A categorization of telecommunications services is presented, as a deliverable in a project commissioned by TeliaSonera.
Urbanization is one of the major current trends in society. Cities around the world are looking into 'smart' solutions based on information and communication technology to deal with the challenges that result from this development. Mobility is one of the most important areas to address, and system-of-systems solutions where vehicles and infrastructure are connected have a potential to improve urban transportation in many aspects. In this paper, current initiatives related to mobility in smart cities around the world are surveyed, and this is complemented with input from focus groups of transportation stakeholders to identify the important aspects of the problem. Based on this, challenges related to the application of systems-ofsystems in urban mobility are identified.
This paper investigates user perceptions of continuous identity as agents migrate between different embodiments. It reports an experiment seeking to establish whether migrating or not migrating the interaction memory of the agent would affect the user's perception of consistent agent identity over different embodiments. The experiment involved a treasure hunt in which a virtual agent migrated from a screen to a mobile phone in order to accompany a user while they searched for clues. A total of 45 subjects took part in three different conditions with 15 subjects in each. The outcome showed that the presence of memory affected the competence users ascribed to the virtual agent. However it had no significant effect on a strong perception of consistent identity across multiple embodiments.
This paper discusses an experiment examining the impact of interaction memory on user perceptions of a virtual agent with multiple embodiments and migration between them. The outcome showed users perceived agents with memory as more competent, but it had no significant effect on a strong perception of consistent identity across multiple embodiments.
This paper investigates user perceptions of continuous identity as agents migrate between different embodiments. It reports an experiment seeking to establish whether migrating or not migrating the interaction memory of the agent would affect the user’s perception of consistent agent identity over different embodiments. The experiment involved a treasure hunt in which a virtual agent migrated from a screen to a mobile phone in order to accompany a user while they searched for clues. A total of 45 subjects took part in three different conditions with 15 subjects in each. The outcome showed that the presence of memory affected the competence users ascribed to the virtual agent but had no significant effect on a strong perception of consistent identity across multiple embodiments.
Opportunistic augmentation denotes connecting a personal mobile device to another device to gain a transient advantage for the user. For example, a mobile phone user might borrow a large display and keyboard from a desktop personal computer. This uniquely ubiquitous computing activity requires effective device and service discovery as well as appropriate media usable across two or more devices. In this paper we show how Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the call signaling protocol for Voice over IP, effectively separates discovery from media-rendering selection in opportunistic augmentation. This separation improves system flexibility while allowing users or system administrators to choose the most appropriate discovery technologies for the environment. We also describe two phone-centric discovery mechanisms and demonstrate the practicality of the system by implementation and use in a test environment.
We will discuss an approach for conducting long term studies of companionship technologies – technologies intended for more intimate relationships with people. We draw from our work of conducting several qualitative long-term user studies of people’s relationship with robotic companions and mobile devices in order to develop a methodology where the initial bond with the artifact is based on a more intense experience. After this initial phase referred to as Always On the relationship will fade over to the adoption phase where the more traditional long-term use can be studied. Most recently we are trying out this approach for studying people’s experience of an online social game that features virtual agents.
We discuss the difference between understanding robot ethics as something that is grounded in philosophical ideas about a potential future design, and understanding robot ethics as something that is grounded in empirical data. We argue, that understanding “robots” as a relatively homogenous group of designs for which we can formulate general ethics may lead to a foresight of future robot designs that includes ideas and concerns that are not feasible or realistic. Our aim is to exemplify a complementing perspective, by shedding light on two different robotic designs. We discuss their relation to specific use practices and user experiences, and provide some early ethical reflections and design concerns.
HCI is increasingly paying attention to sports, and more and more CHI attendees are aiming to maintain being physically active while attending CHI. In response, we offer a SIG on the topic of sports-HCI and conduct it in a sportive way: we will go out of the conference venue and jog around San Jose while discussing the role of HCI in relation to sports. The goal is to actively shape the future of the field of sports-HCI.
