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This paper describe Playful Bottle, a system to motivate user to drink the right quantities of water during the day. The author designed a very smart object by sticking an HTC device to a bottle. The camera of the device could read the level of the liquid inside the bottle, while the accelerometers of the device could detect when a person was actually drinking. Finally, the display of the device was showing the application.

They tested the system with 16 university hospital staffers. The authors developed two “hydratation games”: one called the TreeGame where the user could see a tree on the screen of the device. The health of the plant was regulated by the right amount of water intake by the user. The second game, called the ForestGame was besically showing the same TreeGame with the possibility of seeing other friends and colleagues participating in the same game, thus leveraging on the social pressure to persuade user to drink water regularly.

Results from 7-week user study with 16 test subjects suggest that both hydration games are effective for encouraging adequate and regular water intake by users. Additionally, results of this study suggest that adding social reminders to the hydration game is more effective than system reminders alone.

The authors used an interesting analysis technique called “survival analysis”.

Finally, I found some time to write a report about MobileHCI’09. This conference started in 1998 as a workshop. It matured as a conference in 2003. This year there were 306 participants, and the acceptance rate for full paper was 24%.

The keynote speaker was Jun Rekimoto, professor at University of Tokyo and researcher at Sony Research Lab. He presented some work he conducted on “Large Scale Integration of Real and Virtual Worlds”. One of their latest project is called PlaceEngine. It is basically a WiFi based Position Recognition engine which might combine also GPS information. The idea of building this infrastructure started a couple of years ago with a project called Annotated Reality [Rekimoto 1998]. WiFi positioning is important because it is fast to acquire location and also works indoor and outdoor. Finally it can distinguish the height at which the user is located. Their basic idea is that people might participate into the data collection part of building this database of access points: they want to turn a folsksonomy collection into wifi infostructure sensing (sensonomy). Prof. Rekimoto makes the example of wiper wheater maps (wheather sensors on taxi cabs). They basically come out with a strategy to geolocate the position of the access points. Similare to what I was proposing for GSM antennas.

They used this lagorithm to implement some realworld markerless AR.

I basically opened the conference presenting the first paper titled: Text versus speech: a comparison of tagging input modalities for camera phones:

Speech and typed text are two common input modalities for mobile phones. However, little research has compared them in their ability to support annotation and retrieval of digital pictures on mobile devices. In this paper, we report the results of a month-long field study in which participants took pictures with their camera phones and had the choice of adding annotations using speech, typed text, or both. Subsequently, the same subjects participated in a controlled experiment where they were asked to retrieve images based on annotations as well as retrieve annotations based on images in order to study the ability of each modality to effectively support users’ recall of the previously captured pictures. Results demonstrate that each modality has advantages and shortcomings for the production of tags and retrieval of pictures. Several guidelines are suggested when designing tagging applications for portable devices.

[link to PDF] [DOI] [Slides of the presentation]

Sian Lindley presented a qualitative study on pictures taken with SenseCam devices. They noticed that pictures taken with sensecam devices capture things that are normally nor photographed. People in their qualitative experiment did not use sensecams to record their lifelog but they use it as a special kind of photography. Their work focused on aesthetics and sentimentality of photography. The paper is titled: Frozen in time and “time in motion”: Mobility of vision through a SenseCam lens, and it is available here.

Arto Puikkonen presented an interesting field study to understand how people create videos with mobile phones. They recruited 11 participants that collected a total of 255 videos during two weeks. They found that 65% of the videos were planned and watched on large displays. Also over 85% of the video were meant for oneself and not for others. The paper was titled: Practices in Creating Videos with Mobile Phones.

Peter Mockel addressed the Industrial Keynote of Deutsche Telekom AG. He described how at DT Labs they are trying to get the user more involved. They have 150 researchers but they manage to produce 250 publications per year and a paper application per week. They designed a game called “Scotland yard on your mobile phone”.

