Mobile Life Centre - Publications

GDD as a Communication Medium

Inquiry into the current development methodologies used by the major players in the gaming industry of Sweden has uncovered many abandoning the Game Design Document(GDD) paradigm. We speculate that the move is primarily because of the long unaddressed shortcomings of the GDD in the rapid paced game industry. We set out to design a new GDD medium, especially designed to expedite communication between different teams of a game production. Through published criticisms, post-mortem reports and in combination with our own experiences, we have distilled a set of preliminary general requirements for a new GDD medium. The complete design of this medium will take place in three distinct phases. Aside from the general requirements, this article reports on the first structuring phase, substantiating the general results. The derived structure was tested for its ability to bind pertinent GDD information and support communication between the different production teams.

The challenges of designing a gender-aware pervasive game

This paper describes our approach to designing a pervasive game with teenage girls as its main audience. In doing so, we are faced with two challenges: the challenge of gender-aware game design, and the challenge of integrating a pervasive game into the everyday lives of young women. We describe our core design goals and the rationale for these goals. Based on these goals, we outline the core design elements, and how these were appreciated by a young women audience in a first player workshop.

Framing games.

In this article, I revisit the everlasting question of what constitutes a game. My purpose is to arrive at a permissive definition that can serve to bridge digital and non-digital game studies.

Athletes and street acrobats: Designing for play as a community value in Parkour

Participatory design methods face challenges when designing for a widespread youth community. In such projects, it is not enough to design in collaboration with a few selected individuals; one must also strive to understand the community at a deeper level and incorporate its values and practices into the design solution. We report on our process of designing with, and for, an identified youth group: the Parkour and Freerunning community. We show how the successful design relied not only on employing methods of participatory observation and participatory design, but also on acquiring an understanding of the practice as a ‘fun community’, valuing play over achievement and competition.

PhySeEar. Moving Yourself to Shine and Sound in Geriatric Physiotherapy Interventions

For useful feedback in physiotherapy interventions for geriatric rehabilitation, we have designed and tested two prototypes, based on commercially available radio frequency tags. The prototypes were designed to be suitable for a population with limited proprioceptive skills, high dependency rate, and limited cognitive skills. Focus for design was on designing feedback that would allow the inpatients to self-monitor their rehabilitation process, and would make for increasing their proprioceptive skills. The system is also intended to mean a source of motivation for rehabilitation practice. We have performed a first explorative study in a real setting. In this paper we are commenting on initial observations of the use of one of the prototypes.

Revive! Reactions to Migration Between Different Embodiments When Playing With Robotic Pets

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.

Personalized and autonomous are already everywhere; let’s focus on awareness over trust.

Personalization and autonomous adaptation to users has become a mainstream feature. The diversity is immense, and spans domains ranging from personalized online search and recommenders, to social robots. Based on the findings of a set of studies of people’s responses to autonomous and adaptive systems, and current commercial developments, I highlight a number of challenges related to user trust in such systems, focusing on transparency, social strategies and social mediation effects. Rather than focusing on convincing users to use systems, a more pressing challenge is how we can increase awareness and understanding of the autonomous and user-adaptive systems already there.

Using Computer Vision Technologies to Make the Virtual Visible.

Augmented reality (AR) applications typically overlay the camera view as a backdrop for information presentation, however, AR applications could also benefit from using the camera as a sensor to a greater extent. Beyond using visual data for markerless tracking, AR applications could recognize objects and provide users with information based on these objects. We present two applications that use the camera as a sensor: Pic-in and SubwayArt. The first allows users to check-in on location-sharing service foursquare by taking a picture of the venue they are at. The second provides users with information about artworks in the Stockholm subway system by combining localization and computer vision techniques.

Services as Materials: Using Mashups for Research

Using existing services as development and research materials can greatly reduce development burdens. However, using mashups and existing services has consequences that go beyond the technical realm. We present our ongoing experience with developing and promoting a mobile mash-up implemented in the mobile web browser: Spotisquare. Spotisquare is a mash-up of the location-based service foursquare and music streaming service Spotify. We discuss advantages and tradeoffs of using existing services and the mobile mash-up process, including interaction model choices, as well as validity and representational issues.

Face to face makes a difference: Recommendation Practices of Users of Mobile Services

The mobile app stores and markets provide companies, independent developers and researchers alike with possibilities to distribute innovative designs for mobile devices on a global scale. However, reaching a large numbers of users does not in itself ensure a large number of users adopting the mobile application or service. Large-scale adoption depends on additional factors such as novelty in service design, ease of use, enjoyable interaction, built-in mechanisms for further distribution of the mobile service as well as the practice of word-of-mouth recommendations. In this position paper we present the background and preliminary findings from a study aimed at investigating the motivations and practices by which users recommend mobile apps and services among their acquaintances. We discuss our perspective on distribution of mobile applications and services on a large scale and end this paper by suggesting questions for discussion and future research.

Workshop on Ethics, Logs and Videotape: Ethics in Large Scale User Trials and User Generated Content

As new technologies are appropriated by researchers, the community must come to terms with the evolving ethical responsibilities we have towards participants. This workshop brings together researchers to discuss the ethical issues of running large-scale user trials, and to provide guidance for future research. Trials of the scale of 10s or 100s of thousands of participants offer great potential benefits in terms of attracting users from vastly different geographical and social contexts, but raise significant ethical challenges. The inability to ensure or confirm user understanding of the information needed to provide informed consent and the problems involved in making users understand the implications of information being collected all beg the question: how can researchers ethically take advantage of the opportunities these new technologies afford?

2nd Workshop on Research in the Large: App Stores, Wide distribution channels & Big Data in Research

With the proliferation of app stores and the advancement of mobile devices, research that might have only been tested with a dozen participants in the past can now be released to millions. This offers huge opportunities, but also requires adaptations of existing methods in dealing with large deployments and making sense of large data sets. This workshop provides a forum for researchers to exchange experiences and strategies for wide distribution of applications as well as gathering and analyzing the largescale data sets the result from these deployments.

An introduction to Research in the Large

Distribution of mobile applications has been greatly simplified by mobile app stores and markets. Both lone developers and large research and development teams can now relatively easily reach wide audiences. In addition, people’s mobile phones can now run advanced applications and are equipped with sensors that used to be available only in custom research hardware. This provides researchers with a huge opportunity to gather research data from a large public. Evaluation and research methods have to be adapted to this new context. However, an overview of successful strategies and ways to overcome the methodological challenges inherent to wide deployment in a research context is not yet available. A workshop was organized on this topic and this special issue to help address these topics. This introduction provides an overview of strategies and opportunities in ‘research in the large’, while providing an introduction to challenges in ethics and validity as well

Interaction & the built environment: some challenges.

With the popularity of mobile and ubiquitous services, and the rise of urban sensor-based systems, interaction design has moved into the arena of disciplines traditionally concerned with the design of the built environment. In this position paper, I outline questions raised in our work on mobile, location-based services that illustrate that sharing experiences between our communities is crucial.

Drawing the city: differing perceptions of the urban environment.

In building location-based services, it is important to present information in ways that fit with how individuals view and navigate the city. We conducted an adaptation of the 1970s Mental Maps study by Stanley Milgram in order to better understand differences in people’s views of the city based on their backgrounds and technology use. We correlated data from a demographic questionnaire with the map data from our participants to perform a first-of-its-kind statistical analysis on differences in hand-drawn city maps. We describe our study, findings, and design implications for location-based services

Animal-Computer Interaction SIG

User-computer interaction research is demonstrating growing interest in the relation between animals and technology (e.g., computer-mediated interspecies interactions and animal-computer interfaces). However, as a research area, this topic is still underexplored and fragmented, and researchers lack opportunities to exchange ideas, identify resources, form collaborations and co-operatively develop a coherent research agenda. The Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) SIG meeting aims to provide such an opportunity, promoting the development of ACI as a distinct area of research which is relevant to both animals and humans.

Mobile ActDresses: Programming Mobile Devices by Accessorizing

Mobile ActDresses is a design concept where existing practices of accessorizing, customization and manipulation of a physical mobile device is coupled with the behaviour of its software. With this interactivity demonstrator we will provide a hands on experience of doing this kind of playful manipulation. We provide two examples for how to implement Mobile ActDresses using quick’n dirty hacks to create custom shells and jewellery for controlling the behaviour of the phone.

Always-On + Adoption – a method for longitudinal studies

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.

Transfer Interviews - gathering design input to design for longitudinal use

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.

Couch Mobility – The Cell Phone’s Most Important Feature at Home is Mobility

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.

Introduction to special issue: Experiencing games: Games, play and players

In August 2010, the first Nordic DiGRA conference was held in Stockholm. The theme of the conference was player experiences and player studies in digital games; a theme very much in line with the Scandinavian tradition of user-centred design. The need for a conference in the field of game research was obvious due to the sheer amount of academics in Scandinavia working in the field of digital games. The conference attracted participants from all over Scandinavia. DiGRA is an international association of scholars within the field of game research. The first international DiGRA conference was organized in 2003 and attracted a broad range of scholars from all over the world. In 2010, DiGRA introduced the regional conference Nordic DiGRA. Introducing a Nordic branch calls out for some reflection regarding the specific characteristics of Nordic game research. Did the conference programme indeed reflect a particular Nordic approach to game research and, if so, what kinds of subject matters or methodologies are characteristic of this approach? These are questions we ask, and try to answer, in this introduction.

Mobile Digital Interactive Storytelling – A winding path

In this special issue of the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, we explore the relationship between locative practices and the idea of space as inherently narrative, and the tradition of interactive storytelling as it has developed for virtual media.

Revisiting the Jacquard Loom: Threads of History and Current Patterns in HCI

In the recent developments of human computer interaction, one central challenge has been to find and to explore alternatives to the legacy of the desktop computer paradigm for interaction design. To investigate this issue further we have conducted an analysis on a fascinating piece of machinery often referred to as one of the predecessors of the modern day computer, the Jacquard loom. In analysing the Jacquard loom we look at qualities in design and interaction from some different perspectives: how historical tools, crafts, and practices can inform interaction design, the role of physicality, materiality, and whole-body interaction in order to rethink some current conceptions of interaction and design of computational devices.

Understanding Agency in Interaction Design Materials

We draw on the concept of agency in order to understand the process of how design materials ‘talk back’ to designers. In so doing, we illustrate the various levels at which agency can emerge in the context of intensive short-time prototyping sessions. In HCI, it is often assumed that the designer is the agent that acts intentionally in the design process. Contrary to this, recent notions of agency provide a way of analysing the performative role of design materials as intra-actions between components within a given phenomenon, rather than as meanings merely ascribed by actions of designers. The notion of agency puts focus on the emerging properties of materials and how they actively contribute to the way that design activity unfolds. The analyses showed how interaction design is to a large extent driven by emergent characteristics of available materials. The results have implications for understanding material interactions and materiality in interaction design.

Appreciating plei-plei around mobiles: Playfulness in Rah Island

We set out to explore and understand the ways in which mobiles made their way into an environment—Rah Island in Vanuatu—for the first time. We were struck by their playful use, especially given the very limited infrastructure and inexpensive devices that were available. Based on our findings, we discuss tensions between playfulness and utility, in particular relating to socio-economic benefits, and conclude that playfulness in these settings needs to be taken as seriously as in any other setting. Additionally, we formulated three challenges when designing for play in similar settings: (1) engage intimately with the materials of inexpensive ICT; (2) revisit design recommendations for playfulness to ensure that they can travel/translate into other cultures; and (3) alleviate existing tensions.

Mobile Service Distribution from the End-User Perspective - A Survey Study on Recommendation Practices

Vast amounts of mobile services and applications are being offered to end users via app stores and service providers’ web sites. In addition, users take part in the distribution of services by recommending services to each other, i.e. through various word-of-mouth practices. To understand the current patterns of user-initiated service distribution, we conducted an exploratory survey study (N=203) to investigate the recommendation practices and motivations of mobile service users in situations where they recommend to other(s) and other(s) recommend to them. We found that the dominating way to recommend mobile services to others is to tell about the service in face-to-face situations, despite available support for electronic sharing in mobile situations. Social media was also used, but clearly less frequently. Based on the findings of this study, we present design ideas for supporting users in their recommendation practices.

Universal Robots as ‘Solutions’ to Wicked Problems: Debunking a Robotic Myth

ViPleo and PhyPleo: Artificial pet with two embodiments

In our current work we have designed and implemented an arti*cial pet with two embodiments. In both embodiments behavior is driven by needs that are used to maintain coher- ence and motivate user interaction. These needs are trans- ferred between embodiments, with only one embodiment be- ing active at a time. We performed an evaluation with 10- year old children participants. The retrieved data indicated that many children understood the concept of an arti*cial pet with two bodies, even without being given clues. Nev- ertheless, children did perceive di*erences between the two embodiments, which contributed for many stating that they interacted with two pets. Among other aspects, the physi- cal version was perceived as less obedient due to problems concerning action recognition. Although caused by technical issues, this result raises the question if virtual embodiments should simulate action recognition problems that their physical counterparts have.

Hospital robot at work: Something alien or an intelligent colleague?

Immaterial Materials: Designing with Radio

Designing with digital materials is sometimes challenging due to material properties that are for all practical purposes invisible. Here we present our work on exploring one such material, radio, and how we have worked with making radio a more tangible and accessible design material for multidisciplinary design teams to work with. Starting from an account of a previous project of ours, the LEGA project, we describe a design situation involving radio that exemplifies some of the challenges that working with radio can involve. We thereafter describe how we have used the Inspirational Bits approach to further investigate the peculiarities of radio as an immaterial design material and what possibilities it holds for interactive systems design.

Beyond Speculative Ethics in HRI? Ethical Considerations and the Relation to Empirical Data

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.

Questions, inspiration, feedback, and contributions: How entrepreneurs network online

This work investigates how entrepreneurs use social networking sites for business. Through surveys, online discussions and interviews, we have looked at activities, motives for participating on networking sites for business, motives for contributing, and differences between online and offline networking. Our results show that networking, facts finding, and marketing are very common activities while sharing of experience is quite rare. Entrepreneurs connect with new people online rather than reifying offline networks. A novel use of social media is that of small businesses using Facebook as a web hotel. We believe that an important explanation to our results is that social media are still informal and not yet incorporated in traditional work routines.

