Context Of HCI Research Articles

The Development and (Mis)appropriation of a Digital Kit for Jewellers

Jewellers’ participation in interaction design is scarce, yet the creativity of jewellers could add value as they interpret materials and mediate personal connections in poetic ways. We investigate how to empower jewellers to experiment with the possibilities that physical computing offers to their practice. This paper presents the making of a Digital Jewellery Kit, a composite of pre-assembled circuitry, used by second-year BA jewellery students during a 10-week project which brought together theory and practice. Drawing on students’ reflective accounts, we discuss what made the jewellers’ path into physical computing more meaningful to their practice, what type of artefacts they created with electronics as well as what values drove their creative process. We offer design recommendations on how to support the praxes of jewellers whilst allowing their creativity to grow through their new understanding of physical computing and contribute to the discussions around hybrid craft within HCI and educational contexts.

A conversation with Marianna Obrist

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Marianna Obrist, who is exploring augmented and virtual reality within the context of HCI. Obrist discusses multi-sensory interactions that go beyond sight and sound, as well as her work that explores the role of human senses in the design of future technologies.

Digital Probes Kit

Abstract (Cultural) probes have been used in various software design projects and HCI contexts over the last years. With the ubiquity of smartphones today, there are new ways to design probes material as digital probes. Smartphones allow to document everyday life in situ in mobile contexts and provide a permanent channel for communication between researchers and participants. Based on an analysis of strengths and weaknesses of traditional probes, we propose a concept for a Digital Probes Kit in the form of a digital diary and describe its potential.

HindSight: Encouraging Exploration through Direct Encoding of Personal Interaction History.

Physical and digital objects often leave markers of our use. Website links turn purple after we visit them, for example, showing us information we have yet to explore. These "footprints" of interaction offer substantial benefits in information saturated environments - they enable us to easily revisit old information, systematically explore new information, and quickly resume tasks after interruption. While applying these design principles have been successful in HCI contexts, direct encodings of personal interaction history have received scarce attention in data visualization. One reason is that there is little guidance for integrating history into visualizations where many visual channels are already occupied by data. More importantly, there is not firm evidence that making users aware of their interaction history results in benefits with regards to exploration or insights. Following these observations, we propose HindSight - an umbrella term for the design space of representing interaction history directly in existing data visualizations. In this paper, we examine the value of HindSight principles by augmenting existing visualizations with visual indicators of user interaction history (e.g. How the Recession Shaped the Economy in 255 Charts, NYTimes). In controlled experiments of over 400 participants, we found that HindSight designs generally encouraged people to visit more data and recall different insights after interaction. The results of our experiments suggest that simple additions to visualizations can make users aware of their interaction history, and that these additions significantly impact users' exploration and insights.

Human–computer interaction, foundations and new paradigms

This paper explores the roots of human–computer interaction as a discipline, the various trends which have marked its development, and some of the current and future challenges for research. Human–computer interaction, like any vocational discipline, sits upon three broad foundations: theoretical principles, professional practice and a community of people. As an interdisciplinary field the theoretical roots of HCI encompass a number of other disciplines including psychology, computing, ergonomics, and social sciences; however, it also has theoretical and practical challenges of its own. The evolving internal and external context of HCI, computers, have become smaller and less costly; this has led to changes in nature of the users and uses of computers, with corresponding impact on society. The paper explores the current challenges of computers from the cloud to digital fabrication and the need to design for solitude. It suggests that HCI should not just react to the changes around it, but also shape those changes.

What signal is your inspection team sending to each other? Using a shared collaborative interface to improve shared cognition and implicit coordination in error-detection teams

Coordination theory, created in a collaborative HCI context, has long emphasized the importance of implicit coordination. Such coordination is possible through interactivity design that creates shared cognition. Teams experience implicit coordination when they achieve tacit task coordination without direct or purposeful communication of task strategies among the participants, but this is impossible to achieve without shared cognition. Implicit coordination is often more effective than explicit coordination, and teams increasingly lack sufficient time or capabilities to coordinate explicitly; therefore, methods to foster implicit coordination could result in highly practical techniques to improve task performance. Implicit coordination, despite its promise, has not received much attention in the HCI literature. A particular problem we believe has hindered the application of implicit coordination is the dearth of objective measurement of implicit coordination and the related construct shared cognition. Teams have difficulty improving, implementing, and proving the value of implicit coordination without measurement.For our theoretical foundation, we use implicit coordination theory (ICT) to explain and predict how a simple shared interface in a group error-detection task can establish formalized group memory and group awareness, which foster the shared cognition necessary for implicit coordination to occur. To test ICT, we demonstrate innovative measurement of implicit coordination and shared cognition—without intrusive perceptual survey items—by leveraging measures from signal detection theory (SDT). We use the context of teams performing heuristic data-flow diagramming (HDFD) (which is similar to the Prepare, Collect, and Repair (PCR)-based process of heuristic evaluation) to measure the improved shared cognition and implicit coordination. Namely, we measured shared cognition with SDT's measure of response bias (c); we measured implicit coordination with SDT's measure of discrimination (d′). Supporting our ICT-based predictions, groups operating with a shared interface indeed experienced more shared cognition and implicit coordination—resulting in higher discrimination, more positive response bias, and more accurate hit rates and false-alarm rates than the control groups. Our results show great promise in making similar predictions, measurements, and improvements in other individual or group inspection tasks, which are prevalent in HCI development research and practice.

