Essay on Interaction Design for Ubiquitous Computing
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Transcript of Essay on Interaction Design for Ubiquitous Computing
Essay on Interaction Design for Ubiquitous Computing Alexandre Fleury, July 30, 2010
This essay is part of the PhD course on Interaction Design for ubiquitous Computing taught at Aalborg University in June 2010. The purpose of this exercise is to summarize the state-‐of-‐the-‐art literature used for the course and discuss some of the current research questions and challenges that animate the field.
Additionally, specific design activities carried out during the course are introduced and analyzed.
State-of-the-art According to (Sharp, Rogers, & Preece, 2007), interaction design is concerned with designing interactive products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives. The field of ubiquitous computing, allegedly started in the early 1990s, has been defined as a parallel shift where
technology becomes invisible in people’s life.
Combining the two fields has been the topic of visionary work since the late 1990s (Weiser, 1999), where computer based systems where envisioned to be omnipresent in our environment at various scales, from
stylus-‐controlled page-‐size “pads” to tiny “tabs”, assisting people at home or at the office in their everyday tasks. More recently (Harper, Rodden, Rogers, & Sellen, 2008) discussed a possible future for Human-‐Computer Interaction (HCI). The authors consider even more dramatic changes in the way people interact
with technology in their everyday life, looking at sociological evolution in parallel to technological development. One of the novelties in their approach compared to earlier studies is the role human values play in shaping future HCI advancements. It seems that user experience is much more than a buzz word
replacing usability as defined for instance in (Nielsen, 1994), but it integrates factors that match more closely what humans really experience in their daily life.
Key challenges and research questions One of the key challenges for integrating those values into the design process of future interactive technologies and products is to promote sources of inspiration from fields outside traditional HCI practices.
Such sources, taken from philosophy, are the meaning, purpose and desire attached to human beings and their perception of interaction with technology. Future ubiquitous computing development should therefore address the question of assimilating these new values into the design process. This could start by
extending the traditional user-‐centred cycle by emphasising a stage of understanding the people targeted by the system, their environment and their expectations toward the system, as proposed in (Harper, Rodden, Rogers, & Sellen, 2008). Another approach is to consider the shift in factors that motivate change
in people attitude toward information technologies and integrate their visible and yet invisible impact on that change, as attempted in (Howard, Kjeldskov, & Skov, 2007).
Another challenge comes from the distribution of human activities among dimensions such as time, location and social relations. The course’s reading-‐list splits the work studying ubiquity at home and
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ubiquity in public, which illustrates the difficulty to address human activities as a whole. On the contrary, it
is argued that both environments have their own cultural, social and behavioural rules that should be considered when integrated into an interactive product. The key questions are then to identify these rules and apply them to the products supporting the activities they regulate. And that is only considering the
personal part of people’s life, and not integrating its tendency to blur with its professional counterpart, which opens for even more research opportunities.
Interactions between family members One of the key purposes of ubiquitous computing when it comes to home environment is concerned with the communication between family members. For instance, (Dalsgaard, Skov, & Thomassen, 2007) explored situations of separation between children and their parents. The authors investigated how to cultivate a feeling of intimacy and support experience sharing through a picture weblog. Based on an ethnographic study conducted with families, it can be concluded that the weblog helped parents
understanding the experiences their children had and initiate discussions with them based on the pictures taken. For the children, the weblog provided an easy way to share aspects of their life with their parents and enhanced their feeling of presence. However, children showed little motivation to take and share
pictures with their parents.
In another study of computer mediated family communication, (O'Hara, Harper, Unger, Wilkes, Sharpe, & Jansen, 2005) investigated the use of a person-‐to-‐home SMS system, allowing mobile phone owners to send public messages available to any other family members. An ethnographic study of the system showed
that micromanagement messages were mostly used as for informing about one’s current activity or to remind others about something that needs to be done. The success of the product can be therefore
attributed to its support of simple, already known interaction paradigms, although for a different purpose.