Move that Body! Involving users emotionally, bodily and socially

Our actual corporeal bodies are key in how we live in the world, in creating for experiences. Our bodies are not instruments or objects through which we communicate information. Communication is embodied – it involves our whole bodies, our deeply human ways of being in the world. There are many different kinds of bodily experiences we can envision designing for. In design of interactive systems, this is still a largely untapped area. Bodily movements may, for example, give rise to emotional experiences, by moving you get moved, and emotional processes will affect your bodily movements. In this talk, I will show a range of systems we have built where we try to involve users bodily, emotionally and socially in sustained interaction loops through movement. Doing design research in this area may feel like a daunting task as the qualities we strive to capture are highly elusive, subjective, context- and application-specific, and relates to values such as aesthetics, fun, meaning-making or being emotionally close to others. To get at the felt experience, we have had to innovate novel evaluation methods, such as the Sensual Evaluation Instrument, and novel ways of articulating “bodily ways of knowing”. But the most important output from our research work is, in my view, the formulation of strong concepts that can inspire design practitioners. I propose a strong concept we have named Affective Loops to capture some of our design knowledge. In the talk, I aim to discuss how we have tried to validate that Affective Loops as a strong concept able to generate more than one application.

Reflecting on the Design Process of Affective Health

We describe the design process behind a bio-sensor-based wellness-system, named Affective Health, aimed to help users to get into biofeedback loops as well as find patterns in their bodily reactions over time. By discussing details of the design process, we provide a reflected account of the particular design we arrived at. Three design qualities are used to both generate and evaluate the different design sketches. They are, in short, (1) the design must feel familiar to users, mirroring their experience of themselves, (2) creating designs that leave space for users’ own interpretation of their body data, and (3) that the modalities used in the design does not contradict one-another, but instead harmonize, helping users to make sense of the representation. The final user encounter of the Affective Health system shows that those design qualities were indeed both useful and important to users’ experience of the interaction.

Magical Bits: Designing Through Experiencing the Future End Product

This paper describes a method for designers to brainstorm around, and to experience, an end product before it is even conceptualized. Magical Bits are simple physical models representing the main property of a technology or a main function of a future end product. Knowing the end product’s main function, and using these models as if they were working products, can help to put the experience in focus. By stepping away from the computer, technical limitations and “single solution thinking”, the aim of this method is to let a designer develop through experiencing the users’ perceptions and emotions, which should have a central role in the beginning of a design process.

Experiential Artifacts as a Design Method for Somaesthetic Service Development

How can deep understandings of material properties, limitations and possibilities be used concretely as a resource in the design of embodied experiences? How can material explorations spur and potentially direct, inspire, open up for new technologies and innovations? How can we identify, develop, and polish desirable core mechanics for embodied experiences and what kind of mobile services can be built with these experiences? In this position paper we describe our idea of experiential artifacts, and how we think these can help us open up the design space of the next generation of physically engaging mobile technologies.

‘Outfit-centric Accessory’ Design in Mobile Innovation

Mobile phone design and use is a good case for studying aesthetics in human computer interaction, since this technology provides intimate consumer interaction. Still, the ways in which such technology could attract to fashion oriented people, has been under developed. The industry is making efforts to approach this group by treating phones as accessories. However, to design a mobile phone as an accessory does not just mean to make a phone “beautiful” in a static way, but should allow for matching its appearance with users‟ outfits in a dynamic and interactive way. In this paper we present the concept of outfit-centric accessory and explore a possible way of realizing it in design practice. We present a demo of designing a „match‟ application and discuss the advantages and problems of the app. This study provides valuable insight on how we should design mobile experiences to enhance aesthetics close to our body

Amateur Vision and Recreational Orientation: creating live video together

We explore the use of a live video broadcast system by a group of collaborating amateur camera operators to film an event on networked cameraphones. Using a detailed interaction analysis of their physical interactions and orientations to the work of others, we examine their choice of camera angles and positions in their filming as they attempt to provide interesting visual content and a coherent narrative. Our findings illustrate how users adapt their behaviour as co-ordination problems occur by drawing from a set of everyday visual practices (‘amateur vision’). The findings also show how the specifically temporal aspect of live video requires extended attention on its production, and that this is at odds with the ‘recreational orientation’ of amateur film crews who simultaneously participate in events for their own enjoyment and film them on behalf of other viewers. Implications for the design of collaborative live broadcast media are made, focusing on approaches to interaction design that augment users’ visual practices and allow users to look on behalf of others while experiencing places and events themselves.

Mobile Life VINN Excellence Centre – A model for strategic innovation of next generation mobile services

Fashion as System or Action Net in ‘Fashion in All Things’: The Case of Colour in the Design of Mobile Phones

Contemporary fashion has permeated into all things in life, but little has analyzed in detail. We present a study using mobile phone, one of the most intimate gadgets to people, as a way to approach ‘fashion in all things’. We study the representation of mobile phones in fashion blogs to unpack the fusion of mobile technology to fashion system. Fashion blogs increasingly assume the role of ‘gate-keepers’ within the fashion system, by which is meant Kawamura’s sense of the institutional and cultural arrangements that cause particular cultural objects to accrue values in specific waysi. This supports that fashion blogs have powers of legitimization. The selected corpus includes 109 entries from fashion blogs randomly searched through Google and the blog search-engine Technorati. Based on the materials, the paper pursues the following inter-related points: 1) visual appearances of mobile phones; 2) circumstantial appearances, such as fashion shows, celebrities etc.; 3) designers or fashion brand phones as a significant way of ‘fashionising’ phones. From the empirical study, we conclude that on the one hand, mobile phones do fit into the fashion system. Drawing on the semiotic theory derived from Barthes, the representation of mobile phones in fashion blogs carries two perspectives as heii suggested: the visual look and the circumstantial appearance. The blogs put fashion into mobile phone and legitimate it as a desirable fashion artefact belonging to the user. On the other hand, as mobile phones embrace shifting aesthetics and longer temporality, mobile phones exist in a social practice different from Parisian fashion system based on dress fashion. In this way, we can also contribute to the theorization of the concept of fashion per se which is historically contingent.

Towards an empirical program of drivers’ ethnomethods of sharing the means for transport

The sociological literature often portrays social relations in traffic as severely constrained. The driver’s possibilities to interact with their fellow road users are bounded by the vehicle and the speed of the movement. This form of culture is then interpreted as support for various theoretical approaches, be they modernization, bourgeois ideology, or consumption theory. However, such statements can also be seen as offhand or superficial comments since they are quick characterizations available to most of us through a glance at traffic, or just by thinking about our shared experiences of traveling in various vehicles. They are superficial also because there is no detailed analysis of the ways in which people do interact given the constraints. At the same time the topic is worthy more attention. Although the interaction might be conceived of as meager it is still worthy of investigation and analysis. The way people orient themselves to each other in their brief and restricted encounters is important for both the flow of traffic and the experience of it. Therefore, understanding traffic as constrained social interaction should be a starting point for detailed empirical investigation and analysis, and not the end-point where a general theory fits with social life. Here the ethnomethodological approach, which suggests that we take an interest in drivers’ own ethnographic methodical investigation of traffic interaction as an ongoing everyday activity, is promising. This implies studying the details of the interaction by which people orient themselves in relation to each other, e.g. when people initiate mobile phone conversations while driving or when motorcyclists use an Internet message board to organize a joint trip. It is through analyzing such lay accounts of interaction and “society” that we get an understanding of situated mobilities.

Time to Revisit Mobility in Mobile HCI?

In this panel, we discuss the relevance of the concept of mobility in current mobile Human-Computer Interaction esearch. Is the term still useful to understand and design for interaction with computers, or has the concept of mobility run dry and void of meaning?

Narrative Friction in Alternate Reality Games: Design Insights from Conspiracy For Good

Alternate Reality Games (ARG) tend to have story-driven game structures. Hence, it is useful to investigate how player activities interact with the often pre-scripted storyline in this genre. In this article, we report on a study of a particular ARG production, Conspiracy For Good (CFG), which was at the same time emphasising the role of strong storytelling, and active on-site participation by players. We uncover multiple levels of friction between the story content and the mode of play of live participants, but also between live and online participation. Based on the observations from the production, we present design recommendations for future productions with similar goals.

Performative Gestures for Mobile Augmented reality interaction.

Mobile Augmented Reality would benefit from a well-defined repertoire of interactions. In this paper, we present the implementation and study of a candidate repertoire, in which users make gestures with the phone to manipulate virtual objects located in the world. The repertoire is characterized by two factors: it is implementable on small devices, and it is recognizable by by-standers, increasing the opportunities for social acceptance and skill transfer between users. We arrive at the suggestion through a three-step process: a gesture-collecting pre-study, repertoire design and implementation, and a final study of the recognizability, learnability and technical performance of the implemented manipulation repertoire.

Mobile exploration of geotagged photographs

Columbus is a mobile application that lets users explore their surroundings through geotagged photographs, presented to them at the location they were taken. By moving around the physical world, the user unlocks photographs and gets to see and experience them in unison with their location. During two consecutive field trials, we investigated how the application was used and experienced and how photographs and locations are explored together. We found that previous experience with the surroundings people was exploring affected how they experienced the localized content. We report on the system’s design and implementation, the trials as well as resulting insights that can be used by other developers of locative media applications.

Performing a Check-in: Emerging Practices, Norms and ‘Conflicts’ in Location-Sharing Using Foursquare

Location-sharing services have a long history in research, but have only recently become available for consumers. Most popular commercial location-sharing services differ from previous research efforts in important ways: they use manual ‘check-ins’ to pair user location with semantically named venues rather than tracking; venues are visible to all users; location is shared with a potentially very large audience; and they employ incentives. By analysis of 20 indepth interviews with foursquare users and 47 survey responses, we gained insight into emerging social practices surrounding location-sharing. We see a shift from privacy issues and data deluge, to more performative considerations in sharing one’s location. We discuss performance aspects enabled by check-ins to public venues, and show emergent, but sometimes conflicting norms (not) to check-in.

The LEGA: A Device for Leaving and Finding Tactile Traces

This paper describes experiences from development and deployment of the Lega, a hand held device for physical sharing of experiences during an art exhibition. Touching and moving the device in different ways creates a tactile trace that can be experienced by others through their own device. The system was successfully deployed at an art exhibition for two months where user studies were performed. Here we present some general observations regarding the systems performance and discuss issues that we encountered.

Things that Tweet, Check-In and are Befriended. Two Explorations on Robotics & Social Media

This late breaking report describes two explorations of effects of using social media in human-robot interaction. The first is an exploration of how 'autonomous creatures' can use information shared via social awareness streams by implementing a Nabaztag to use information from its 'friends' on location-sharing service foursquare. The second is an informal analysis of tweets sent to an existing robot-associated twitter account as a case. We show parallels to prior research and discuss questions that these simple explorations pose for the future of robots and social media.

Pixel crush doesn't begin to explain it!

In Dragon Age, game characters can be made to fall in love. As it turns out, so do the players.

Navigating the world and learning to like it - mobility training through a pervasive game.

This paper introduces the idea that location based pervasive games can be used to make mobility training for visually impaired children more fun. The user centred development process which has been carried out in collaboration with both visually impaired children and rehabilitation staff is described and we present a novel game concept which combines locative play, sound traces and a physical catch movement. We report and discuss results of user tests and summarize our experience in a set of tentative development and design guidelines for this type of game.

Studying the Elusive Experience of Pervasive Games

Studying pervasive games is inherently difficult, and different from studying computer or board games. They cannot be studied as play-tests or use-cases: they must be staged under very realistic settings. This article builds upon the experiences of staging and studying a dozen pervasive games and other playful pervasive technology prototypes. We discuss the challenges and customary pitfalls, of evaluating pervasive games in general and the player experience specifically, and chart methods that have proven useful in previous research. The aim is to provide insight into the qualitative research practise of pervasive games, providing a situated methodology of what we have found to be valuable – and what as a waste of time – in evaluating and researching pervasive play.

I’m in love with someone who doesn’t exist! Bleed in the context of a computer game

It is not unusual for computer games to include romance, but it is unusal for a computer game to create strong romantic reactions in players. In this article I investigate the romantic experience in the game Dragon Age:Origins. Based on an investigation of blog and community comments, I argue that the game creates a ‘bleed’ effect; that some players to some extent fall in love with the characters that they are romancing in the game. The article identifies some specific aspects of the game design that contribute to the effect; apart from storyline and character design I discuss the desire for safe zone romance and the phenomena of player projection as contributing to the effect.

Developing Physical Check-In Methods for Location-Sharing Services and Analysing Their Influence on the User Experience

This thesis describes different types of physical check-ins to location-sharing services and their influence on the user experience. In current location-sharing services, people check-in to semantically named places. The work presents a new concept of physical check-ins to location-sharing services: Check-ins that determine a location reliably by using the physical environment around the user instead of the use of common location technologies like GPS, mobile phone network or handset based positioning. Three different categories of physical check-in methods are presented: Check-ins using visual tags, RFID tags and Bluetooth signals. For each category multiple varieties are explored. A study of the user perception of the different check-in methods exposes if those technologies make a positive contribution to the user experience for location-sharing services. In addition to the implemented prototypes, of which one has been published and used by more than 5,000 users, the output of the created explorations and evaluations are design recommendations facilitating check-ins to location-sharing services that have both, a fast and reliable place determination and a positive user experience.

Some themes in bodily interaction

We identify and reflect on a number of themes that we argue has been underexplored in embodied interaction research. This work is based on findings from own design work and studies of artifacts for bodily forms of interaction in leisure oriented contexts, together with related theoretical and empirical literature. Three themes are discussed: the temporality of bodily experiences, the difference in scale of bodily interaction, and the social construction of bodily experiences.

MoBoogie. Creative Expression Through Whole Body Musical Interaction

allows users to manipulate and arrange music through movement. MoBoogie is designed to foster experiences in creative expression for children and potentially adults. The application responds to users’ movements by changing variables in a continuous stream of music loops. Results from this study suggest that the creative expressions arose in the joint space of movement and music, and did not primarily have to be in one form or the other. This allowed users with limited experience in dance and music making to be creative in such forms of expression.

Designer Experience through Magical Bits

This paper describes a method for designers to brainstorm around, and to experience, an end product before it is even conceptualized. Magical Bits are simple physical models representing the main property of the technology and the main function of the future end product. Knowing the end product’s main function, and using these models as if they were working products, can help to put the experience in focus. By stepping away from the computer, technical limitations and “single solution thinking”, the aim of this method is to let a designer develop through experiencing the users’ perceptions and emotions.

Bodies, boogies, bugs & buddies: Shall we play?

