Irani, L., Jeffries, R., and Knight, A. Rhythms and plasticity: television temporality at home. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 14 (October 2010), 621–632. [PDF]

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This work focuses on new temporalities of media consumption in the home as enabled by new media technologies. The authors conducted in-home interviews and diary study with 14 households over two weeks. They found many instances of the classic image of television temporality, namely families relaxing together in front of the television. They also found examples of time-shifting to adjust broadcasts to fit one’s agenda. However, they also found a range of complex temporal patterns that sit between these two extremes.

They found many instances of rhythmic television watching. These are subject to change and are negociated. When made visibles these are a source for social coordination. DVR technologies allowed people flexibility in the times they watched television.

They found that rhythms might span across households. However, while most of the previous literature focused on the synchronous nature of these social events, they found instances of watching television independently at individually convenient times that still sustained the rhythm of the collective discussion experiences.

They also found accounts of “plastic” television watching. Plastic time activities are the variable, ad hoc time that fits between or along with other activities. On Demoand cable television allowed users to browse lists of shows, find one that fit into one’s anticipated amount of time, and immediately begin watching. This kind of television would also allow users to skip not relevant or interesting content or to watch more episodes of a series of interest.

The study concludes with interesting and relevant design implications:

1) the design and support of temporal awareness may support the sociality of television. Design that support asymnchronous sociality might also support some users keep up with television shows.

2) on demand TV might support plastic time by having a selection of very short video segments;

3) recommender systems would benefit from sense of timing and social awareness and realizing that timing might be as important as the stories or genres presented.

Dearman, D., Kellar, M., and Truong, K. N. An examination of daily information needs and sharing opportunities. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (New York, NY, USA, 2008), CSCW ’08, ACM, pp. 679–688. [PDF]

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The main argument of this work is that context-sensitive information needs can be supported by individuals in the social network. The authors support the idea that many contextual needs require specialized knowledge that is often not available on the Internet.

Under this assumption they conducted a 4-weeks diary study in which a diverse group of participants recorded the information they needed or that they wanted to share. They collected 1290 entries that were analyzed using grounded theory affinity analysis. They grouped the needs into 9 main categories with relative subcategories. Participants were able to satisfy their needs 45.3% of the time. Participants satisfied their information need by asking someone, going to a location where the information was available, look the answer on the web and user other methods suchg as the GPS, paper documents, trial and error and other media.

By looking qualitatively at the answers they observed some interesting facts: The timeliness of the information was a key factor and also the trust relationship with the source of the answer was an higly quoted variable that participants took into account.

The basic idea of the application is that you can formulate a wish and share it with people around you. The wish takes the form of a seed that you need to cultivate by giving enough water and light. Little by little the wish grows into a tree and it starts making flowers. People nearby can see your wish because it is planted at a geolocated position and can send you comments and encouraging messages to help you make you wish come true.

The concept of the app came out of the joint work that we did last summer with the UDSI team in Barcelona. I also like the idea because of my past work with the DigitalSeed [link] etc.

If you want to try out the app: WishTree

Heimonen, T. Information needs and practices of active mobile internet users. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Mobile Technology, Application & Systems (New York, NY, USA, 2009), Mobility ’09, ACM, pp. 50:1–50:8. [PDF]

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The authors of this paper looked at the effect of dataplan on smartphones have on mobile information needs and poractices. The authors used a diary study with 8 participants over the course of two weeks. Participants were filling a web form where they were asked to answer a certain number of questions (where / when / what / how / did you find what you were looking for?). They used a strict definition of information needs: need for a piece of informationthat you cannot recall from memory or that is not immediately available to you and that you would likely spend few minutes attempting to solve it while mobile.

They classified with simple coding the information needs into 15 topical categories. They divided the needs into utilitarian (pragmatic) and hedonic (entertainment). Most of the needs, 45%, were addressed immediately. The majority of the users answered the needs through web search. Interestingly, they also found that the contributing reasonto the information need is not easily attributable to any environmental factor (33% of the times).

The paper also presents some nice implications for design, such as the use of communal knowledge to solve mobile search needs. Also, they suggested several techniques to take advantage of the user’s interaction to predict mobile information needs.

The text of the design competition has been published on the MobileHCI’11 website (design brief below):

http://www.mobilehci2011.org/node/34

I would be grateful if you could spread the word around to colleagues who might be interested in academia and industry.