There has been a significant increase of interactive technologies to support sports activities. Examples are heart rate monitors for cyclists, jogging apps on mobile phones and GPS sports watches for extreme sports. Despite consumer popularity, there is little knowledge about how they should be designed in order to support the exertion activity. Based on CHI’13’s success of conducting a special interest group outdoors, we propose jogging with technology to discuss sports support interactive systems and investigate what future opportunities and challenges exist.
This paper explores the issues that arise in the context of the migration of a robotic pet between different embodiments and the associated design challenges. In the following, we describe the perceptions that a group of children have of a dinosaur character crossing the boundary between its robotic embodiment (the Pleo commercial pet), and its virtual counterpart on a mobile phone. We analyse the children's perceptions of, as well as emotional reactions to, the migration of this character, and show how seemingly subtle variations in the migration process can affect the children's perception on the character and its embodiments. Among other findings, gaps in the migration process, or perceived unresponsiveness, appeared to be accompanied by anxiety in the participating children. Based on our results, we point to yet unsolved design challenges for migration in interactions with embodied characters, and offer insights for migration implementation.
To explore how people manage and maintain life style change, we conducted interviews with eight members of different Twelve Step Fellowships with 2-23 years of recovery about how they maintain and develop their recovery in everyday life. They reported how identification, sharing, and routines are keys to recovery. Our lessons for design concerns how these concepts support recovery in a long term perspective: Sharing to contribute in a broader sense to the fellowship and to serve as an example for fellow members created motivation even after 20 years of recovery; reflecting over routines in recovery was essential since life is constantly changing and routines need to fit into everyday life; concrete gestures were helpful for some of the abstract parts of the recovery work, such as letting go of troubling issues. Design aimed to support maintenance of lifestyle change needs to open up for ways of sharing that allow users to contribute their experiences in ways that create motivation, and support users in reflecting over their routines rather than prompting them on what to do.
A preliminary analysis of diary study of cell phone use in the home shows that mobility is an important feature at home and phones are more mobile than laptop computers with wifi. The phone adds functionality to the home, such as text messaging, reminders and integrated picture taking and sending. The needs of mobile phone use in the home are similar to the needs in traditional mobile use situations: mobility, quick access, ease of use.
We present a method for developing multi-device services which allows for the creation of services that are adapted to a wide range of devices. Users have a wide selection of electronic services at their disposal such as shopping, banking, gaming, and messaging. They interact with these services using the computing devices they prefer or have access to, which can vary between situations. In some cases, the services that they want to use func-tions with the device they have access to, and sometimes it does not. Thus, in order for users to experience their full benefits, electronic services will need to become more flexible. They will need to be multi-device services, i.e. be accessible from different devices. We show that multi-device services are often used in different ways on different devices due to variations in device capabilities, purpose of use, context of use, and usability. This suggests that multi-device services not only need to be accessible from more than one device, they also need to be able to present functionality and user interfaces that suit various devices and situations of use. The key problem addressed in this work is that there are too many device-service combinations for developing a service version for each device. In-stead, there is a need for new methods for developing multi-device services which allows the creation of services that are adapted to various devices and situations. The challenge of designing and implementing multi-device services has been addressed in two ways in the present work: through the study of real-life use of multi-device services and through the creation of a development method for multi-device services. Studying use of multi-device services has gener-ated knowledge about how to design such services which give users the best worth. The work with development methods has resulted in a design model building on the separation of form and content, thus making it possible to create different presentations to the same content. In concrete terms, the work has resulted in design guidelines for multi-device services and a system prototype based on the principles of separation between form and content, and presentation control.
This report provides an overview of different approaches to device independent development of applications and a background to why it is important for mobile computing. It also describes the different sources of inspiration for the work with the Ubiquitous Interactor.