Movement based interaction is a growing field especially within games, such as the Nintendo Wii and Kinect for Xbox 360. However, designing for movement-based interaction is a challenging task in mobile settings. Our approach is to use context design for designing such games and in this paper we present the experiences from a workshop targeting the design of social full-body dance games. The workshop explores how movement based games can be supported by social interaction and external influences (in particular music and beats) in addition to the sensing and feedback capabilities of a limited device, to create a complete and engaging experience. Although basing our design on an existing device, our focus is on the context of its use rather than its functionalities, to encourage an engaging behavior. Findings from this first workshop form the basis for a design exercise where we suggest

Ethnography of the telephone:  Changing uses of communication technology in village life

While mobile HCI has encompassed a range of devices and systems, telephone calls on cellphones remain the most prevalent contemporary form of mobile technology use. In this paper we document ethnographic work studying a remote Mexican village’s use of cellphones alongside conventional phones, satellite phones and the Internet. While few homes in the village we studied have running water, many children have iPods and the Internet cafe in the closest town is heavily used to access YouTube, Wikipedia, and MSN messenger. Alongside cost, the Internet fits into the communication patterns and daily routines in a way that cellphones do not. We document the variety of communication strategies that balance cost, availability and complexity. Instead of finding that new technologies replace old, we find that different technologies co-exist, with fixed phones co-existing with instant message, cellphones and shared community phones. The paper concludes by discussing how we can study mobile technology and design for settings defined by cost and infrastructure availability.

Unpacking Social Interaction that Make us Adore – On the Aesthetics of Mobile Phones as Fashion Items

We report on a study of fashionable people‟s expressions of opinions on mobile phones in online fashion media, such as blogs and magazines. First, the study contributes to our understanding of the role of pragmatic philosophy, which is now dominating HCI both as a guide for design and as a guide when looking at social practices, in outlining the role of aesthetics in experience design. Fashion practices di-verge from this theory, since here aesthetic appearances can be visual, ambiguous and incomplete although it still pro-vides a lot of meanings for people. We argue that our find-ings should influence the discussion in HCI to consider a less theoretically oriented aesthetic approach, where instead empirical studies get at the forefront. Second, the study provides valuable insight on how we should design mobile experiences to attract more attention from people interested in fashion. Mobile phones, and their services, can for ex-ample be designed to relate to the visual appearance of the dressed outfit, or ensemble of a person.

EcoFriends – the non-guilt feeling mobile system for inspiration and engagement

Many people have a strong will to do good and positive environmental choices, while they struggle to make this fit the needs of daily life. Our starting point is that technology that aims to help people be more environmentally friendly must also be designed in harmony with the way modern people live their lives. One prerequisite to achieve lasting attitude changes is that we are touched in the most basic level - where all our senses, bodily habits and norms are put into a social context and thus can form a whole. Only when the good, environmentally friendly habits also appeals to us aesthetically, physically and socially, can we fully embrace and maintain them.

Social Media on the Road: Mobile Technologies and Future Traffic Research

In the future, everyday life in traffic will be intricately meshed with city life. Today, motorways, city streets, toll roads, country roads, etc. are places where we spend a considerable amount of time, and where a large number of everyday encounters between people occur. Any road user’s journey coincides with several, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of other people’s journeys. But these encounters are brief and the interaction is slight. Mobile technologies and emergent social media provide us with new possibilities to support drivers and passengers beyond just helping them to reach their destination. We suggest that new technologies and applications could enhance social interaction in traffic and make life on the road more interesting and meaningful

Sketching in Software and Hardware: Bluetooth as a Design Material

In any design process, a medium’s properties need to be considered. This is generally well established, yet still within interactive systems design, the properties of a technological medium are often glossed over. That is, technologies are often black-boxed without much thought given to how their distinctive material properties open up the design space. In this paper, we experiment with a technology to see what might be gained from intentionally and systematically investigating its properties. Specifically, we look upon Bluetooth from the perspective of being a design material and examine how its properties from that perspective can be used to shape design thinking. Using four example cases or “sketches”, we show that Bluetooth’s properties, often seen as constraints, can provide useful building blocks for designing interactive systems.

Weather Gods and Fruit Kids – Embodying abstract concepts using tactile feedback and Whole Body Interaction

In this paper we present findings based on the design and study of a game like activity that allows for physical and bodily interaction around abstract concepts like energy and energy consumption in a collaborative learning setting. The game, called Weather Gods and Fruit Kids, uses motion sensing technologies in combination with tactile and audio feedback to create an embodied interactive setting without computer screens. We analyze and discuss the properties of the interactive setting as well as the interactions with and around the system using characteristics such as multiple modalities of response, large space interaction and aspects of focus and attention. The work suggests that alternative pedagogical activities can be created providing new entries to theoretical concepts using an embodied interaction approach. In particular it may support kinesthetic learners in their preference to learn by being physically engaged.

Gamification and location-sharing: some emerging social conflicts

Location-sharing services such as foursquare are a prominent example of commercial apps that use gamification to increase user engagement. These gamification elements however have to coexist with a plethora of usage motivations. We here present selected observations on emerging conflicts between gamification elements and other usage motivations for location-sharing. We argue gamification needs to take into account the social context in which services operate and that conflicts within this context can both be detrimental and add to playfulness.

Bodily Orientations around Mobiles: Lessons learnt in Vanuatu

Since we started carrying mobiles phones, they have altered the ways in which we orient our bodies in the world. Many of those changes are invisible to us – they have become habits, deeply engrained in our society. To make us more aware of our bodily ways of living with mobiles and open the design space for novel ways of designing mobiles and their interactions, we decided to study one of the last groups of users on earth who had not been exposed to mobiles: the people of Vanuatu. As they had so recently started using mobiles, their use was still in flux: the fragility of the mobile was unusual to them as was the need to move in order to find coverage. They were still getting used to carrying their mobiles and keeping them safe. Their encounters with mobile use exposed the need to consider somaesthetics practices when designing mobiles as they profoundly affect our bodily ways of being in the world.

Inspirational Bits

Through sketches, mock-ups and early prototyping designers engage in a “conversation with materials” (Schön 1983). In the formation of a new idea the material starts to “talk back”, revealing new opportunities and challenges. Computer technology is a complex material for many designers to work with (Kursat Ozene et al. 2010). It is a material both in space and time (Hallnäs and Redström 2006). It is not enough to touch and feel the material in any given moment and thereby getting to know its properties and potential, but instead it reveals itself and its dynamic feel when put together into a running system.

Video interaction - Making broadcasting a successful social media.

Video has slowly been gaining popularity as a social media. We are now witnessing a step where capture and live broadcasts is released from the constraints of the desktop computer, which further accentuate issues such as video literacy, collaboration, hybridity, utility and privacy, that needs to be addressed in order to make video useful for large user groups.

Understanding People and Animals: On Ordinary Human-Canine Interaction and the Use of a Positioning System in the Wild

Animals are increasingly integrated in interactive contexts depending on digital technologies. The current and future use of such technologies is a relevant topic for HCI research. However, the field is struggling with the inherent problem of ‘interaction’ in understanding interaction with animals. We argue for a way forward based on critical anthropomorphism informed by ethnomethodology, with a focus on manifest interaction. Drawing upon a field study of hunters’ use of a GPS dog tracking-device, we discuss how interaction between dogs and humans is affected when new technology is introduced. The GPS data is situated and interpreted by the dog handler, and supports the hunter’s work of dealing with the dogs’ intentions. This opens up for new forms of interactions with the dog. When studying and designing for interaction between humans and animals we should move beyond merely looking at dyadic relationships, and also consider the social organization of the interaction.

Into the wild: Challenges and opportunities for field trial methods.

Field trials of experimental systems ‘in the wild’ have developed into a standard method within HCI - testing new systems with groups of users in relatively unconstrained settings outside of the laboratory. In this paper we discuss methodological challenges in running user trials. Using a ‘trial of trials’ we examined the practices of investigators and participants - documenting ‘demand characteristics’, where users adjust their behaviour to fit the expectations of those running the trial, the interdependence of how trials are run and the result they produce, and how trial results can be dependent on the insights of a subset of trial participants. We develop three strategies that researchers can use to leverage these challenges to run better trials.

Communication Technology for Human-Dog Interaction: Exploration of Dog Owners’ Experiences and Expectations

Whereas communication technology to connect people has long been an integral part of our everyday lives, it has only recently expanded to offer applications for dogs and dog-owners. In this paper, we present two explorative studies to understand the experiences and expectations of dog owners for communication technology to support their interaction with dogs. These studies look at two different user groups, hunters and pet owners, charting the lessons learnt from the current technology and exploring the aspects that should be taken into account when designing future applications and services. Our findings reveal that usability problems are still the dominant issue with current applications. We also suggest key design implications which can be utilized in the development of future human-dog interaction systems.

The Effects of Interaction Techniques on Talk Patterns in Collaborative Peer Learning around Interactive Tables

This paper presents the findings of a user study investigating conversational patterns across three conditions of table-based interaction (direct touch interactive table, pantograph interactive table and non-digital table) for different types of educational activities. Findings demonstrate that communication style is significantly affected by interaction techniques. The direct touch technique stimulated conversations based around the topic and pedagogical method. The pantograph technique promoted playfulness and had a higher number of directive utterances between participants, with fewer task-based, group-oriented utterances. The non-digital table promoted reflective forms of task-orientated utterance, encouraged group communication and fostered more equitable participation between members. The findings provide insights into the design of interactive tables to support particular forms of social interaction.

Inspirational Bits - Towards a shared understading of the digital material

In any design process, a medium’s properties need to be considered. This is nothing new in design. Still we find that in HCI and interactive systems design the properties of a technology are often glossed over. That is, technologies are black-boxed without much thought given to how their distinctive properties open up design possibilities. In this paper we describe what we call inspirational bits as a way to become more familiar with the design material in HCI, the digital material. We describe inspirational bits as quick and dirty but fully working systems in both hardware and software built with the aim of exposing one or several of the dynamic properties of a digital material. We also show how they provide a means of sharing design knowledge across the members of a multi-disciplined design team.

Real-time markerless tracking of objects on mobile devices

Additionally, mobile devices include several hardware features nowadays, like GPS positioning, motion-sensing accelerometers and compasses. Applications for mobile devices can determine the position of the mobile device, its orientation and its inclination, although not very accurately. Thus, it is possible to use mobile devices for augmented reality applications. These applications rely in almost every case on the position and orientation of the device and/or the tracking of markers, which have been placed in the real world. However, adding to the inaccurate positioning, there is another issue which current applications cannot solve yet: The augmentation lags behind, whenever the user moves the device with natural speed. If the applications use marker or markerless tracking, a correct detection is only possible if the markers or objects in the real world are captured at least almost completely on the screen. The goal of this thesis is to investigate the possibilities of displaying larger-than-screen objects on mobile devices with real-time markerless tracking. Different approaches to markerless object and symbol identification will be investigated regarding their portability to mobile devices with sufficient performance. Depending on how promising the investigated methods are one or several will be implemented for further research. By combining and enhancing the methods, a markerless tracking technique for mobile devices will be developed. The primary concerns will be the performance of this technique and the visualisation of larger-than-screen objects while the user moves around them.

Interactive augmented reality

Augmented reality can provide a new experience to users by adding virtual objects where they are relevant in the real world. The new gen- eration of mobile phones o*ers a platform to develop augmented reality application for industry as well as for the general public. Although some applications are reaching commercial viability, the technology is still lim- ited. The main problem designers have to face when building an augmented reality application is to implement an interaction method. Interacting through the mobile's keyboard can prevent the user from looking on the screen. Normally, mobile devices have small keyboards, which are di*cult to use without looking at them. Displaying a virtual keyboard on the screen is not a good solution either as the small screen is used to display the augmented real world. This thesis proposes a gesture-based interaction approach for this kind of applications. The idea is that by holding and moving the mobile phone in di*erent ways, users are able to interact with virtual content. This approach combines the use of input devices as keyboards or joysticks and the detection of gestures performed with the body into one scenario: the detection of the phone's movements performed by users. Based on an investigation of people's own preferred gestures, a reper- toire of manipulations was de*ned and used to implement a demonstrator application running on a mobile phone. This demo was tested to evaluate the gesture-based interaction within an augmented reality application. The experiment shows that it is possible to implement and use gesture- based interaction in augmented reality. Gestures can be designed to solve the limitations of augmented reality and o*er a natural and easy to learn interaction to the user.

Rudiments 1, 2 & 3: Design Speculations on Autonomy

This work describes the design process and installation of three speculative, rudimentary machines, or rudiments. Through careful iterations in their design, the rudiments are intended to provoke curiosity and discussion around the possibility of autonomy in interactive systems. The design of the rudiments is described in detail, alongside the design decisions that were made to suggest a machine autonomy and to provoke discussion. Some preliminary reflections from installing the rudiments in two separate households are also reported. Widely divergent opinions of the rudiments from the two households are used to discuss a number of themes for thinking about autonomy and interactive systems design. Overall, the presented work adopts a perspective strongly oriented towards guiding future research, but, importantly, aims to do so by opening up and exposing the design possibilities rather than constraining them.

Design qualities for Whole Body Interaction – Learning from Golf, Skateboarding and BodyBugging

What is it that is makes swinging a club to hit a ball so captivating and fun that people spend their whole lives perfecting that one movement? In this paper we present how we, rather than to invent something off-line in a lab, have returned to the real world to get inspiration and studied full body movement activities with non-digital artefacts that have track records of ensnaring and hooking practitioners for a life time, golf and skateboarding. We have also looked at a new interactive movement device called the BodyBug. We explore how the skilled use of the artefacts puts people in contact with and let them experience the world in an essentially new way. We identify and present 8 design qualities for Whole Body Interaction, based on people’s performances in these activities. The interdependency between user, artefact and physical environment was a primary driving forces behind rich, sustained and graceful interaction with the artefacts.

Please Enjoy!? Workshop on Playful Experiences in Mobile HCI

This workshop aims to explore different approaches and challenges in studying playfulness as a mode of interacting with mobile technology. Researchers, designers and developers with interest in this theme are welcome to participate in a full day activity of demos, presentations and discussions. In particular, our emphasis is on how to introduce, explore and understand playful interaction in mobile applications used in the wild.