Design brief: The Essence of Mobile Communication and Connectivity

Mobile technology is very close to everyday lives, for more than half of the world’s population. It is reflected well by the fact that we hear about it very often. However designers, researchers, technologists and journalists alike tend to give too much highlights on what’s new, especially around high-end, so-called ‘Smart phones’. Arguably, smart phones embody the exciting future of mobile connectivity, but they may not reflect the reality of mobile connectivity for majority of users around the world for many years to come, due to affordability, infrastructure, total cost of ownership, and simply, user preference.

Overall, people’s behaviors around mobile communication devices have certainly changed over the past decades. People have experienced a considerable diversity of mobile phones, hence it is logical to assume that what people may consider as essential features of a mobile phone would have been diversified and changed as well.

Thereby we challenge contestants to define the essence of mobile communication and connectivity and demonstrate what, why and how to design it. Most importantly, contestants need to think about a mobile device that is not about extra new features but is rooted on the good design of its core essential functionalities and experience they will create. Perhaps we can think about a phone that uses the exact same hardware features of existing basic phones but with a completely redesigned user experience. Perhaps we can think about a phone that “pushes” some of its intelligence to the cloud. Or a phone that can be operated with voice and that does not require a display.

Zilok is a startup that offers an interesting service: people post possessions they are willing to rent out, along with a price. The web site processes the fee, track the reputation of your renting partner and issues insurance for the item. This is peer to peer renting.

B. Schilit, N. Adams, and R. Want, “Context-aware computing applications,” in WMCSA ’94: Proceedings of the 1994 First Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, (Washington, DC, USA), pp. 85–90, IEEE Computer Society, 1994. [PDF]

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This paper describes software that reacts to an individual’s changing context. According to the authors, three important aspects of context are: where you are, who you are with, and what resources are nearby. Context includes different aspects of the physical environment around the user.

To investigate these topics they developed ParcTab, a small hand-held devices that uses infrared based cellular network for communication. The Tab acts as a graphics terminal and most of applications run on remote hosts.

Using this experimental environment, they describe four interaction mechanism:

1. Proximate Selection, the located-objects that are nearby are emphasized or otherwise made easier to choose.
2. Automatic Contextual Reconfiguration is the process of adding new components, removing existing components or altering the connections between components.
3. Contextual Information and Commands happens when contextual information can produce different results accodring to the context in which they are issued.
4. Context-Triggered Actions are sets of rules that specify how contex-aware systems should adapt.

A. Zimmermann, A. Lorenz, and R. Oppermann, “An operational definition of context,” in CONTEXT’07: Proceedings of the 6th international and interdisciplinary conference on Modeling and using context, (Berlin, Heidelberg), pp. 558–571, Springer-Verlag, 2007. [PDF]

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This paper presents a summary of theoretical definitions of context that were developed in the past in the field of computer science. The authors’ argument presented in the paper is that most of the definitions that were proposed in the past were indirect definitions that used synonyms or that were either too general or incomplete.

By summarizing previous work, the authors presented an operational definition of context that could be used to characterize the situation of anentity. According to the authors, elements for the description of this context information fall into five categories:

1. individuality
2. activity
3. location
4. time
5. relations

Also, according to the authors something is context because of the way it is used in interpretation, not due to its inherent properties. When interacting and communicating in everyday life, the perception of situations, as well as the interpretation of the context is a major part. Therefore, the author presents some operational additive to the general definition: context transitions, variation of approximation, change of focus, shift of attention, shared contexts, the establishment of relations, the adjustment of shared contexts, and the exploiting of relationships.

N. A. Bradley and M. D. Dunlop, “Toward a multidisciplinary model of context to support context-aware computing,” Hum.-Comput. Interact., vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 403–446, 2005. [PDF]

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This paper presents a comprehensive literature review of multidisciplinary research on context. The primary aim of the authors was that of reviewing and merging theories of context within linguistic, computer science, and psychology to propose a multidisciplinary model of context that would facilitare application developers.

The authors find out that contextual interactions appered to comprise the cross-disciplinary component for understanding and using principles of context. From a liguistic perspective it is the interaction between two people, within computer science it is the user-application interaction (combined with possible interactions with other people and objects=, and within psychology it is the internal and external interactions. Last, contextual interactions should be considered also though the notion of embodiment, as described by Dourish (2001).

Thus man is a perpetually wanting animal. Ordinarily the satisfaction of these wants is not altogether mutually exclusive, but only tends to be. The average member of our society is most often partially satisfied and partially unsatisfied in all of his wants.

A. H. Maslow, A Theory of Human Needs, 1943