May 10, 2012 @ 09:30, Room: 12AB
Chair: Josh Tanenbaum, Simon Fraser University, Canada
"I had a dream and I built it" Power and self-staging in ubiquitous high-end homes - alt.chi
Contribution & Benefit: Case study describing motivations for affluent people to live in smart home environments. In particular we describe how people use technologies for staging themselves and for exposing their power.
Abstract » Research on smart homes and ubiquitous homes is often highly focused on the challenges and obstacles for establishing and living in smart homes. Few have studied peoples’ motivations for establishing smart homes as well as the real life experiences living in such homes. We have had the chance to study 27 homes of very wealthy people around the world, living in homes containing the smartness and intelligence money can buy today. We report on the passions and experiences motivating people to live in smart environments. In particular we describe how people use technologies for staging themselves and for exposing their power.
Pet Video Chat: Monitoring and Interacting with Dogs over Distance - alt.chi
Contribution & Benefit: To investigate the potential of interactive dog cams, we designed a pet video chat system with remote interaction features and evaluated it with pet owners to understand its usage.
Abstract » Companies are now making video-communication systems that allow pet owners to see, and, in some cases, even interact with their pets when they are separated by distance. Such ‘doggie cams’ show promise, yet it is not clear how pet video chat systems should be designed (if at all) in order to meet the real needs of pet owners. To investigate the potential of interactive dog cams, we then designed our own pet video chat system that augments a Skype audio-video connection with remote interaction features and evaluated it with pet owners to understand its usage. Our results show promise for pet video chat systems that allow owners to see and interact with their pets while away.
Vehicular Lifelogging: New Contexts and Methodologies for Human-Car Interaction - alt.chi
Contribution & Benefit: Presents novel design for automotive lifelogging that engages drivers in ongoing discoveries about their vehicle. Offers innovative storytelling and theatrical strategies focusing on “character” and larger social context surrounding driving.
Abstract » This paper presents an automotive lifelogging system that uses in-car sensors to engage drivers in ongoing discoveries about their vehicle, driving environment, and social context throughout the lifecycle of their car. A goal of the design is to extend the typical contexts of automotive user-interface design by (1) looking inward to the imagined “character” of the car and (2) looking outward to the larger social context that surrounds driving. We deploy storytelling and theatrical strategies as a way of moving our thinking outside the familiar constraints of automotive design. These methods help us to extend the concept of a lifelog to consider the “lives” of objects and the relationship between humans and non-humans as fruitful areas of design research.
Crowdsourcing an Emotional Wardrobe - alt.chi
Contribution & Benefit: Investigating the possibility of designing a multi-modal language to enable the crowdsourcing of tactile perceptions of garments and the values that such a process would bring to our society.
Abstract » Selecting clothing online requires decision-making about sensorial experiences, but online environments provide only limited sensorial information. Inferences are therefore made on the basis of product pictures and their textual description. This is often unreliable as it is either based on the designer’s understanding of the product or deprived of perceptual content due to the difficulty of expressing such experiences. Using a purpose built website that combines and cross references multi-modal descriptive media, this study aims at investigating the possibility of using crowdsourcing mechanisms and multi-modal language to engage consumers in providing enriched descriptions of their tactile experiences of garments.
TravelThrough: A Participatory-based Guidance System for Traveling through Disaster Areas - alt.chi
Contribution & Benefit: We examine the potential of utilizing the affected population and prevalent mobile technology (with GPS) as distributed active sensors, sharing observations from the disaster areas, while guiding themselves to safety.
Abstract » This paper focuses on decentralized individual self-help in the aftermath of a disaster, instead of the traditionally adopted model of centralized disaster response management. It presents the results of a controlled field experiment that compares a new disaster response model involving civilians participating with smartphones with the traditional centralized model. In the new system, the affected people lead themselves to safety, and at the same time serving as distributed active sensors that share observations of the disaster area. The results show that the proposed system is more effective, preferred, and reduces the workload in guiding affected people safely to their destinations.