Research in the large: Using App Stores, Markets and other wide distribution channels in UbiComp research

The mobile phones that people use in their daily lives now run advanced applications and come equipped with sensors once only available in custom hardware in UbiComp research. At the same time application distribution has become increasingly simple due to the proliferation of app stores and the like. Evaluation and research methods have to be adapted to this new context to get the best data and feedback from wide audiences. However, an overview of successful strategies to overcome research challenges inherent to wide deployment is not yet available. App store platform characteristics, devices, reaching target users, new types of evaluation data and dynamic, heterogeneous usage contexts have to be dealt with. This workshop provides a forum for researchers and developers to exchange experiences and strategies for wide distribution of applications. We aim at building an understanding of the opportunities of various distribution channels and obstacles involved in a research context.

Are we living in a robot cargo cult?

We use the Cargo Cult metaphor to discuss visions, methods and communication of robot research. Essentially cargo cult involves performing of imitative rituals that are conducted without understanding the underlying cause of a phenomenon. We discuss how this is an ongoing challenge within the field of HRI, and what researchers could do to avoid contributing to a robotic cargo cult.

How do you play with a robotic toy animal?: a long-term study of Pleo

Pleo is one of the more advanced interactive toys currently available for the home market, taking the form of a robotic dinosaur. We present an exploratory study of how it was interacted with and reflected upon in the homes of six families during 2 to 10 months. Our analysis emphasizes a discrepancy between the participants' initial desires to borrow a Pleo and what they reported later on about their actual experiences. Further, the data suggests an apparent tension between participants expecting the robot to work as a 'toy' while making consistent comparisons with real pet animals. We end by discussing a series of implications for design of this category of toys, in order to better maintain interest and engagement over time.

The Look, the Feel and the Action: Making Sets of ActDresses for Robotic Movement

We present a series of design explorations for controlling autonomous robotic movement based on a metaphor of clothing and accessorising. From working with various sketches, scenarios and prototypes we identify a number of particular features of this form of interaction, as well potential challenges for designers of other systems based on this design concept. Finally we conclude with a few general implications, especially concerning the inert properties of visibility, physicality and modularity with respect to the particular case of interaction and robotic movement.

Blue-Sky and Down-to-Earth: How analogous practices can support the user-centred design proces

We discuss how traditional methods for understanding design requirements are leveraged to produce innovative and fundamentally new perspectives when using analogy. We call these analogous practice approaches, and illustrate two cases that both use analogy to achieve exploratory design with ethnography, by gathering data from a different setting than we intend to design for. We discuss how the use of analogy is different in the cases, yet exemplify a related perspective of using analogy as a resource to support inventive design with traditional data collection methods.

Sharing mobile services - Beyond the app store model

The app store model used by Apple’s iPhone has presented a successful model for installing new applications; however, only a fraction of current mobile phones have access to a dedicated app store. Thus there is need to investigate alternative ways of discovering and installing mobile services and applications. We performed studies on two services, focusing on the social aspects of sharing mobile apps between users. The services were a portrait sharing application prototype called Portrait Catalog, and a commercially available chat application called Hanashi. They differ not only by functionality and design, but also by their availability to the public as well as the means of distribution they offer. We present initial insights in how users share mobile services between each other, when using a phone that doesn’t include mobile application distribution as part of the user experience. We found that factors such as users’ habits of downloading and testing new applications, their understandings of the service they are using and the means of distribution the services offer, all affected how the services were shared.

Watching sports in pubs as an inspiration for the design of mobile live TV services

Being at the sport event or watching sports in pubs is a fulfilling experience, highly sociable, fun and relaxing. Our aim is to identify issues that are closely connected to watching sports in pubs using field studies and theory of leisure and play and to apply them on mobile TV design. In particular we concentrate on watching live sports on mobile devices.

Mind the Body! Designing a Mobile Stress Management Application Encouraging Personal Reflection

We have designed a stress management biofeedback mobile service for everyday use, aiding users to reflect on both positive and negative patterns in their behavior. To do so, we embarked on a complex multidisciplinary design journey, learning that: detrimental stress results from complex processes related to e.g. the subjective experience of being able to cope (or not) and can therefore not be measured and diagnosed solely as a bodily state. We learnt that it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to make a robust analysis of stress symptoms based on biosensors worn outside the laboratory environment they were designed for. We learnt that rather than trying to diagnose stress, it is better to mirror short-term stress reactions back to them, inviting their own interpretations and reflections. Finally, we identified several experiential qualities that such an interface should entail: ambiguity and openness to interpretation, interactive history of prior states, fluency and aliveness.

Spaces of Interaction

As the world becomes increasingly computationally enabled, so our view of human-computer interaction (HCI) needs to evolve. The proliferation of wireless connectivity and mobile devices in all their various forms moves people from being outside a computer and interacting with it to being inside an information space and moving through it. Sensors on the body, wearable computers, wireless sensor networks, increasingly believable virtual characters and speech-based systems are all contributing to new interactive environments. New forms of interaction such as gesture and touch are rapidly emerging and interactions involving emotion and a real sense of presence are beginning. These are the new spaces of interaction we need to understand, design and engineer. Most importantly these new forms of interaction are fundamentally embodied. Older views of a disembodied cognition need to be replaced with an understanding of how people with bodies live in and move through spaces of interaction.

Temporal Relations in Affective Health

In the Affective Health project we explore possibilities of how to, through biofeedback support users in making sense of the relationship between their stress and their behavior in everyday life. Affective Health is a tool for visualizing patterns and trends of bodily and contextual information. It is particularly important that the design reflects changes over time as this is how people start recognizing patterns in their own behavior and connect it to their bodily reactions. We spent substantial effort sketching and testing ways of portraying time that would move us away from more mathematically inspired representations such as for example graphs and calendars. Instead, we want users to see the signals our bodies emit as part of themselves, of their own ways of being in the world, alive, acting and reacting to their environment. We have explored many possible, alternative ways of visualizing temporal representations through biofeedback. For example as the relation between different places and with time as different layers of history in a concept inspired from ecology. The latest and most developed concept is a cyclic repetition of biodata mapped on a spiral shape.

How to Stay in the Emotional Rollercoaster: Lessons Learnt from Designing EmRoll

Bodily expressions can be used to involve players in intense experiences with games. By physically moving, breathing, or increasing your pulse, you may start emotional processes that help create for a stronger experience of the narrative in the game. We have designed a system named EmRoll that poses riddles to pairs of players. The riddles can only be solved if the players are, or at least pretend to be, moving according to different emotional states: dancing happily, relaxed breathing and being scared. The system measures movement, breathing and sweat reactions from the two players. Lessons learnt were: playing in pairs is an important aspect as the two players influenced one-another, pulling each other into stronger experiences; getting excited through intense movement when involving your whole body worked well, as did relaxing through deep breathing; using the sweat response as an input mechanism worked less well; and finally, putting a Wizard (a human operator) into the loop can help bootstrap difficulty balancing and thereby increase emotional involvement.

Transferring Qualities from Horseback Riding to Design

We see more and more attempts to design for bodily experiences with digital technology, but it is a notably challenging design task. What are the possible bodily experiences we may aim to design for, and how can we characterise them? By analysing a horseback riding experience, we came to identify the following themes: (1) how certain kinds of bodily experiences are best understood through experiencing them yourself – the bodily ways of knowing, (2) how rhythm and balance create for particularly strong physical experiences of this kind, (3) how movement and emotion coincide in these experiences, (4) how the movement between seeing our own bodies as objects vs experiencing in and through our bodies is one of the ways we come to learn the language of expressing and understanding bodily action, and (5) how this in turn lets us describe the sensitive and delicate relationship of wordless signs and signals that represent, in the case described, two bodily agents – a human and a horse. When the human-horse relationship is really successful, it can be described as rare moments of becoming a centaur. We translate these themes into design considerations for bodily interactions.

Geolocation in the Mobile Web Browser

Current mobile browser capabilities make it possible to quickly develop advanced mobile location based services without having to write device specific software, or build custom hardware. We here describe three web applications exploring using location within mobile browsers (TågAlong, NearMe and LocalURL). These explorations show clear potential for using geolocation in the web browser in order to reach a larger user base, with a greater variety of devices, thus allowing for UbiComp researchers to explore the effects of specific services and applications on a larger scale. We discuss the services, as well as the potential and challenges with using the user's location directly in the browser.

φ²: Exploring physical Check-Ins for Location-Based Services

This paper presents the φ² (‘Phisquare’) Scanner and φ² Barcode Generator – an exploration of physical check-ins for location-based services. The system uses 2D barcodes to retrieve and share semantic location information. Users can scan barcodes at venues that activate a location-based application with the corresponding venue page. This system overcomes problems arising when users have to select their location manually. We expect an enhanced user experience using physical artefacts in location-based services.

Documenting and experiencing with live video - An evaluation of two mobile applications for live video editing

Mobile telephony is a technology that quickly has becoming a part of our culture and it is not unusual to see people using these technologies in different context (Palen et al., 2000). Video Telephony is now available in everyday mobile phones (O'Hara et al., 2006). Live mobile broadcasting technologies differ from previous technologies, such as web camera technology because it is wireless and makes it possible to capture from anywhere, as long as there is access to mobile networks (Engström et al., 2010). There are now several thousand users of mobile live broadcasting services that enable uploading videos, examples of such services is qik.com, bambuser.com (Juhlin et al., 2010). The purpose of the evaluation was to test and prototyp1 prototyp2 and get an idea of how they functioned and how to use these served as mobile solutions. What are the challenges for the users? What are the scopes of use for the prototypes? This study has used an ethnographic field study where participants were recorded with video, after this a focus group formed where the participants could tell what they thought about the use of the prototypes and at last were made and a content analysis. The evaluation consisted of two occasions and seven tests. Two of the test groups had two mixer, the remaining two groups and this differed the groups some. At the test sessions, the participants in Stapelbäddsparken in Malmo got no directives, whilst the participants at Universeum in Gothenburg got some. The most obvious difference between the prototypes was that prototyp1 showed four active pictures and prototyp2 only showed four still pictures. The study showed that there are different participatory among the users depending on the environment they find themselves in, that affects what they choose to film. At first, the cameramen tended to film in a way that gave the same containment in the pictures for the mixer, which lead to little options to choose among. One of the problems experienced by the cameramen was that they did not know whose camera that were broadcasting at the moment, but that was resolved. Mixer found it difficult to editing with the lag-time between what the cameramen filmed and what was showed on the mixer’s display. Another problem was to mix so that a whole sequence from beginning to the end was showed. This survey is important for finding different scopes of use where a service like this can be used.

Studying the Elusive Experience in Pervasive Games

Studying pervasive games is inherently difficult, and different from studying computer games. They cannot be studied as play-tests or use-cases: they must be staged under real or very realistic settings. This article builds upon our experiences of staging and studying a dozen pervasive games and other ludic pervasive technology prototypes. We discuss the challenges and customary pitfalls of evaluating pervasive games in general and the player experience specifically, and chart methods that have proven useful in our research. The aim is to provide insight into the qualitative research practise of pervasive games, providing a situated methodology of what we have found to be valuable – and what as a waste of time – in evaluating and researching pervasive play.

Games as Activity: Correcting the Digital Fallacy

Game studies would benefit from acknowledging that digital games should be studied as a special case of games rather than the other way around. Digital games research tends to look at games as fixed structures or media, largely ignoring the role of the player. Conversely, play and player studies tend to ignore the role of design. We argue that in order to uncover the relationship between game design, game activity and game experience we need to put the game activity in central focus. If games are approached from this perspective, we should study them simultaneously as consciously designed and socially enacted.

“I'm in love with someone that doesn't exist!!” Bleed in the context of a Computer Game

It is not unusual for computer games to include romance, but most games treat romance as a narrative theme rather than as an integrated part of gameplay. In this article I investigate the gameplay experience in the game Dragon Age, a single-player game that allows players to actively engage in romance. Based on an investigation of blog and community comments, we argue that this sometimes will create an experience that is similar to the “bleed” effect in non-computerised role-play, and that the player to some extent shares emotions with his or her character.

A Fashion-ology of Mobile Innovation

We contribute to the discussion on fashion-ology of mobile innovation by looking into the practical production system within this industry. By analyzing how mobile phones are produced as aesthetic objects through a qualitative content analysis of insiders, we attempt to clarify a relatively more independent aesthetic-creating system, that is, the fashion-ology of mobile technology. We learn how much the industry insiders see the mobile design and production is related to fashion and how the work process goes on through the interviews.

Business Models in the Mobile Ecosystem

The mobile ecosystem is constantly changing. The roles of each actor are uncertain and the question how each actor cooperates with each other is of interest of researchers both in academia and industry. In this paper we examine the mobile ecosystem from a business perspective. We used five mobile companies as case studies, which were investigated through interviews and questionnaire surveys. The companies covered different roles in the ecosystem, including network operator, device manufacturer, and application developer. With our empirical data as a starting point, we analyze the revenue streams of different actors in the ecosystem. The results will contribute to an understanding of the business models and dependencies that characterize actors in the current mobile ecosystem.

Social media on the road - The future of car based computing

In the future, everyday life in traffic will be intricately meshed with city life. Today, motorways, city streets etc. are places where we spend a considerable amount of time, and where a large number of everyday encounters between people occur. Any road user’s journey coincides with hundreds or even thousands of other people’s paths. We unpack the details of the practical achievements involved in socially engaging with these persons at high speed. In general, these encounters are brief and the interaction is slight. The recent emergence of mobile technologies provide us with new possibilities to support drivers and passengers beyond just helping them to reach their destination. We suggest that new applications could enhance social interaction in traffic and make life on the road more interesting and meaningful. We provide examples of some innovative applications such as car stereos that share music among drivers; digital games that interact with the landscape passing by outside the car windows, or with passengers in surrounding cars; message systems that allow drivers to help each other and web applications that allow motorcyclists to socialize on the road.

"EVS... now!" Mixing relevant instant replay into live video

The video capabilities of mobile telephones, combined with their access to with high bandwidth data networks, mean that consumer devices now allow amateur camera operators to broadcast live content. Yet viewing live images does not always provide viewers with an understanding of events as they occur, and instant replay is often used in professional multi-camera productions to augment the live visual images–something that no consumer video broadcast technology currently supports. To understand how amateur producers might use instant replay in the future, we have examined the ways in which professional productions combine real-time and recorded media. This paper therefore examines the professional practices around video technologies to enable the archival, search and broadcast of visual content to show how live and non-live footage are combined. A detailed interaction analysis demonstrates that this work is dependent on the coordinated practices of multiple participants, and how they practically achieve this to search for topically useful recorded visual material to augment the ongoing live action, display its relevance to the live situation and segue transitions between live and replay visuals.