This paper is composed of two parts. The first one gives a review of the design iterations for the Ubiquitous Interactor prototype. The second part makes a primary evaluation the concepts and the implementation, describes a small pilot study and gives some pointers on how the future evaluation will be conducted.
The project has created a design for a mobile service for personal Twelve Step work and situated Twelve Step work within the space of internet therapy and mobile services. The Twelve Step program helps addicts to recover from addiction and obsessive behavior, and their families to recover from the effects of living with an addict. Since recovery touches upon all aspects of life, mobile technology is a useful tool. The design presented below consists of three functions: · compiling the daily rhythm – helping users reflect over their routines through data collection and visualization, · rolling the dice - helping users break out of negative thinking by suggesting activities, · a gesture for letting go – helping users let go of issues they cannot handle. They are grounded in interviews and literature and will be further tested in future projects. Here, they are described and their minimal technical requirements are listed.
Cell phones and other mobile devices are used to access the Internet even at home and at work where computers are easily available. They are no longer a mere backup to the computer. This means that it makes little sense to study Internet access from mobile devices separate from other Internet access. We need new methods that encompass online behavior from desktop computers and mobile devices as well as stationary and mobile online behavior.
Information technology has not yet fully penetrated the work with pre-school children. We have interviewed parents and pre-school teachers to investigate how they exchange information. Findings show that the information flow relies heavily on presence. The information is concentrated to physical places in the pre-school and in the home which means that information problems arise when children are absent from pre-school or the family is absent from home.
We have interviewed four parents and a teacher at a Swedish preschool to investigate the practices for spreading information in preschool. Our findings suggest that frequent presence in the premises of the preschool is important to get information, and that parents rely heavily on routines to make it work. When either of these points fail, breakdowns occur. Discrepancies in parents’ and teachers’ IT use also complicates the information exchange.
We have conducted interviews with 22 users of three multi-device services, email and two web communities, to explore practices, benefits, and problems with using services both from desktop computers and mobile devices. Participants reported different usage patterns on different devices, offering support for adapting services to the capabilities of devices. The most common usage problems reported concerned text input and navigation on mobile devices, and data organization over multiple devices.
We have interviewed members of three different Twelve Step programs about how they manage their recovery in a long term perspective. This data also provides insight in the social aspects of the Twelve Step program. We believe that HCI could be inspired for design of social media for lifestyle change by looking more closely at the Twelve Step program. For example the focus on sharing practical experience, creating groups with strong sense of identification as well as personal mentor relations.
This chapter looks back on and reflects over the mobile use of an online community for Swedish teenagers, an early social media, and discusses its relationship to current social media. Analysis of two months of log data and 100 surveys on teenagers’ phone use showed that the phone use mostly took place during times of the day when teenagers had social time and was not influenced by the availability of a computer. The phone made the community access more private compared to the computer, but teens did share the use when they wanted to. The cell phone bridged the online and offline social communities and allowed teens to participate in both at the same time. The online community was not only a place for social activity online, it was also a social activity offline that was carried out face-to-face with friends.
This licentiate thesis addresses design and development problems that arise when service providers, and service end-users face the variety of computing devices available on the market. The devices are designed for many types of use in various situations and settings, which means that they have different capabilities in terms of presentation, interaction, memory, etc. Service providers often handle these differences by creating a new version for each device. This creates a lot of development and maintenance work, and often leads to restrictions on the set of devices that services are developed for. For service end-users, this means that it can be difficult to combine devices that fit the intended usage context and services that provide the needed content. New development methods that target multiple devices from the start are needed. The differences between devices call for services that can adapt to various devices, and present themselves with device specific user interfaces. We propose a way of developing device independent services by using interaction acts to describe user-service interaction. Devices would interpret the interaction acts and generate user interfaces according to their own specific capabilities. Additional presentation information can be encoded in customization forms, to further control how the user interface would be generated. Different devices would generate different user interfaces from the same interaction acts, and a device could generate different user interfaces from the same interaction acts combined with different customization forms. In this thesis, the interaction act and customization form concepts are described in detail. A system prototype for handling them and two sample services have been implemented. Preliminary evaluations indicate that interaction acts and customization forms constitute a feasible approach for developing services with multiple user interfaces. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the problems arising when evaluating this kind of systems, and some conclusions on how to continue the evaluation process.