Richard Harper from MSR Cambridge presented “Glancephone an exploration of human expression”. His initial argument was that sociology does not exist. He quoted a book of Hutchinson titled: “There is no such thing are social science”. In essence, the point that Winch was trying to make, that has so often been misinterpreted (though thankfully clarified by Hutchinson, Read and Sharrock), is that the desire to utilise and replicate the methods and achievements of the ‘natural’ sciences to the ‘social’ and ‘human’ sciences is profoundly mistaken. The concept of a ‘social science’ is a misnomer that merely displays itself as ‘bad’ philosophy and is the very scientism that Wittgenstein and Winch aimed to steer us away from. In their work, Harper and colleagues are interested in fitting design to human use. Richard explains how communicating for people is a really rich activity that is usually reduced when mediated by technology. The glancephone allows users to let callers glance at what they are doing before making a phone call. They conducted a user study to understand how it was perceived. What happened during the trial was that people used the system to be glanced not to glance at people.

Karin Leichtenstern presented as study titled: “Studying Multi-user settings for pervasive games”. They tried to understand what is the best way to allocate resources in a multi-user pervasive game so to balance collaboration and communication. They conducted a user study with 18 children. They built 3 group with different configurations.
Ohad Inbar presented a study on how to design “Online Help in Mobile Devices”. They noticed that 63% of 1 out of 7 phones sold are returned because said to be “faulty” however they are not broken. Built-in help solutions are not good because these people are not good in seeking these information.On the other hand an online help might be considered intrusive. Therefore they designed a context-aware help that could kick-in every time they were facing a difficult situation. They were detecting the problematic aspect of the user’s interaction by the activity of the user as seen from the system.

Anupriya Ankolekar presented: “Friendlee: A mobile application for your social life”. Their starting assumption is that true social networks are smaller than the contacts you have on FB. Interactions are driven by smaller, more intimate groups of users like Twitter and phone communication (CDR). Difficult to filter out unwanted staff from Facebook to concentrate on the core. Friendlee construct your intimate social network from the call-logs and SMS. Share personal context and browse connections of friends. Big social networks do not distinguish between the general and intimate contacts. MIG33 is an social network application for phone only, like loopt. [more]

Nirmal Patel presented a study on “Two Thumbs Chording”: This works explain and evaluates a technique to enter text with the keyboard of a mobile with two thumbs. The paper includes a nice methodology and metrics for comparing inputing techniques.

Stephen Brewster presented a paper titled: “Pressure-Based Text Entry for Mobile Devices”. Their motivation was that currently pressure input is of little help for interaction because we do not have good ways to offer good feedback to the user so that they can adapt their movements and control finely the device. They designed a pressure keyboard where a light pressure brings a lower case letter and and hard pressure brings an uppercase letter. They found that good feedback is key for pressure input. The pressure keyboard is slower than other input method but is more robust to error when the user is walking. They used the NASA TLX for measuring workload.

Kun Yu presented a paper titled: “Coupa: operation with pen linking”. It is basically an interface where the user can operate the phone by just drawing a line between a number of labels sitting on the edges of the screen. The labels represents actions and items that the user uses frequently.

Leif Opperman presented a study titled: “Ubiketous computing”. They explained how cycling is good for many reasons. They want to augment riding by providing hystorical information and other information while the user is riding. The project was called “sillitoe trail“. The second study was called “rider spoke” where players could freely explore the city for 1 hour. They could hear a narrator voice recorded and they could record messages that others could hear. The paper contains useful design suggestions for designing interactive systems for cyclists.

Ronald Ecker, from BMW research presented an interactive menu for car entertainment systems called PieTouch. The paper addresses the complexity of designing interactive menus for in-car entertainment systems that do not conflic the most important navigation functionalities of the car.

Martin Pielot presented a study on how to support map-based wayfinding. Their initial argument was that paper-based maps are favored over navigation systems and allow more effective navigation [Ishikawa et al., 2008 & Rukzio et al., 2009] than GPS for pedestrians. They developed a belt with many vibration motors that could offer egocentric cues to the user toward the final destination. They designed a user study to understand the impact of this technology. They found that the belt was helping pedestrian navigation a lot. The belt allowed them to orientate the map and to detect and correct maps mistakes that were difficult to fix without (e.g., pedestrian paths).

Simon Robinson presented a study titled: “Sweep-Shake: Finding Digital Resources in Physical Environments”. They designed an interaction technique to access digital resources using the shake device. moving the device users could select specific content and using the vibrator feedback they could locate the location connected with some content in the environment.