TV watching at sports bars as social interaction

We present a number of videos taken at sports bars in Stockholm. They display the ways in which people interact with each other at the same time as they orient to the TV screens. Our intent is to unpack the detail collaboration, and the experiences of TV spectators in a public setting in order to influence the design of future TV broadcast systems.

Designing a mobile system for coping with stress

In the Affective Health project we explore mobile services that empowers people to monitor and understand their own stress levels vis-à-vis their everyday activities. Our design aims to create open surfaces for users to interpret, appropriate and change over time, making the look and experience of the system their own, even after it has been deployed, letting the participatory process continue where PD traditionally leaves. Here we discuss our design process and the problem of getting design input from a sensitive and hard to reach target group. We present the ways we worked around the problems, the questions that arose, and thoughts we have for our future work.

Mobile broadcasting – The whats and hows of live video as a social medium

A new type of social media, which display live broadcasts from mobile devices, are becoming increasingly popular. We provide a qualitative content analysis of a sample from four such services, which specifically focus on the topics conveyed; camera work and coordination, in order to investigate the possibilities and problems in this new social media. Although the services are already used by many members, the study reveals an immature application area. People struggle with finding interesting topics to broadcast, and managing the camera in a way that present it in a broadcastable way. But there are also examples of topics such as artistic performances and tours, as well as ways to conduct live transitions and coordination, that point to a more medium specific way of using these services. The results implicate, that providing the opportunity to broadcast live video is not enough, and that there is now a need to design for amateurs appropriation of camera handling techniques.

Wii Science: Teaching the laws of nature with physically engaging video game technologies

A great number of educational and edutainment projects have already used video games to teach topics such as physics, math, language, etc., using traditional game or computer controls. Recently, however, commercial games have shifted to incorporate gestures and body motion, as exemplified by a variety of games where the player is required to actually perform real-world physical movements to control the game. This includes an array of dancing games, where the player follow a sequence of instructions by dancing on a sensor mat (e.g. Dance Dance Revolution); sports games, where the player performs movements mimicking those required in real games of bowling, boxing, tennis, etc. (e.g. Wii Sports); and music games, where the player acts out pieces of music by playing on replicas of real instruments (e.g. Guitar Hero, Rock Band). This new focus on physicality in video games has had several benefits, both by making the games more socially engaging for a co-located group of players, and by introducing a degree of physicality to an activity that was previously considered unhealthy and inactive. In this project, we are using the popular Wii game controller, aka Wiimote, manufactured by Nintendo. However, rather than using the Wiimote as a direct controller for the player's on-screen avatar, as in most popular games, we want to apply the technology to let students explore phenomena related to physics and natural sciences. Thus, by leveraging the sensory capabilities of game controllers that youths already enjoy outside of school, we can introduce physical exploration as a means to engage in learning about phenomena from natural science. Key concepts of physics – work, energy, force, potential energy, kinetic energy, momentum – may be introduced as aspects of the interactive setting that students are exploring.

Human Action and Experience As Basis for the Design and Study of Robotic Artefacts

This paper aims to illustrate how robotic artefacts and applications may be described from a perspective of human action and experience. This is done by presenting an interaction model based on four ways that interactive artefacts may work as resources for human action. In contrast to data-centric models, this model includes socially and contextually oriented actions performed around the artefact, as well as actions related to the computational system running on the machine. A goal with the framework is to provide a concrete reference for designers, focusing on the experiential dimensions of the products that they develop.

Comics, robots, fashion and programming: outlining the concept of actDresses

This paper concerns the design of physical languages for controlling and programming robotic consumer products. For this purpose we explore basic theories of semiotics represented in the two separate fields of comics and fashion, and how these could be used as resources in the development of new physical languages. Based on these theories, the design concept of actDresses is defined, and supplemented by three example scenarios of how the concept can be used for controlling, programming, and predicting the behaviour of robotic systems.

Experiencing Mobile 2.0 with Context-Aware Applications.

In this paper, we present through the description of several applications how the Mobile 2.0 project is exploring the scope of context-aware mobile applications and their implications on a human-centered perspective.

On not being a stranger: Making sense of the sociable media landscape

This paper discusses our view on sociable media and applications in which social connectedness is not limited to (re)connecting with (distant) lovers, friends and family and maintaining long-term relationships, but also encompasses casual connections to nearby `strangers'. Based on experiences at the Mobile Life Center, we discuss various aspects that need to be taken into account in design and evaluation of social connectedness applications. We argue against an overly quantitative approach to evaluation of social and affective aspects of media, services or `things' that facilitate social connectedness. We aim for a meaningful comparison between applications and their social-affective effects, without foregoing neither negative consequences of increased social awareness, nor the unique, wondrous experiences that might have never occurred without them.

Affective Health – designing for empowerment rather than stress diagnosis

When designing Affective Health, a mobile stress management tool using biosensors, we gradually understood how severely limited inferences can be when we move from laboratory situations to everyday usage. We also came to understand the strong connection between our subjectively perceived resources for dealing with stress and healing. Therefore, rather than employing a diagnose-and-treat design model, we propose that designers empower users to make their own reflections and interpretations of their own bio-sensor data. We show how this can be done through encouraging reflection, alternative interpretations and active appropriation of biosensor data – avoiding a reductionist, sometime erroneous, mediation of automatic interpretation from bodily data to emotion models or, in this case, stress diagnosis.

Design Processes for Bodily Interaction

Designing interactive systems that have illusive interaction qualities, such as suppleness or pliability, is challenging. In several design projects aiming for bodily and emotional interaction, we have aimed to find concepts, methods or processes that can capture the essence of the sought experience and steer the design process in a successful and efficient direction. Our attempts include using e.g. Laban-analysis of emotionally-oriented movement, video-cards from ethnographic studies of users in movement, or simply explicitly naming and defining the sought interaction quality. Our experiences point to the importance of moving from low-fi prototyping to high-fi – no matter which artefact is used to keep the design team on track. Repeatedly exposing unfinished prototypes not only to prospective end-users, but also to the whole design team has been another important part of our process. Finally, a deeper, theoretical and design-oriented understanding of emotional and bodily interaction is badly needed.

Bodies, boards, clubs and bugs: A study of bodily engaging artefacts

Popular practices with non-digital artefacts were explored in order to reveal qualities for design of interaction that allow for full body experiences, and engagement of a rich array of our senses and bodily capabilities for being-in and moving-in the world. For successful design of movement-based and bodily interaction, we have identified the importance of allowing users to connect their experiences with the artefact to the surrounding physical and social world.

Colors, Faces and Illustrations: New concepts for tools for reporting emotion and activity in a pervasive game

Players of video games often find themselves at a set location, in a room or a game hall, playing alone, with family or friends, even both, or maybe with strangers over the Internet. The game becomes intense when the player reaches a crucial moment or event. Such moments might be when the player has reached a new level, received a new piece of equipment, found the last hidden key or is about to kill the last “boss” in the game to win a war. The emotional state of the player changes as the game proceeds, where excitement can be closely followed by frustration or surprise. Studying players of such games has become easier when new technology give us the opportunity to study them closely. By the use of biosensors, cameras and close observations, observers can collect a rich amount of quantitative and qualitative data. But the complexity increases when the players are players of a pervasive game. Pervasive games are games that expand socially, spatially and temporally. They are lived experiences, where players might experience the more (or less) intense moments in the game when they e.g. find themselves in a dark alley chasing a fictional character in the streets of Sheffield (UK), on a bike recording memories and thoughts in a “hidden” location outside central London (UK) or running around downtown, trying to map places of interference on the Internet in Düsseldorf (Germany). The players are more or less on the loose, which minimizes the chances to carry out close observations. In this thesis I will report on a design project focusing on finding new concepts in capturing different aspects of the game experiences. By focusing on game play experience, I have chosen to go beyond the traditional usability evaluation methods used in present CHI practice and focus on representations for different aspects of the game experience. I will describe the design rationale and process in choosing concepts as well as presenting the resulting design proposals for two hand-held tools for self-reporting. The designs for the tools will be based on findings from a conducted user study, where representations for game play experiences will be tested by potential users. At the end of this thesis I will discuss the results from my design process as well as lessons learnt from the project.

Mobile usage at the community site Playahead

Communities have always excited in human life and people have always met to discuss subjects that are important and interesting to us. For a long time communities were bound to the limitation of time and space, but with highly developed mobile phones and networks, people are these days able to “meet” anytime, anywhere at mobile communities. This study has examined the mobile usage at the community site Playahead. The study had an inductive approach primarily based on analysing quantitative data from usage logs, but also included a survey. The purpose of the study was to look at the mobile usage of different social functions at Playahead and see if the usage differed between different user groups, e.g. between male and females and different age segments. It was also of interest to see how the activity differed between weekdays and weekends. Our main findings was that women tend to use the communicative functions chat and write guestbook more than men and that women also login more to Playahead. Men, on the other hand, are sending more mail than women and are looking at profiles more. The age distribution looked similar for most of the functions with an age peak at 14, 15 and 16. Comparing weekends and weekdays showed us that the usage followed a similar pattern for the different methods. At weekdays the usage started earlier in the mornings and ended earlier in the evenings. At weekends the activity started later in the mornings and continued later on throughout the nights.

Serious work on playful experiences: a preliminary set of challenges

As work, leisure and social activities blend together, and amateur and professional practices becomes harder to distinguish, we need to explore the role of technology that works to support people in this rich range of everyday experiences. Incorporating fun, playful elements in the workplace is essential for enhancing creativity and making work activities more socially and emotionally meaningful practices in which to participate.

Hand in Hand with the Material: Designing for Suppleness

Designing for a supple interaction, involving users bodily and emotionally into a ‘dance’ with a system is a challenging task. Any break-ups in interaction become fatal to the sensual, fluent, bodily and social experience sought. A user-centered, iterative design cycle is therefore required. But getting to know the affordances of the digital material used to build the application plays an equally important role in the design process. The ‘feel’ of the digital material properties sometimes even determines what the design should be. We describe three situations in which the properties and affordances of sensor network technologies guided our design process of FriendSense – a system for expressing friendship and emotional closeness through movement. We show how the sensor node look and feel, choice of sensors, limitations of the radio signal strength and coverage, as well as iterative prototyping to properly exploit the software/algorithmic possibilities guided our design processing for suppleness.

Temporal hybridity: Mixing live video footage with instant replay in real time”,

In this paper we explore the production of streaming media that involves live and recorded content. To examine this, we report on how the production practices and process are conducted through an empirical study of the production of live television, involving the use of live and non-live media under highly time critical conditions. In explaining how this process is managed both as an individual and collective activity, we develop the concept of temporal hybridy to explain the properties of these kinds of production system and show how temporally separated media are used, understood and coordinated. Our analysis is examined in the light of recent developments in computing technology and we present some design implications to support amateur video production.

Using the Sensual Evaluation Instrument

In our research we made use of an instrument previously developed to facilitate nonverbal self-report of emotion, which consists of eight sculpted objects. We describe the use of this instrument in the assessment of three interactive storytelling experiences in a small user study and draw some conclusions about the instrument's effectiveness in supporting design.

Mobile Life – innovation in the wild

After a decade of work in our research labs on mobile and ubiquitous technology, often formed by the early visions of ubiquitous computing, with the urge to move interaction from the desktop out into the wild, these technologies have now moved out into the world – into the wild. We are in the middle of a second IT-revolution, caused by the spread of mobile and ubiquitous services, in combination with a broad consumer-oriented market pull. The first IT-revolution, the introduction and deployment of Internet and the World Wide Web during the 1990’s, had a major impact on all parts of our society. As mobile, ubiquitous technology now becomes wide-spread, the design and evaluation of mobile services – i.e. information technology that can be accessed and used in virtually any setting – represents an important business arena for the IT- and telecom industry. Together we have to look for a sustainable web of work, leisure and ubiquitous technology we can call the mobile life. But what impact does this have on HCI research? In particular, what is our role in innovating new services, new technologies, new interaction models and new ways of living with this technology? Obviously, new methods for design and evaluation of interfaces are needed, especially when those interfaces are not always clearly ‘interfaces’ anymore, but blend in with various new materials in our environments or even worn on our bodies. Usage situations are shifting, unstable, mobile settings – interaction in the wild. There is a need for design methods that help structure a multitude of different sources of inspiration and fieldwork, and synthesize it into concrete requirements and service or technology concepts. In our work we have used a variety of such methods, such as ethnography as a basis for design, Laban-notation to analyse body behaviours, novel forms of quick sketching of mobile service interaction, cultural probes to understand emotional processes in people’s everyday lives, bodystorming for situating ideas in the real world, and the experience clip method for user self-evaluation to evaluate mobile services in their realistic setting. We have also developed our own methods, such as e.g. user-driven innovation - studying extreme or specialised user groups and then innovating services for other user groups based on those experiences But we also see trends that will turn these ways of approaching innovation upside down. Producers and consumers blend together in what we name Mobile 2.0-services, creating content dependent on the mobile setting. Sketching in hardware and software combinations becomes accessible not only to technology experts, but to all. How can HCI-practice change to make the ‘digital materials’ accessible to all rather than supporting only HCI-experts to develop innovative design? As pointed out in the vision “Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the year 2020”, HCI needs to orient towards the values shaped by the interaction between technology and people in our everyday lives. As digital, interactive technology enters every aspect of our lives we must do justice to the full complexity of actual human lived experience, where people actively and individually construct meaningful experiences around technology. We might even have to take responsibility for how society is shaped by this second digital revolution - making values such as privacy, autonomy or trust, but also living a good, rich life, explicitly part of our design processes and study methods, creating for a sustainable, human-friendly society. In the Mobile Life centre, we work around a vision of a ludic society where work mixes with leisure, private with public – a society where enjoyment, experience and play are adopted into all aspects of life. It becomes important to recognise that private and leisure life should not have to be as polished and efficient as your work performance when practices and technology travel between these spheres of our life. In my talk, I will discuss the implications for academic research in HCI as well as how this fosters a novel work practice in industry. The ICT and telecom industry will be less focused on identifying needs and more focused on values, in particular, ludic aspects of life.