Multi-device services need to be adapted to various devices to accommodate users. When deciding how to adapt a multi-device service, several parameters such as device capabilities, usage context, purpose of use, and usability need to be considered. Here, these parameters are discussed and based on the discussion basic design guidelines for multi-device services are presented.
We present transfer interviews as a method for gathering input when designing for long-term lifestyle change. By interviewing people who have managed to maintain a lifestyle change for several years in a certain domain, in our case Twelve Step recovery, we can gain design knowledge that we can transfer to other domains.
Mobile devices and mobile services have been around long enough for the research community to start thinking about the next step in studying them: larger user groups and longer periods of time. Strictly quantitative methods are not very useful when it comes to studying user experience so we need to find scalable ways to support our qualitative methods to be able to take this next step. This paper reflects on automatic gathering of context data as one such way.
We describe the blogging habits of 19 teams of students participating in the KTH triennial carnival. They were blogging in a rough environment, i.e. outdoors while nailing or welding carnival carriages together and painting them, and they were interviewed on site. Astonishingly enough, students did not mind bringing laptops into this environment. 53% of the postings made during the study were made from the construction site. The ability to blog from the site seemed to be important, teams that blogged from the site blogged more that teams who did not.
As electronic services are spreading in our society, they will need to be able to adapt to different users and different usage contexts. Different user interfaces will be needed for different devices and different contexts. We envision a way of developing services where the ability to adapt is included from the start. We use a set of interaction acts combined with customization information to create tailored user interfaces. A calendar service has been implemented with user interfaces for Java Swing, HTML and std I/O.
People want user interfaces to services that are functional and well suited to the device they choose for access. To provide this, services must be able to offer device specific user interfaces for the wide range of devices available today. We propose to combine the two dominant approaches to platform independence, "Write Once, Run Every-where" and "different version for each device", to create multiple device specific user interfaces for mobile services. This gives possibilities to minimize the work with development and maintenance, while still keeping the control of how the user interface is presented to the end user. A calendar service has been implemented with user interfaces for Java Swing, HTML and std I/O.
The Ubiquitous Interactor is a system for universal access to mobile services, where the user-service interaction is the common denominator between different devices. By combining interaction with device specific presentation information, tailored user interfaces for different devices can be created. A calendar service has been developed as a proof of concept.
When services providing real-time information are accessible from mobile devices, functionality is often restricted and no adaptation of the user interface to the mobile device is attempted. Mobile access to real-time information requires designs for multi-device access and automated facilities for the adaptation of user interfaces. We present TapBroker, a push update service that provides mobile and stationary access to information on autonomous agents trading stocks. TapBroker is developed for the Ubiquitous Interactor system and is accessible from Java Swing user interfaces and Web user interfaces on desktop computers, and from a Java Awt user interface on mobile phones. New user interfaces can easily be added without changes in the service logic.
If services providing real-time information are accessible from mobile devices, functionality is often restricted and no adaptation of the user interface to the mobile device is attempted. Mobile access to real-time information requires designs for multi-device access and automated facilities for adaptation of user interfaces. We present TapBroker, a push update service that provides mobile and stationary access to information on autonomous agents trading stocks. TapBroker is developed for the Ubiquitous Interactor system and is accessible from Java Swing user interfaces and Web user interfaces on desktop computers, and from a Java Awt user interface on mobile phones. New user interfaces can easily be added without changes in the service logic.