Exploiting public space Designing for interactions in public place also requires careful consideration of the key challenges identified
previously. The two following studies show that in such context, the attitude toward interaction is influenced by even more factors than when interacting within a close circle such as a family. For instance,
(O'Hara, Lipson, Jansen, Unger, Jeffries, & Macer, 2004) developed and studied a voting system for choosing music to be played in a café. A situated field trial showed the importance of integrating the mediating device (on which groups of users casted their votes) into the social setting of the area, allowing
focused exchange among group members, supporting communication between groups and requiring low attention in order to best fit into usual social activities in such context.
Finally, (O'Hara, Glancy, & Robertshaw, 2008) investigated people’s engagement and interaction with a collaborative game played through large urban displays. Their findings concern four key issues to be
addressed when deploying such system: 1) the location itself and how people occupy it in an everyday setting; 2) the public nature of the interaction and the configuration of users within the space; 3) the two-‐ways impact of the audience on the users and of the users on the audience in shaping the user experience
with the system; and 4) in the paper specific case, the unhosted nature of the game proposed, where explanation, motivation and commentary from the audience was limited.
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The digital kitchen The process of interaction design involves the four following steps (Sharp, Rogers, & Preece, 2007):
1. Identifying needs and establishing requirements for the user experience. 2. Developing alternative designs that meet those requirements. 3. Building interactive versions of the designs so that they can be communicated and assessed. 4. Evaluating what is being built throughout the process and the user experience it offers.
The two first steps have been the focus of the course’s continuous exercise, during which six groups of 4-‐5
students developed creative ideas to support various tasks in a “digital kitchen”. The target concept of group #2 was the planning of cooking, which involves all the activities prior to the actual cooking. The
developed concept should support the planning of cooking experiences through tips and ideas on the meal, the produce, and cooking methods. The following sections report on the work generated by group #2, from the identification of key issues to the design and creation of early mock-‐ups illustrating an innovative
concept developed.
Issues Planning the cooking depends on multiple parameters such as the people involved in the cooking, the time allocated to the planning, the place where it happens as well as the ingredients and tools required to later perform the actual cooking. However, the following wh-‐parameters that determine how to plan the
cooking can vary quite dramatically, as illustrated by the related questions below:
• Who: Who are we cooking for? Who is cooking? Are the people cooking the same as the ones planning (for instance doing the shopping)? This can be linked to the where question (opportunistic planning)
• When: When does the planning take place? How much time is required to plan? Is this time available? Is it possible to allocate this time to several actors? How does this influence the time later dedicated to cooking?
• Where: Where does the planning take place? At home? At the shop? While commuting? Does this require synchronisation between the actors involved?
• What: What is to be cooked? What ingredients/tool are already available? What is missing?
We can see that the activity of planning the cooking spreads along multiple dimensions and involves
knowledge, coordination/synchronisation and decision-‐making power. Coming up with a concept that can fit in this framework should therefore consider if not address these questions.
Design process – group #2 To identify concepts that address the overall problem of planning the cooking, each member of group #2 started by individually mapping a personal representation of the issues that seemed of importance, which
we presented and discussed as a group afterward. This exercise produced a general perspective of the problem and helped identify key issues that should/could be addressed. As an example, sharing the inventory of available ingredients among several actors located at various places (one at home and one at
the store) is possible today using mobile phones, however combining this inventory with the store’s stock and generating ideas for recipes are not so convenient in this way.
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The group then though about a system that would support this distributed environment in which cooking is
generally planned in. It was agreed that the system should address a wide population (couples, friends and families) and not focus on one specific target group. Furthermore, the system should focus on the following values:
• Sociality: the system should involve more that one person
• Collaboration: all actors should act together in the planning process • Interactivity: the system should allow the actors to communicate easily • Creativity: the system should support the generation of creative ideas for cooking, through for
instance new recipes or optimization of ingredients available
Sketching 1 – initial design The first sketching exercise consisted in producing an early design of the envisioned system, illustrating its function, its possible look, and how to use it.