Shape-changing interfaces

The design of physical interfaces has been constrained by the relative akinesis of the material world. Current advances in materials science promise to change this. In this paper, we present a foundation for the design of shape-changing surfaces in human---computer interaction. We provide a survey of shape-changing materials and their primary dynamic properties, define the concept of soft mechanics within an HCI context, and describe a soft mechanical alphabet that provides the kinetic foundation for the design of four design probes: Surflex, SpeakCup, Sprout I/O, and Shutters. These probes explore how individual soft mechanical elements can be combined to create large-scale transformable surfaces, which can alter their topology, texture, and permeability. We conclude by providing application themes for shape-changing materials in HCI and directions for future work.

PUX

and concrete, because so much about software seems abstract. As a result, the adaptation of pattern languages to software has lost the key contribution of Alexander's work, which was to throw attention onto the users. Software patterns, despite being inspired by Alexander's work, emphasise abstract descriptions of construction and of ornament, not abstract descriptions of user experience. It's time to change that. This article tracks down the history of where we took a wrong turning, and proposes an alternative way forward. Traditional software patterns are concerned with user experience, but mostly with the user experience of programmers. That perspective may sound strange in an HCI context, but it helps explain the popularity of pattern languages in the programming community. If we move from the object world of technical software features to the human experience of structured information - we refocus attention on ways of working, not widgets. Our aim is a pattern language in the sense intended by Christopher Alexander, but a pattern language of user experience design rather than a pattern language of user interface design. This lets us escape shallow understanding of user experience in terms of affect and passive consumption (architects describe this as ornament (3)), to the ways that users perceive and build information structures. Before the publication of the 'Gang of Four' book that popularised software patterns (4), Richard Gabriel described Christopher Alexander's patterns in 1993 as a basis for reusable object-oriented software in the following way: Habitability is the characteristic of source code that enables programmers, coders, bug­fixers, and people coming to the code later in its life to understand its construction and intentions and to change it comfortably and confidently.

Human–computer interaction: A stable discipline, a nascent science, and the growth of the long tail

This paper represents a personal view of the state of HCI as a design discipline and as a scientific discipline, and how this is changing in the face of new technological and social situations. Going back 20 years a frequent topic of discussion was whether HCI was a ‘discipline’. It is unclear whether this was ever a fruitful topic, but academic disciplines are effectively about academic communities and there is ample evidence of the long-term stability of the international HCI/CHI community. However, as in computer ‘science’, the central scientific core of HCI is perhaps still unclear; for example, a strength of HCI is the closeness between theory and practice, but the corresponding danger is that the two are often confused. The paper focuses particularly on the challenge of methodological thinking in HCI, especially as the technological and social context of HCI rapidly changes. This is set alongside two other challenges: the development of reliable knowledge in HCI and the clear understanding of interlinked human roles within the discipline. As a case study of the need for methodological thinking, the paper considers the use of single person studies in research and design. These are likely to be particularly valuable as we move from a small number of applications used by many people to a ‘long tail’ where large numbers of applications are used by small numbers of people. This change calls for different practical design strategies; focusing on the peak experience of a few rather than acceptable performance for many. Moving back to the broader picture, as we see more diversity both in terms of types of systems and kinds of concerns, this may also be an opportunity to reflect on what is core across these; potential fragmentation becoming a locus to understand more clearly what defines HCI, not just for the things we see now, but for the future that we cannot see.

An adaptive blink detector to initialize and update a view-basedremote eye gaze tracking system in a natural scenario

A method for blink detection from video sequences gathered with a commercial camera is presented. This is used as a view-based remote eye gaze tracker (REGT) component performing two relevant functions, i.e. initialization and automatic updating in case of tracking failures. The method is based on frame differencing and eyes anthropometric properties. It has been tested on a publicly available database and results have been compared with algorithms found in literature. The obtained average true prediction rate is higher than 95%. The robustness of the automatic tracking failure detection has been tested on a set of experimental trials in different conditions, and yielded detection rates around 98%. The computational cost of the processing allows the blink detection algorithm to work in real time at 30 fps. The obtained results are in favour of combining blink detection with gaze mapping for the development of a robust view-based remote eye-gaze tracker to be introduced in different HCI contexts, specifically in the assistive technology framework.

Requirements for belief models in cooperative dialogue

Models of rationality typically rely on underlying logics that allow simulated agents to entertain beliefs about one another to any depth of nesting. Such models seem to be overly complex when used for belief modelling in environments in which cooperation between agents can be assumed, i.e., most HCI contexts. We examine some existing dialogue systems and find that deeply-nested beliefs are seldom supported, and that where present they appear to be unnecessary except in some situations involving deception. Use of nested beliefs is associated with nested reasoning (i.e., reasoning about other agents' reasoning). We argue that for cooperative dialogues, representations of individual nested beliefs of the third level (i.e., what A thinks B thinks A thinks B thinks) and beyond are in principle unnecessary unless directly available from the environment, because the corresponding nested reasoning is redundant. Since cooperation sometimes requires that agents reason about what is mutually believed, we propose a representation in which the second and all subsequent nesting levels are merged into a single category. In situations affording individual deeply-nested beliefs, such a representation restricts agents to human-like referring and repair strategies, where an unrestricted agent might make an unrealistic and perplexing utterance.