Knowing, Communicating and Experiencing through Body and Emotion

With new technologies such as body sensors, tangible interaction, haptics, interactive cloth, or small computing devices such as mobiles, we can move interaction from the desktop out into the world and onto our bodies. Likewise, with the boom of computer games, domestic digital technology use, and social communication tools, we have to consider designing for non-instrumental goals, beyond task completion. This has been picked up by human-computer interaction researchers in the so-called third wave of HCI. We suggest that learning technologies could use some of the results from the third wave of HCI, placing body and emotion more centrally into the communication and construction of knowledge. Designing for bodily interaction, emotional communication or aesthetics is not trivial. In design work, a designer can only set the stage for certain experience to happen, but in the end, it is the user who co-constructs the experience with or through the interaction. Based on our experiences of designing for bodily and emotional communication, we will posit three postulates that might be helpful in designing for involving interaction: leaving dasiasurfacespsila open for users to appropriate, building for users to recognise themselves socially, emotional or bodily through the interface, and avoiding reductionism.

Affective Loop Experiences: Designing for Interactional Embodiment

Involving our corporeal bodies in interaction can create strong affective experiences. Systems that both can be influenced by and influence users corporeally exhibit a use quality we name an affective loop experience. In an affective loop experience, (i) emotions are seen as processes, constructed in the interaction, starting from everyday bodily, cognitive or social experiences; (ii) the system responds in ways that pull the user into the interaction, touching upon end users' physical experiences; and (iii) throughout the interaction the user is an active, meaning-making individual choosing how to express themselves—the interpretation responsibility does not lie with the system. We have built several systems that attempt to create affective loop experiences with more or less successful results. For example, eMoto lets users send text messages between mobile phones, but in addition to text, the messages also have colourful and animated shapes in the background chosen through emotion-gestures with a sensor-enabled stylus pen. Affective Diary is a digital diary with which users can scribble their notes, but it also allows for bodily memorabilia to be recorded from body sensors mapping to users' movement and arousal and placed along a timeline. Users can see patterns in their bodily reactions and relate them to various events going on in their lives. The experiences of building and deploying these systems gave us insights into design requirements for addressing affective loop experiences, such as how to design for turn-taking between user and system, how to create for ‘open’ surfaces in the design that can carry users' own meaning-making processes, how to combine modalities to create for a ‘unity’ of expression, and the importance of mirroring user experience in familiar ways that touch upon their everyday social and corporeal experiences. But a more important lesson gained from deploying the systems is how emotion processes are co-constructed and experienced inseparable from all other aspects of everyday life. Emotion processes are part of our social ways of being in the world; they dye our dreams, hopes and bodily experiences of the world. If we aim to design for affective interaction experiences, we need to place them into this larger picture.

Play, Belief and Stories about Robots: A Case Study of a Pleo Blogging Community

We present an analysis based on user-provided content collected from online blogs and forums about the robotic artifact Pleo. Our primary goal is to explore stories about how human-robot interaction would manifest themselves in actual real-world contexts. To be able to assess these types of communicative media we are using a method based on virtual ethnography that specifically addresses underlying issues in how the data is produced and should be interpreted. Results indicate that generally people are staging, performing and have a playful approach to the interaction. This is further emphasized by the way people communicate their stories through the blogging practice. Finally we argue that these resources are indeed essential for understanding and designing long-term human-robot relationships.

On the Edge of Reality: Reality Fiction in Sanningen om Marika

The Alternate Reality Game genre inspires a mode of play in which the participants choose to act as if the game world was real. Jane McGonigal has argued that one of the most attractive features of an ARG is the ‘Pinnochio’ effect: at the same time that the players deeply long to believe in them, it is in reality impossible to believe in them for real. In this article, we study “Sanningen om Marika”, a game production where fact and fiction was blurred in a way that made some participants believe that the production was reality rather than fiction, whereas other participants found the production deeply engaging. We discuss the different participant interpretations of the production and how it affected the players´ mode of engagement. We also outline some of the design choices that caused the effect.

Play Style Survey

Is there any coherence in how different professions place themselves as players on the Bartle’s graph of different play styles?

An In-Game Reporting Tool for Pervasive Games

Pervasive and location-based games are played in the real world rather than on the screen of a computer or mobile device. This makes them difficult to study. Since players move around it is difficult to observe them, while at the same time many of the central game activities cannot be monitored simply through logs of device interaction. In our project, we develop tools that allow players to record their subjective experiences during an ongoing game. We report on the design considerations for such tools, and our first experiences of using them in a game session.

Tiny Broadcast Systems

Authoring tools for interactive narratives - an interface design of a script editor for the pervasive game Backseat Playground

The frontiers of gaming is constantly moved forward and the pervasive game Backseat Playground, developed at Interactive Institute is no exception. The game experience is created while driving along the road, the story adapts to the outside environment and according to the player’s interactions with the game world. To create such an adaptive game world requires a great amount of story content, and to make this process manageable a tool was requested by the developer team at Interactive Institute. The main challenge of designing such a tool is to visualize and structure the special information needed in this kind of game. This thesis investigates the scope of the game Backseat Playground and establishes the requirements for a possible editor. The thesis also dives into two theoretical parts with close connections to this field: Interactive narratives and content creation for prevasive game environments. The creation process of this prototype has involved tasks such as interviews and script creation to schetches and flow charts and the result is, besides an extentensive pre-study also a semi-functional prototype for demonstrational purposes implemented in Flash CS3, actionscript 3.0. This report describes the complete workflow and the final result of this thesis.

Bootlegging: Multidisciplinary Brainstorming with Cut-Ups

We introduce bootlegging, a structured brainstorming technique particularly suited to multidisciplinary settings. Participants first generate ideas in 2 rough groups, one having to do with users and usage situations and the other pertaining to a specific technology or domain. Results are then randomly combined to form unexpected juxtapositions. These combinations are used as the basis for several quick application brainstorms, after which promising ideas can be fleshed out to complete scenarios. Bootlegging stimulates participants’ creativity without abandoning the target domain, and can be run efficiently even without a skilled facilitator. The technique has been successfully used in several thematic workshops.

Eliciting User Requirements using a Goal-Directed Approach

Will be added shortly

Supporting Self-Reflection in Everyday Life: An exploratory review of physiological input methods for the Affective Health system

Today’s fast-paced modern life motivates a need for tools and devices that support people in dealing with stress by helping them to control their daily behaviors. There is a variety of emerging applications that track physiological data from the body associated with stress over periods of time by using biosensors. However, most of them remain purely monitoring devices made to diagnose or warn users when they become stressed. We are projecting Affective Health, a mobile system designed to enable users to make a connection between the data from their body and their own subjective memories and experience, over the course of daily activities. To facilitate this connection, we propose a representation of the physiological data mapped on three common sense concepts: physical activity, arousal and adaptability. While the first two were previously tested in a similar system developed by the research group, adaptability, which represents the ability of the body to cope and recover from stress, had yet to be mapped to consistent physiological input in order to have meaning both in terms of its relation to stress and to end-users. The intended continuous usage of the system poses challenges in how the physiological data from the body is to be collected. There is a wide range of physiological sensors varying in detection accuracy and degree of discomfort that people are willing to stand. Novel wearable sensor technologies minimize the discomfort by compromising the validity of the measured data. This thesis contributes an exploratory review of sensors and characteristics of physiological data suited to be measured during the course of everyday life. It is also shown as a proof-of-concept that both arousal and physical activity can be measured consistently in such unconstrained setting but adaptability can only be estimated by assessing sleep quality. Besides supporting sensor input in Affective Health, these results provide insights and best practices when sensing signals from the body in real-time.

Broadcast culture meets role-playing culture

The production Sanningen om Marika is a rare example of a production that combines traditional broadcast culture with the participative culture fostered primarily within the larp community in the Nordic countries. Swedish television collaborated with The Company P to produce this alternate reality multiplatform media production. The result was a spectacular and controversial production offering online and live action role-playing experiences in parallel with traditional TV drama. This article focuses on the differences between the production cultures of two companies, and how it affected the experience they produced together.

An experiment with random stories in pervasive games

In this thesis, we investigate a model for interactive story telling based on which stories are generated randomly. We discuss whether it is fun to read a story in random order and whether this can be used in a pervasive game. Moreover, in order to prove the theoretical discussions, we present a new game - Shards – which is a pervasive game based on random storytelling. Storytelling is a very traditional activity, as are games. Sometimes people connect the two together, making storytelling into a playful activity. Examples of playful storytelling include many formats, such as random writing or multi-author storytelling, interactive storytelling and adventure games. In this thesis, we discuss the playful possibilities offered by reading stories in random order, the different kinds of stories that fit this reading mode, the possible forms to play with it, and finally present an authoring tool for such stories. To illustrate this idea, we present a new game, Shards. Literally, “Shards” means pieces or fragments. Here, the name refers to the pieces of stories we play with. In this game, the player tries to complete one story line. Every time he or she comes close to another participant, a new shard can be retrieved, until the story is finished or the player stops playing the game. ‘Shards’ requires stories that are written to be read in random order. The first part of the thesis investigates which kinds of stories are best suited for shards. From a brainstorming session, we obtained four stories in the form of Shards. The four stories are very different and offer different reading experiences when read randomly. Based on the initial idea of this game, one story was chosen as a model story to develop the game and the authoring system for the game. One conclusion we can draw from the brainstorming session is that certain story themes are better suited for this game than others. For example, crime stories would fit well with the game structure. The second part of the thesis describes two authoring tools that support story writers in generating stories for shards. The tools were implemented using Ruby for basic reading tools and TCL/TK for more advanced functionality. Both are web-based tools and were used by the author to maintain the story database. The basic tools allow for CRED (create, read, edit, delete, a standard of database operation), and the more advanced tools allow for VADE (view, add, delete, edit, a standard) with “read” but without “delete” and “edit”. The basic tool, using Ruby, is intended for backend service management, and the more advanced tool, using TCL/TK, draws a graphic interface for the end user. The final part of the thesis describes a brief user evaluation of the game and evaluates the authoring tools. Four people participated in this evaluation. They found that Shards was a fun game with a well-designed story. This shows that it is possible to create a game out of random story reading, and also that the authoring tool is usable as a tool to create such stories.

KIM

Projektet som den här rapporten sammanfattar har bedrivits på heltid under 20 veckor hösten/vintern 2007. Min huvudsakliga utgångspunkt är att många barn behöver vistas mer i naturen än vad de gör idag för att må bra på alla plan. Min uppgift har sedan varit att ta fram ett koncept som introducerar naturen för de barn som idag inte ser den som en självklar lekplats. Min målsättning är att leverera ett koncept som kan få barn att ersätta stillasittande lekmed aktiva upptäckter utomhus. Den virtuella verkligheten är lättillgänglig och uppslukande, och jag har utvecklat ett digitalt spel som blandar virtuella och verkliga upplevelser. Spelet är tänkt som ett medium mellan de två världar som barn idag lever i. Spelet ges ytterligare dimensioner av att spelplanen existerar fysiskt. Eftersom fl era sinnen samtidigt måste användas förstärks spelupplevelsen samtidigt som det är nyttigt för barnen att träna sina sinnen. Genom intervjuer och enkäter har jag utvecklat och formgivit ett spel och en spelmobil som används tillsammans. Det här konceptet kallar jag för KIM. KIM står för Kids In Matrix, och som namnet antyder är det både den virtuella- och fysiska verkligheten det handlar om.

Exploring and Designing for Emotional Closeness between Friends

Designing tangible systems that mediate physical, emotional closeness between friends in a group is difficult and has so far been neglected in HCI research. A first step in designing such systems is to understand what emotional closeness entails for different relationships we are involved in. The thesis work at hand approaches the problem in an exploratory way by deploying a technology probe that was used in two groups of friends at work. We are providing results from a qualitative study including cultural probe material to open up the dialogue between designers and participants. In the semi-structured interviews that were conducted after a two weeks’ period of using the probe, we were able to discuss experiences about selfexpression, social interaction and emotional processes with the participants. We learned how important it is to offer users a range of ways to express themselves in their own personal way engaging body and mind. Furthermore we found qualities that are important to look at in the process of designing for emotional closeness in groups of friends. Such qualities were Richer Expressivity and Personality, Collaboration, History, Social Positioning as well as Aesthetics and Engagement of Non-users.

Setting the Stage. Setting the stage – Embodied and spatial dimensions in emerging programming practices

Three challenges when designing for children’s everyday digital literacy.

Beyond representations: Towards an action-centric perspective on tangible interaction.

Pieces of Identity

We describe the motivation, design, and deployment of the Pieces of Identity system. Two goals motivated the system: to provoke a discussion concerning the relationship between privacy and mobile information technology during an inauguration event of a mobile technology research center, and to stir reactions contributing to the widening of the design space of privacy and information and communication technology (ICT). The results contrasts the two well-established preconceptions about privacy that nothing is private anymore and that personal information is best locked away.

Believable environments – Generating interactive storytelling invast location based pervasive games.

Generating content into vast areas is a relevant challenge in the field of location-based pervasive games. In this paper, we present a game proto-type that enables children travelling in the back seat of a car to enjoy a narrated experience where gameplay combines with the experience of trav-eling through the road network. The prototype is designed to provide what we refer to as a believ-able environment. We propose four design char-acteristics to persuasively include a journey within a pervasive game. First, the story should refer to geographical objects with their everyday meanings. Second, the game’s scale needs to cover vast areas. Third, the application should provide sequential storytelling to make it fit with the journey experience, and finally it should pro-vide interaction support where players can en-gage in gameplay and interact with the computer in various ways at the same time as they are looking out of the car window. We describe how these requirements have been implemented in the prototype and present an initial performance test.

Dealing with Stress: Studying experiences of a real-time biofeedback system

To deal with stress, in a positive way, one can benefit from increased self-reflection in order to better understand the individual experiences and how they affect your health and well-being. This way the person can become increasingly empowered over him/herself yourself. There is a lack of tools and devices to support people to be empowered to take control over their everyday behaviors and balance their stress levels. We are creating a mobile service, Affective Health, where we aim to provide a holistic approach towards health, enabling users to make a connection between their daily activities, as reflected by a representation on the mobile phone (which is constructed from values picked up, by biosensors, from some of their bodily reactions) and their own memories and subjective experiences. This issue entailed figuring out how to provide real-time feedback without making them even more stressed and making sure that the representation empowered rather than controlled them. In a Wizard of Oz study, testing two different visualizations on the mobile, we got some useful design feedback. In short, we found that the design needs to: feel alive, allow for interpretative openness, include short term history, allow for scrolling back into the past, and be updated in real-time. We also found that the interaction did not, according to their feedback, increase our participants stress reactions. They also claimed that the setting was successful in recreating a real-life “feeling”.