The early prototypes individually produced by all group members have been quite rapidly combined during the discussions that followed their presentation, into a theoretical overview of the system, yet still blurry at
this time of the design process. Additionally, these discussions put light on an issue that emerged during such discussion, namely the diversity of opinions and the difficulty to reach agreements within short delays. In fact, the time required to decide which direction the group should adopt in order to produce a creative
and innovative concept appeared as a function of both the number of people in the group and the individual background of each member. [Maybe develop on solutions to this problem]
The idea that emerged during this step was of a system that would allow multiple people involved in the planning process to communicate through the planning process, based on the ingredients already available
in the home’s fridge, some ideas for recipes from the actors, and the food available at nearby stores. The concept of the “Knight Freezer 2000” (Figure 1) that we presented at the end of the exercise session refers to this category of futuristic almighty automated systems, which would support people in their tasks, as
they used to be depicted in 1980s TV series. Such system seems realistic nowadays in the case of a digital kitchen.
Figure 1 -‐ Illustration of conceptual presentation
Sketching 2 – redesign The second stage of the design process originally consisted in starting mocking up the early sketches produced in stage 1. However, given the delays the group took during the initial discussions, the pieces of
advice and comments received during the presentation and the group’s own considerations, we decided to
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keep on working on the early design of our concept by slightly shifting its focus and defining it in further
details.
The redesign illustrates various key stages of the planning process that encompasses the four target values introduced earlier in this document. The three focus stages are illustrated in the following.
1. Choose
This stage takes place either in the home (Figure 2, left) or at a shop (Figure 2, right). It involves selecting the products required for the cooking, based on what is available, what is possible to buy and the desired
meal.
Figure 2 -‐ Illustration of the choosing stage, at home (left) or at the shop (right)
2. Discuss
This stage allows the various actors of the system to communicate while planning (Figure 3), possibly
remotely, and while having access to all the information required to make common decisions.
Figure 3 -‐ Illustration of the discussion stage
3. Guide
Finally, this stage involves the possibility to access external sources of inspiration for recipes, information
on seasonal products, etc. This information could for instance come from shop assistants (Figure 4) or community based web services.
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Figure 4 -‐ Illustration of guidance from a shop assistant
Mocking up – final concept In this final stage of the exercise, the group turned the previously mentioned design sketches into mock-‐ups, illustrating the concept in a simple yet visually explicit fashion. We had to integrate the two mocking stages originally planned, showing the various components of the system, their integration into the
environment, the related human-‐computer interaction as well as some specific aspect of the interactions, such as buttons, interaction paradigms and central screens.
To do so we based our presentation on a storyline, using a very simple mock up to illustrate the stages introduced previously. In the following illustrations, one of the actor s involved in the planning is at home,
manipulating a digital tabletop that displays a list of possible recipes based on the products available in the fridge (Figure 5).
Figure 5 -‐ Planning from home
At the same time, another actor is shopping and connects to the systems via a similar installation located in the store (Figure 6, left). The two actors can communicate via this interface and the one at home can access what has been put in the shopping bag of the one in the shop (Figure 6, right).
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Figure 6 -‐ Communicating through the interface, from the shop (left) and from home (right)
A recipe can be commonly agreed on though the system, and a shopping list (accessible to both actors) is automatically created based on what products are missing (Figure 7).
Figure 7 -‐ Creating a common shopping list
In the meantime a shop assistant offers a good deal on a product that was not part of the shopping list. The two actors discuss the necessity to buy such product and the shopping list is updated accordingly (Figure 8).
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Figure 8 -‐ Updated shopping list after shop assistant recommendation
This concludes the planning process of the cooking for that day, and at the same time the course exercise.
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