HCI 2011

While this paper values the different ways in which the World Wide Web is making data ubiquitous and more accessible, it questions some of its subtle yet destructive effects on the Google Generation/those born after 1993. This paper will look over the learners’ interactions with online information, analyze the negative behavioral and psychological consequences caused by these interactions, question the consequences and in each case ask that designers of online experiences be more careful as they make design decisions when creating online interfaces.

This paper presents a case for the importance of sustainability in HCI as it relates to the Web. So far, the discussion about sustainability in HCI has focused on environmental aspects. However, our belief is that cyber-sustainability is much greater than this. We argue that to address cybersustainability correctly, the principles of sustainability should be considered in relation to 3 concerns: 1) environmental impacts, 2) psychological impacts, and 3) the worldview that the Web tends to promote. Several broad implications for more sustainable Web development are proposed.

This paper looks at the ways in which professional interaction designers, despite the all too common rhetoric about serving humanity, end up uncritically serving corporate needs. It covers the conflict between the priorities of business and the goal of design; the influence of universities in setting students up to serve business interests; and how designers can resist by pursuing their own goals as radical professionals.

In this paper, we argue that a great starting point of novel application design is not the problem space (trying to rigorously define the user requirements) but the solution space (trying to leverage emerging computational technologies and growing design knowledge for various interaction platforms), and we build a foundation for a pragmatic design methodology supported by the authors’ extensive experience in designing novel applications inspired by emerging media technologies

We start with the ambition - dating back to the early days of the semantic web - of assembling a significant portion human knowledge into a contradiction-free form using semantic web technology. We argue that this would not be desirable, because there are concepts, known as essentially contested concepts, whose definitions are contentious due to deep-seated ethical disagreements. Further, we argue that the ninetenth century hermeneutical tradition has a great deal to say, both about the ambition, and about why it fails. We conclude with some remarks about statistics.

This paper suggests that individuals within Local Communities may be very receptive to increased community engagement, outlines the need for a taxonomy to maximise the outcomes of Collective Intelligence (CI), speculates about some possibly rich seams for future research and some expedient ways of doing this through the use of Web 2.0 applications. In doing so there is consideration of contributions from Computer Science, Management and Design.

This paper investigates ‘pause’ and ‘duration’ as conceptual resources to expand current design approaches to place, technology, and experience in museums to the extended temporality of heritage practice. The author strives to understand ‘through design’ how we come to value objects, places and events through multiple and repeated interactions. In doing so, the author contributes to expand the boundaries of interaction design beyond individuals acting ‘in the moment’ (pause) to individuals and communities participating ‘across time’ (duration) in the cultural production of memory and identity.

For designers, attempting to respond to unknown design spaces can be a daunting task. This paper describes a series of workshops that presented rapid ethnographic design methods in city streets as a way of exploring human behaviours, and recording their traces.

People tend to respond realistically to situations and events in immersive Virtual Reality (VR). Our research exploits this finding to test the hypothesis that the psychology underlying moral judgement is distinct from the psychology that drives moral action.

This paper draws on both theoretical perspectives and a design framing, using the problem of designing a social mobile agile ridesharing system, in order to reflect upon and call for broader design approaches for context-aware computing and human-computer Interaction research in general.

Our research investigated whether the presence of an interface agent - or virtual assistant (VA) - in a self-service checkout context has behavioural effects on the transaction process during particular tasks. While many participants claimed to have not noticed a VA within the self-service interface, behaviour was still affected, i.e. fewer people made errors with the VA present than in the voice-only and control conditions. The results are explained as reflective of an unconscious observation of non-verbal cues exhibited by the VA. The results are discussed in relation to possible behavioural outcomes of VA presence.

An eighty year old today is expected on average to live well beyond the year 2020. However the needs of the older old are seldom considered in relation to current and future banking services. This paper documents a qualitative study investigating the meaning of money to a group of eighty somethings (people aged over 80).

Group brainstorming is widely adopted as a design method in the domain of software development. However, existing brainstorming literature has consistently proven group brainstorming to be ineffective under the controlled laboratory settings. Yet, electronic brainstorming systems informed by the results of these prior laboratory studies have failed to gain adoption in the field because of the lack of support for group well-being and member support. Therefore, there is a need to better understand brainstorming in the field. In this work, we seek to understand why and how brainstorming is actually practiced, rather than how brainstorming practices deviate from formal brainstorming rules, by observing brainstorming meetings at Microsoft.

Users are increasingly willing to disclose sensitive personal information online, seemingly without great regard for privacy protection. We surveyed over 1200 people to measure user attitudes and behaviours in terms of: (i) the type and perceived sensitivity of information they regularly disclosed, and (ii) who the recipients of different types of information were. In our initial analysis of the data we have observed an interesting age-related trend: a U shaped curve whereby the youngest and oldest members of society are less protective of their privacy than the middle-aged cohort.

This paper explores how field and indoor based students can be connected so that their contrasting circumstances and capabilities are used as a basis for learning. We describe the design of the ‘Out There and In Here’ system and activity. Using naturalistic evaluations in the context of higher education earth science, we find evidence that this approach can be beneficial in developing essential skills, by supporting dialogue and collaboration across diverse contexts.

While a calendar is generally thought of as a visual representation of a day, week, month or year; in its simplest form, a calendar consists of scheduled events with associated dates, times, locations and descriptions. In this paper we describe the design and evaluation of a web-based calendar prototype for blind individuals who use screen readers to access their computers and the Internet.

This study used existing digital technologies as probes to explore teenager’s use of exercise-related technology, their usage contexts, and their ideas for the design of ubiquitous technology that would persuade their peers to be more active in their daily lives.

Despite the offline reluctance of individuals to talk openly about weight issues, there is an abundance of personal weblogs about weight loss with remarkably open accounts of everything to do with overweight. While the widespread use of personal blogs offer opportunities for interaction and communication they also raise privacy concerns. There are both potential positive and negative consequences for stigmatized individuals of online (self-) disclosure. Why are people willing to disclose information which has a social stigma offline? And can the Internet function as an empowering technology for those who are being stigmatized?

In this work, we will examine how mobile device could predict users’ wishes regarding the push services like incoming mobile phone call. We conducted some experiments in order to get contextual data and then did analysis, a limited number of sensors were tagged to the user which were meant to detect certain characteristics of the environment the users were in, such as light sensor, temperature sensor, surrounding audio/noise level. Our results show that machine learning algorithms were able to classify the instances correctly with a high accuracy rate.

While many models exist to support the design process of a software development project, the evaluation process is far less well defined and this lack of definition often leads to poorly designed evaluations, or the use of the wrong evaluation method. Evaluations of products for children can be especially complex as they need to consider the different requirements and aims that such a product may have, and often use new or developing evaluation methods. This paper takes the view that evaluations should be planned from the start of a project in order to yield the best results, and proposes a framework to facilitate this.