Industrial Experience : Evaluating novel interaction styles

A user study, with ten participants and three prototypes built on 3D-accelerometers in mobile phones was executed with Think Aloud method, Brainstorming sessions, and DV documentation. McCarthy & Wright´s ‘Four Threads of Experience’ was used as a framework for analysis of the material. The methods were very well suited for the purpose of the project, and the results of the study is encouraging in further design and development of mobile services with new interaction styles.

On the move - sharing music, inspiration and fun

See link above.

Playing with Context: Explicit and Implicit Interaction in Mobile Media Applications

This thesis contributes with insights into how aspects of the surrounding physical and social context can be exploited in the design of mobile media applications for playful use. In this work, context refers to aspects of the immediate surroundings – outside of the device – that can be identified and measured by sensors; for instance environmental aspects like sound, and social aspects like co-located people. Two extensive case studies explore the interplay between users, mobile media, and aspects of context in different ways, and how it can invite playful use. The first case study, Context Photography, uses sensor-based information about the immediate physical surroundings to affect images in real time in a novel digital camera application for everyday creativity. The second, Push!Music, makes it possible to share music both manually and autonomously between co-located people, based on so-called media context, for spontaneous music sharing.

The insights gained from the designs, prototypes, and user studies, point at the value of combining explicit and implicit interaction – essentially, the expected and unexpected – to open for playful use. The explicit interaction encouraged users to be active, exploratory, and creative. The implicit interaction let users embrace and exploit dynamic qualities of the surroundings, contributing to making the systems fun, exciting, magical, ‘live’, and real. This combination was facilitated through our approach to context, where sensor-based information was mostly open in use and interpretation, ambiguous, visible, and possible to override for users, and through giving the systems a degree of agency and autonomy. A key insight is that the combination of explicit and implicit interaction allowed both control and a sense of magic in the interaction with the mobile media applications, which together seems to encourage play and playfulness.

On Being Supple: In Search of Rigor without Rigidity in Meeting New Design and Evaluation Challenges for HCI Practitioners

In this paper, we argue that HCI practitioners are facing new challenges in design and evaluation that can benefit from the establishment of commonly valued use qualities, with associated strategies for producing and rigorously evaluating work. We present a particular use quality 'suppleness' as an example. We describe ways that use qualities can help shape design and evaluation process, and propose tactics for the CHI community to use to encourage the evolution of bodies of knowledge around use qualities.

Personlig Integritet: A Comparative Study of Perceptions of Privacy in Public Places in Sweden and the United States

In this paper we report on a cross-cultural study of people's judgments about privacy in public places. Replicating and extending a previously published study conducted in the US, 350 surveys and 30 interviews were conducted on a university campus in a major city in Sweden. Participants were recruited on campus while walking through a major public through fare which was being captured by a video camera and displayed in real-time in a room in a campus building overlooking the area. We analyze the Swedish data alone and also report comparative analyses with the previously published US data. Results showed in general Swedes are substantially more concerned about privacy in public places than their counterparts in the US. In both countries, women generally expressed more concern than men, but this gender gap was greater in the US than Sweden. Discussion focuses on cross-cultural perspectives on privacy in public and implications for interaction design.

License to Chill! How to empower users to cope with stress

There exists today a paucity of tools and devices that empower people to take control over their everyday behaviors and balance their stress levels. To overcome this deficit, we are creating a mobile service, Affective Health, where we aim to provide a holistic approach towards health by enabling users to make a connection between their daily activities and their own memories and subjective experiences. This construction is based upon values detected from certain bodily reactions that are then visualized on a mobile phone. Accomplishing this entailed figuring out how to provide real-time feedback without making the individual even more stressed, while also making certain that the representation empowered rather than controlled them. Useful design feedback was derived from testing two different visualizations on the mobile in a Wizard of Oz study.. In short, we found that a successful design needs to: feel alive, allow for interpretative openness, include short-term history, and be updated in real-time. We also found that the interaction did not increase our participants stress reactions.

Development of an Affective User Interface for Mobile Phones

As part of the Affective Health project this thesis describes some of the challenges of developing a UI that does not use standard UI components and uses its own visual language. It focuses on the implementation of graphics and interaction. I present OpenGL ES as sufficient tool for this task and used the touch screen for interaction. The choice of these techniques is explained and problems arising when using them are described.

Interactional Empowerment

We propose that an interactional perspective on how emotion is constructed, shared and experienced, maybe a good basis for designing affective interactional systems that do not infringe on privacy or autonomy, but instead empowers users. An interactional design perspective may make use of design elements such as open-ended, ambiguous, yet familiar, interaction surfaces that users may use as a basis to make sense of their own emotions and their communication with one-another. With such tools, users are provided with power over their own data and the interpretation of it – providing for privacy and autonomy. We describe the interactional view on design for emotional communication, and provide a set of orienting design concepts and methods for design and evaluation that help translate the interactional view into viable applications. From an embodied interaction theory perspective, we argue for a non-dualistic, non- reductionist perspective on affective interaction design.

Mind, mouse and body: designing engaging technologies

Digital products that attempt to set the scene for emotional experiences, bodily interactions, persuasive processes, aesthetic experiences and other experiential qualities, are gaining grounds both in the commercial world and in the so-called “third-wave of HCI”-movement within academia. While a typical HCI-goals used to be ease of use or learnability, we now discuss design qualities such as suppleness, game play, embodiment, reflection, affective loops or pliability. In this talk, I will discuss these new design qualities and the kinds of challenges we meet when designing for physical, emotional, and bodily involvement. I will examplify with systems that we have built (or are building) in my lab, such as eMoto, mobile emotional messaging using gesture, Affective Diary, a way to remember your bodily and social experiences, and Affective Health, a mobile service empowering users to deal with stress.

Affective Loop Experiences – What Are They?

A research agenda for bodily persuasion through a design approach we name affective loops is outlined. Affective loop experiences draw upon physical, emotional interactions between user and system.

Knowing, Communicating and Experiencing through Body and Emotion

With new technologies such as body sensors, tangible interaction, haptics, interactive cloth, or small computing devices such as mobiles, we can move interaction from the desktop out into the world and onto our bodies. Likewise, with the boom of computer games, domestic digital technology use, and social communication tools, we have to consider designing for non-instrumental goals, beyond task completion. This has been picked up by human-computer interaction researchers in the so-called third wave of HCI. We suggest that learning technologies could use some of the results from the third wave of HCI, placing body and emotion more centrally into the communication and construction of knowledge. Designing for bodily interaction, emotional communication or aesthetics is not trivial. In design work, a designer can only set the stage for certain experience to happen, but in the end, it is the user who co-constructs the experience with or through the interaction. Based on our experiences of designing for bodily and emotional communication, we will posit three postulates that might be helpful in designing for involving interaction: leaving ‘surfaces’ open for users to appropriate, building for users to recognise themselves socially, emotional or bodily through the interface, and avoiding reductionism.

Experiencing the Affective Diary

A diary is generally considered to be a book in which one keeps a regular record of events and experiences that have some personal significance. As such, it provides a useful means to privately express inner thoughts or to reflect on daily experiences, helping in either case to put them in perspective. Taking conventional diary keeping as our starting point, we have designed and built a digital diary, named Affective Diary, with which users can scribble their notes, but that also allows for bodily memorabilia to be recorded from body sensors and mobile media to be collected from users’ mobile phones. A premise that underlies the presented work is one that views our bodily experiences as integral to how we come to interpret and thus make sense of the world. We present our investigations into this design space in three related lines of inquiry: (1) a theoretical grounding for affect and bodily experiences; (2) a user-centred design process, arriving at the Affective Diary system; and (3) an exploratory end-user study of the Affective Diary with 4 users during several weeks of use. Through these three inquiries, our overall aim has been to explore the potential of a system that interleaves the physical and cultural features of our embodied experiences and to further examine what mediaspecific qualities such a design might incorporate. Concerning the media-specific qualities, the key appears to be to find a suitable balance where a system does not dictate what should be interpreted and, at the same time, lends itself to enabling the user to participate in the interpretive act. In the exploratory end-user study users, for the most part, were able to identify with the body memorabilia and together with the mobile data, it enabled them to remember and reflect on their past. Two of our subjects went even further and found patterns in their own bodily reactions that caused them to learn something about themselves and even attempt to alter their own behaviours.

Reflecting on the Design Process of the Affective Diary

Affective Diary is a digital diary that makes use of bio-sensors to add some reminiscence of bodily experiences. The design process behind Affective Diary aimed was ‘sensitive’ to three design qualities extracted from a previous project; providing cues of emotional expressivity building on familiarity, making the design open for personal expressivity and be aware of contradictions between modalities. Through the design process of Affective Diary, with frequent user involvements during the process, these design qualities became further tested, developed and refined. By providing a fairly detailed and reflected description of the design process behind Affective Diary, we aim to provide other designers with inspiration on several levels: both in terms of methods used, but also in why these three design qualities are important and how to realize them. Our aim is also to provide designers with knowledge in the form that makes sense to designers: the practical link between design qualities and final results.

In Situ Informants Exploring an emotional Mobile Messaging System in Their Everyday Practice.

We have designed and built a mobile emotional messaging system named eMoto. With it, users can compose messages through using emotion-signalling gestures as input, rendering a message background of colours, shapes and animations expressing the emotional content. The design intent behind eMoto was that it should be engaging physically, intellectually and socially, and allow users to express themselves emotionally in all those dimensions, involving them in an affective loop experience. In here, we describe the user-centred design process that lead to the eMoto system, but focus mainly on the final study where we let five friends use eMoto for two weeks. The study method, which we name in situ informants, helped us enter and explore the subjective and distributed experiences of use, as well as how emotional communication unfolds in everyday practice when channelled through a system like eMoto. The in situ informants are on the one hand users of eMoto, but also spectators, that are close friends who observe and document user behaviour. Design conclusions include the need to support the sometimes fragile communication rhythm that friendships require—expressing memories of the past, sharing the present and planning for the future. We saw that emotions are not singular state that exist within one person alone, but permeates the total situation, changing and drifting as a process between the two friends communicating. We also gained insights into the under-estimated but still important physical, sensual aspects of emotional communication. Experiences of the in situ informants method pointed to the need to involve participants in the interpretation of the data obtained, as well as establishing a closer connection with the spectators.

Evaluating affective interactions. Editorial Introduction

Editorial.

The Sensual Evaluation Instrument: Developing a Trans-Cultural Self-Report Measure of Affect

In this paper we describe the development and testing of a tool for self-assessment of affect while interacting with computer systems, meant to be used in many cultures. We discuss our research approach within the context of existing cultural, affective and HCI theory, and describe testing of its effectiveness in the US and Sweden.

Probing the Potential of Non-verbal Group Communication

Designing for non-verbal communication using e.g. gestures and other bodily expressions is difficult. Hardware and software need to be co-designed and harmonize in order to not throw users out of their embodied experience. We aim to design for kinaesthetic expressions of emotion in communication between friends – in this case, colleagues at work. A probe was built using sensor node technology designed to let users express themselves and their emotional state to a public and shared display where the expressions together formed a collective art piece expressing the individuals but also the group as a whole. Two groups of colleagues used the probe during two weeks. It came to serve as a channel in which some conflicts and expressions of social relations were acted out which were not openly discussed in the office. It exposed different roles and balances in relationships in the group. Finally, the probe taught us the importance of balancing the design for joint group expression and individual, personal expressions. The study also allowed the participants to experience the sensor node-‘material’ – enabling a participatory design process.

See You on the Subway: Exploring Mobile Social Software

This project explores the social possibilities of mobile technology in transitional spaces such as public transport. Based on a cultural probes study of Stockholm subway commuters, we designed a location-based friend finder that displays only people in the same train as the user. We aim at reaching a critical mass of users and therefore decided to make the system compatible with as many phones as possible, thus it was designed as a simple web application. An initial informal study pointed out consequences of certain design decisions on the user experience and highlighted social tensions created by presence awareness.

Lean collaboration through video gestures: co-ordinating the production of live televised sport

To be added

Games for passengers - Accounting for Motion in location based applications

Passengers pay attention to the landscape as they move through the environment. We suggest a new type of applications, which adds to that experience. It consider their motion and velocity, which make the time available for interaction with individual geographical objects very limited, at the same time as they cannot control it. Applications, in this case a game, could utilize audio and gesture interfaces, as well as digital maps to provide for experiences that are sequentially mapped onto the landscape. An initial user feed back trial made visible interactional and experiential challenges in passengering.

Rummets betydelse för användargenererat innehåll i pervasivespel

Denna rapport handlar om hur användaren etablerar en relation till en applikation samt sin omgivning i s.k. pervasivespel och hur detta stödjer användargenererat innehåll. I rapporten tas det upp hur man sätter sig in i ett spel och hur man kan uppmuntra spelaren till att etablera en önskvärd relation till spelet. Det hela ses ur perspektiv av rumslighet så som det är beskrivet i Paul Dourishs text från 1996 där han presenterar begreppen rymd och plats. Analyser baseras på tester utförda på ett pervasivespel som utvecklas vid Interaktiva Institutet. Detta spel kallas i rapporten för Backseat Playground. Förutom dessa analyser har även designförslag tagits fram för hur man ska kunna förbättra spelarens förmåga att uppnå en önskad relation till rummet samt få en bättre spelupplevelse. De frågor som ställs är: - Hur påverkar rummet/miljön spelarens vilja att bidra med innehåll i detta pervasivespel? - Hur kan man ta hänsyn eller utnyttja detta i spelet? - Hur kan Backseat Playground komma att stödja användargenererat innehåll? Resultaten pekar på att spelaren måste skaffa sig en särskild relation till miljön där spelet utspelar sig innan spelaren kan tänka sig att bidra med innehåll.