The Ubiquitous Interactor (UBI) addresses the problems of design and development arising around services that need to be accessed from many different devices. In UBI, the same service can present different user interfaces on different devices by separating user-service interaction from presentation. The interaction is kept the same for all devices, and different presentation information is provided for different devices. This way, tailored user interfaces for many different devices can be created without multiplying development and maintenance work. In this paper we describe the system design of UBI, the system implementation, and two services implemented for the system: a calendar service and a stockbroker service.
The Ubiquitous Interactor (UBI) addresses the problems of design and development that arise around services that need to be accessed from many different devices. In UBI, services present themselves with different user interfaces on different devices. This is done by separation of user-service interaction and presentation. The interaction is kept the same for all devices, and different presentation information is provided for different devices. This way, tailored user interfaces for many different devices can be created without multiplying development and maintenance work. In this paper we describe the design of UBI, the system implementation, and two services implemented for the system: a calendar service and a stockbroker service.
The Ubiquitous Interactor (UBI) addresses the problems of design and development that arise from services that need to be accessed from many different devices. In the UBI, a service can present itself with different user interfaces on different devices. This is done by a separation of the user-service interaction and presentation. The interaction is kept the same for all devices, and different presentation information is provided for different devices. This way, tailored user interfaces for many different devices can be created without multiplying the development and maintenance work. In this paper, we describe the design of the UBI, the system implementation, and two services implemented for the system: a calendar service and a stockbroker service.
We present a case study of an application for supporting home health care practitioners in their work. Groups of practitioners have been interviewed as well as representatives for the sales organization. Below the application is presented as well as work practices before and after the introduction of the system and perceived benefits of the system.
RunRight is a system that gives two different kinds of feedback for runners. First, it creates a visualization of the running movement based on acceleration in vertical and horizontal direction. Second it gives audio feedback on the rhythm. These two types of feedback are valuable when exploring how to design technology that supports athletes in learning how a desired movement should feel.
A microcommunity for preschool is a community for parents, teachers and other people involved in a preschool child group. The community is a tool for distributing and exchanging information and complements the traditional face to face communication and paper notes in that it makes information available from other places than the home and the preschool facilities. We present a first design iteration for preschool microcommunities with parents and teachers. Teachers have worked with a prototype tool to create microcommunities that has been made available to parents. We present a set of design principles for preschool microcommunities and a new design of the tool.
SwingSound is a system that creates an audio mirror of your golf swing in real time, in order to explore various dimensions of interaction design in sports, such as feedback, representation, and multimodality. At CHI interactivity we will allow the audience to practically try out this system by hitting golf balls into a net, thereby re-experiencing their golf swing in a new modality.
We have analyzed two months of log data and 100 surveys on the phone use of a Swedish online community for teenagers to investigate the mobile use of an established online service. This shows that the phone use mostly takes place during times of the day when teenagers have social time and the use is not influenced by the availability of a computer. The phone makes the community access more private compared to the computer, but teens do share the use when they want to. The cell phone bridges the online and offline social communities and allows teens to participate in both at the same time. The online community is not only a place for social activity online, it is also a social activity offline that is carried out face-to-face with friends. The cell phone thus was a tool for the teens to combine their participation in the online and the offline world.
We use a long-term study of a robotic eating-aid for disabled users to illustrate how empirical use give rise to a set of ethical issues that might be overlooked in ethic discussions based on theoretical extrapolation of the current state-of-the-art in robotics. This approach provides an important complement to the existing robot ethics by revealing new issues as well as providing actionable guidance for current and future robot design. We discuss our material in relation to the literature on robot ethics, specifically the risk of robots performing care taking tasks and thus causing increased isolation for care recipients. Our data identifies a different set of ethical issues such as independence, privacy, and identity where robotics, if carefully designed and developed, can make positive contributions.
We conducted a diary and interview study to investigate where and why people use cell phones to access the Internet. In more that 50% of the cases, our participants chose a phone even though they had access to a computer, and the most frequent location for cell phone Internet access was the home.