Johannes Schoning presented a study titled: “PhotoMap: Using Spontaneously taken Images of Public Maps for Pedestrian Navigation Tasks on Mobile Devices”. They started from the assumption that when you are visiting a parc you do not use your mobile navigation device but you use public maps to understand where to go because they contain better information that you could find online. The idea of Photomap is to take a picture of these publically available map and transfer them to the mobile device to add dynamic positioning on top of the map. The main idea behind photomap is the georeferencing that is required to position yourself on top of these locally available maps. Userg generated maps are richer that the ones you can get from google, yahoo, or microsoft. [more]

Alireza Sahami Shirazi presented a paper titled: “Emotion Sharing via self-composed Melodies on Mobile Phones”. The paper includes interesting references that are relevant for MobiMoood. They designed a system for composing tunes that could be sent to a certain recepient to share emotions.

Finally, Markku Turunen, from Tampere university, presented a paper titled: “User Expectations and User Experience with Different Modalities in a Mobile Phone Controlled Home Entertainment System”.The author designed an experiment to test different ways of using the mobile phone to control a Home Entertainment Systems. The best part of this paper was to devise an interesting methodology to extrapolate users’ feedback. The same methodology was presented in INTERACT and INTERSPEECH. [more]

Two weeks ago I presented a paper at MobileHCI’09 titled: Text versus speech: a comparison of tagging input modalities for camera phones:

Speech and typed text are two common input modalities for mobile phones. However, little research has compared them in their ability to support annotation and retrieval of digital pictures on mobile devices. In this paper, we report the results of a month-long field study in which participants took pictures with their camera phones and had the choice of adding annotations using speech, typed text, or both. Subsequently, the same subjects participated in a controlled experiment where they were asked to retrieve images based on annotations as well as retrieve annotations based on images in order to study the ability of each modality to effectively support users’ recall of the previously captured pictures. Results demonstrate that each modality has advantages and shortcomings for the production of tags and retrieval of pictures. Several guidelines are suggested when designing tagging applications for portable devices.

[link to PDF] [DOI] [Slides of the presentation]

Full reference:

Cherubini, M., Anguera, X., Oliver, N., and de Oliveira, R. Text versus speech: a comparison of tagging input modalities for camera phones. In MobileHCI ’09: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (New York, NY, USA, 2009), ACM, pp. 1–10.

This week I am pretty happy because in Italy we made some progress for the freedom of press: a new journal is born, namely “Il Fatto Quotidiano“. This journal has some peculiar characteristics:

– it does not have an owner. It was founded by a bunch of journalists of “L’Unità” that left that journal and took equal shares of the new journal.

– it does not take public money. It works with subscriptions and selling copies through news-agents.

– it does not take a particular point of view. It criticize equally the government and the opposition, although it bends a bit for the opposition.

– it publishes news that nobody else usually want/can publish.

Today I stumbled upon two interesting news that made me remember the good old days of the Biosphera project. Different research teams tried to build a robotic plant that could behave like an organic plant.

One of the plant was developed by a Korean team, at Chonnam National University. The robotic plant has has humidifying, oxygen-producing, aroma-emitting, and kinetic functions. The robot was developed using characteristics of plants normally grown for ornamental purposes. It is 130 cm tall and 40 cm in diameter and consists of a pot, a stem, and five buds of a flower reminiscent of a rose of Sharon.

The second model was developed by Sega and it is called Pekoppa Robot Plant. It looks surprisingly lifelike but never needs watering or sunlight… what it craves is your attention. Talk to your Pekoppa plant and it responds to your voice by bending and moving in a very lifelike manner.

What I like about these two projects is that designers are increasingly more interested in plants as interaction objects. For centuries they have been delicate and vulnerable beings that did not interact at all with superior species. However, there is something primal in their essence that has always captured the attention and fascinations of humans (besides sustaining human life on earth). I also like the idea of a robo plant. In my digital seed project, I was using virtual characters to help kids interact with plants and learn about life science. However, the virtual elements of my design destroyed completely the tangible experience you could have with physical plants. I bet with a robo plant it would be completely different.

Biography:

M. Cherubini. Microworlds for ecology explorations: From DigitalSeed to Biosphera in fostering children’s understanding of plant biology. Master’s thesis, St. Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, Ireland, May 2004. [PDF]

M. Cherubini, H. Gash and T.J.J. McCloughlin The Digital Seed: An interactive toy for investigating plant growth and the generalized plant life cycle., Journal of Biological Education, Institute of Biology Press, London, 2008