Kraftåterkoppling för handhållna enheter, haptiska kuben

Under högskoleingenjörsutbildningen, Mekatronik & Industriell IT på institutionen för tillämpad IT på Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan ,KTH, i Stockholm, ingick det att utföra ett examensarbete på 10 högskolepoäng. Examensarbete bedrives i grupp om två personer och utfördes gentemot ett företag. I detta fall utfördes det åt Mobility studion på Interactive Institute i Kista. Interactive Institute är ett experimentellt IT-forskningsinstitut som utmanar traditionella perspektiv och tankesätt genom att kombinera konst, design och teknologi i forskningsprojekt. Genom att integrera och utforska dessa tre områden bidrar institutet till innovation, kreativitet och hållbar utveckling. Mobility studio utför forskning om framtidens mobila applikationer. Interactive Institute ingår i SICS-gruppen som tillhör koncernen Swedish ICT Research AB. Swedish ICT Research bidrar med sin forskning till ökad innovationskraft och tillväxt i näringsliv och samhälle. Examensarbetet är en del av projektet Backseat Playground, BSP, vilket är ett interaktivt handhållet spel. Spelet syftar till att sysselsätta barn under bilturer. BSP är ett innovativt spel där användaren riktar enheten (se ) mot geografiska objekt i omgivningen. För att detektera vad användaren riktar enheten mot kombineras riktningsdata från vinkelavkänning med data från GPS och geografisk kartinformation. Medans användaren färdas längs vägen förvandlas kyrkor, broar andra objekt till en fiktiv värld fylld av brott, virtuella karaktärer och gömda ledtrådar. Syftet med examensarbetet är att utveckla en modul som skapar en kraft som får enheten att vridas mot bestämda objekt i omgivningen. Kraftåterkoppling skall kunna integreras med den befintliga enheten. Kraften skall kunna variera i styrka och riktning med en hög uppdateringsfrekvens.

The Emotional Driver - A Study of the Driving Experience and the Road Context

In modern societies the activity of driving has become almost an essential routine. Vehicles are considered by many as indispensable tools for accomplishing their daily tasks and they are the main form of transportation for millions of people. The average driver spends, voluntarily, considerable amounts of time on the road, using their vehicle to transport himself even for small distances and knowing that its use presents him with some form of comfort and convenience; yet, drivers frequently regard their road experience as tiring and fastidious, but their persistence in using their vehicle at every opportunity serves as proof of a pleasurable experience. So far car manufacturers, traffic authorities and designers of technology have been mainly concerned with aspects of the road that ensure drivers safety, increase power engine, provide more comfort, and maintain better streets, etc; however, the actual feelings of the driver as he travels through the streets has not yet been taken into a great account by the developers of the road environment. For this reason this thesis tries to create awareness on the existence and constant presence of people’s emotions as they drive, which have the mutual power to influence their action on the road and their driving patterns. In order to capture a drivers’ emotional experience this study uses three main methods. One of them is Cultural Probes, consisting of common objects specifically Postcards, Pictures, and Web-logs, to measure unknown factors about the users. The second is the use of Ethnographic studies on the driving activities through the use of observations, the popular talk-aloud-protocol and the shadow method. Finally, the Experience Sampling Method is used, which tries to captures the experience of an individual as it unfolds in its natural context. With the combined used of these three methods some of the main factors of the road’s environment that are commonly able to influence the driver’s emotions in negative or positive ways were discovered, which include the intensity and type of light, the different types and sources of sound, the perceivable landscapes and surrounding architectures and the different kinds of continuously occurring interactions. These are just some of the many factors that can influence emotions on the road, and hopefully this study will open the curiosity for a deeper study of these and other aspects of the emotional driving experience.

Mediated Social Serendipity.

This master thesis in industrial design is a research- and innovation-project in the vast area of the interaction design of mediated communication. This thesis describe mobile-phone services and applications that enable users to “stumble into” friends, despite being apart physically. Four concept-categories for social serendipitous mobilephone experiences were developed.

OSREP - Open-Set REalistic Pinpointing

Using what researchers call backseat games the kids could be occupied while traveling in a car and not bother parents with nag like “Are we there yet”. These kinds of games transform boring trips into exciting adventures by combining and connecting real world and computer generated data. One of these backseat games is a research prototype called Backseat Playground (BSP). This prototype is based on narrative stories which evolve through interaction with the surrounding environment. By using a customized gaming device for acquiring position of where the player is located and direction that the player is pointing the device kids are able to interact with the surroundings of the car. In the current BSP prototype the player can only pinpoint objects that are defined by BSP itself while traveling through a variety of surrounding environments. In this thesis project it is investigated if there is a possibility to make the pinpointing more realistic. Realistic in the way that the algorithm senses if the player has started to pinpoint an interesting object and further on it also pinpoints that object’s location. This new generation of pinpointing is called Open-Set REalistic Pinpointing (OSREP) since it extends a closed set of objects into the amount of objects that the player(s) would like to put into the world of the BSP. Furthermore this opens up for the possibility for users to create their own content at that location. The purpose of this thesis project is to create algorithms that serves as proofs of concept showing that it is possible to carry out the necessary calculations needed to produce the results wanted for the BSP game prototype. Therefore there are some extensive investigations and examinations made as to how a player would be pinpointing objects and also how the sensing of players sight can be calculated. These examinations were in fact test runs made by myself in the same environment that the BSP prototype is tested. To be able to conduct such test runs a simplistic data acquirement tool was created. The investigations carried out was done by first study the relevant publications made in the area of mobile AR games and also study the publications made regarding the BSP prototype. Consecutively there were some studies made in the areas of mathematical statistics, geometry and probability to show the theories behind the OSREP algorithm. One objective during development of the OSREP algorithm was that they should be easy to integrate into the BSP prototype. This was accomplished through a thoroughly investigation of the current version of the code written for the BSP prototype. Although some modifications regarding the handling of direction data has been made and also regarding the conversions of positional data. A reason for this was to be able to create the OSREP algorithms as a standalone process so that there would not be a need for running the actual BSP game or its simulator. Another objective was to visualize the OSREP performance in the real world. Although this has not been completely finished there are results presented in this thesis in a more primitive way than wished for. The reason for not completing such a visualization application is that the time constraint put on this kind of thesis project is too narrow. But at least a foundation has been made and could certainly be continued by another master student. Although some setbacks have been experienced regarding the way the OSREP algorithms was visualized the algorithms seem to work in both in theory and on the acquired sensor data. The primitive visualization made only serves as proof-of-concept and could be used as an aid for making sure further efforts of integration of the OSREP algorithms into BSP is worth the cost in effort and time. The major result of the OSREP algorithm was that it shows a sufficiently accurate location of the pinpointed object. A very nice feature of the algorithm is that it does not need any external triggering to make the distinction as to when the player has started to aim. It could rather be used continuously to examine the recorded data to calculate the location of pinpointed objects.

Nighttime visual media production in club environments

We analyze how VJs produce visuals to support DJs in dark and noisy club environments, enhancing the overall experience. We suggest that mobile technologies could improve the interaction between the audience and the VJ. As a first step to the generation of new applications, we tease out some characteristics of VJ production and live performance, which might influence the design of such technologies. We specifically focus on the ways in which VJs interact with the audience and the computer interfaces, as well as how they orient towards specific aesthetical ideals.

Driving and passengering: notes on the natural organization of ordinary car travel.

We spend ever increasing periods of our lives travelling in cars, yet quite what it is we do while travelling, aside from driving the vehicle itself, is largely overlooked. Drawing on analyses of video records of a series of quite ordinary episodes of car travel, in this findings paper we begin to document what happens during journeys. The material concentrates on situations where people are travelling together in order to examine how social units such as families or relationships such as colleagues or friends are reassembled and re-organised in the small scale spaces that are car interiors. Particular attention is paid to the forms of conversation occurring during car journeys and the manner in which they are complicated by seating and visibility arrangements. Finally the article touches upon the unusual form of hospitality which emerges in car sharing.

Mobile Collaborative Live Video Mixing

We report on design research investigating a possible combination of mobile collaborative live video production and VJing. In an attempt to better understand future forms of collaborative live media production, we study how VJs produce and mix visuals live. In the practice of producing visuals through interaction with both music and visitors, VJing embodies interesting properties that could inform the design of emerging mobile services. As a first step to examine a generation of new applications, we tease out some characteristics of VJ production and live performance. We then decide on the requirements both for how visitors could capture and transmit live video using their mobile phones and how this new medium could be integrated within VJ aesthetics and interaction. Finally, we present the SwarmCam application, which has been implemented to investigate these requirements.

On movement, sound and radio talk in deer hunting

Recently, there has been an increase in studies focusing on naturally occurring mobile activities. In this paper, we add to this growing body of work, by presenting a study of a highly mobile activity - deer hunting. Deer hunting is a collaborative activity with a number of different roles such as marksmen and dog handlers, collaborating to make the hunt efficient but also fun. A hunting radio is an important tool in this activity, as well as the dogs, which are lead through the specified terrain, searching for animals and driving the prey towards the marksmen. We focus on a number of issues of relevance for mobility, space and talk. First, we look at how the radio is used to make sense of the ongoing activity. For the marksman, the hunt often consists of long periods of isolation; looking and listening, many times without seeing or hearing an animal. The radio creates an awareness of the ongoing hunt, when hearing the dog handlers discuss what they have seen and heard. It is also used to prepare or warn hunters that a deer might be coming their way. Second, we analyze how sounds in the local environment are oriented to by the hunters. They skillfully describe their sound environment and qualify the audio observations to each other. Third, we discuss the potential relevance of absence of sound. The hunters need to interpret what the absence of a barking dog means – is the dog following a lead, is it too far away to be heard, or does this particular dog not bark when following the trace of a deer? The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork of three hunting days, and the data consists of recorded radio talk, videos of marksmen and dog handlers, as well as photos of all these activities.

Playing with the Highway Experience - Pervasive Games on the Road.

We explore how the dynamic and vivid context of road travel, i.e. the highway experience, can be used to provide drama and challenge to pervasive games. The aim has been to gain insights into this novel application area and to understand the potential and implications for design. The thesis embraces a design-oriented research approach, where knowledge has been gained through the process of designing, implementing and evaluating experimental prototypes. The research has resulted in three prototypes, i.e. Backseat Gaming, Road Rager and Backseat Playground, which in various ways illustrate the potentials and problems in the proposed design space. Backseat Gaming makes use of roadside objects to create a contextualised game experience as the player travels along a specific route. The intention with the prototype has been to explore the characteristics of the fictitious linkage between the game and road-context. We have particularly looked at what types of roadside objects that could be integrated to create an understandable and engaging pervasive game. Road Rager is a multiplayer game where children that meet in traffic duel against each other. We suggest that the temporal and unpredictable character of an encounter, as well as the proximity, can provide for interesting game-play. A critical challenge is to enable multimodal interaction when the lifetime of a game-event is very limited. The Backseat Playground is a murder mystery game, which takes place in the physical landscape outside the window of the vehicle. The prototype particularly explores the prospect of automatically scaling the game to vast geographical areas through integration with digital maps. Additionally, it explores how to provide sequential storytelling that fits with the journey through the landscape. We will hereafter refer to these types of games as journey games. In this thesis we will explore four issues, which we argue are of crucial significance when designing experiences, which combine pervasive game play with the highway experience. First, we will tease out what parts and types of a digital game that fits with this experience. Second, we will look at ways to design the game interface so that the player’s can combine a visual attention on the road-context with game play. Then, we will investigate how to utilize the passengers’ cursory experience of the swiftly passing road objects. Finally, we look at how to provide game-content, which match to the temporal unfolding of the surrounding road-context.

Mobile Collaborative Live Video Production

In this position paper, we present an ongoing design oriented project examining the mobile and collaborative production of live video. We argue that mobile phones equipped with cameras will play an important role in the future of user multimedia content creation. Informed by our findings from previous projects with similar topics of exploration, however with other users and settings such as VJ’s in a club setting and the professional crew producing live sports television, we now turn to teenagers in a school setting to learn more from early adopters, and gain new insights regarding the possibilities for the design of innovative services. By arranging a series of discussion seminars, on the teenagers’ relation to, and use of, their mobile phones, combined with practical workshops on video production with mobile phones, we examine the design space for mobile collaborative live video production.

Laying waste together: the shared creation and disposal of refuse in a social context

to be added

Producing, Collaborative Video: Developing an Interactive User Experience for Mobile TV

This paper presents a study of professional live TV production, investigating the work and interactions between distributed camera operators and a vision mixer during an ice hockey game. Using interview and video data, we discuss the vision mixer’s and camera operators’ individual assignments, showing the role of video as both a topic and resource in their collaboration. Our findings are applied in a design-oriented examination into the interactive user experience of TV, and inform the development of mobile collaborative tools to support amateur live video production.

Hunting for Fun: Solitude and Attentiveness in Collaboration

The design of online collaborative computer games and pervasive games can learn from the everyday practice of deer hunting. We present an ethnographic study revealing how hunters fine-tune their experience through temporal and spatial organization. The hunt is organized in a way that allows the hunters to balance between forms of collaboration ranging from solitude to face-to-face interaction, as well as between attentiveness and relaxation. Thus, the hunters deal with the task – hunting down the prey – while managing issues of enjoyment. We argue that understanding these experiential qualities is relevant for collaborative gaming, and adds to our understanding of leisure.

The Interactive Road – Mobile technology to increase social interaction in traffic

To be added

Sound Pryer: truly mobile joint music listening

Following the widespread adoption of music media sharing applications for the Internet a growing number of research projects have explored sharing in a mobile context. Insofar these projects have mainly addressed face-to-face copresence situations. The Sound Pryer prototype, on the other hand, is designed to provide joint music listening experiences among drivers in traffic. Through field trials with a prototype application we have learned the importance of including awareness information but not necessarily distributing complete music media content in order to provide meaningful experiences.

New uses for mobile pervasive games - Lessons learned for CSCW systems to support collaboration in vast work sites

To be added

Passive Photography from a Creative Perspective

We aim to understand meaningful experiences of photography, in order reflect upon the design of future camera devices. We have conducted a study of a passive camera device called Sensecam, which previously has been investigated as a memory aid, a combination of life-logging and memory tool and as resource for digital narratives. We take a creative perspective and show that even if a camera is designed to be forgotten in use (i.e. is worn as a necklace and takes pictures automatically) it can still be part of an engaging or active photographic experience. Because Sensecam is different from film cameras, camera phones and other digital cameras, this involves a different type of photographic experience and pictures, for example when moving through different social contexts, and how the resulting pictures are valued. Our findings stem from people who used the camera for a week, and are complemented with reflections from the author who has used the camera for a month.

Sanningen om Marika – The Interplay of Reality and Fiction

One of the most exciting developments in the field of new technologies, games and other media are crossmedia productions. New forms of interaction between the ludic and the narrative are being established, displayed via different platforms such as mobile phones, television shows, online games, websites, chats, blogs and forums, as well as physical locations. Sanningen om Marika (The Truth About Marika), a Swedish crossmedia production, employed those platforms to create a fictional universe with strong references to the real. As it turned out during the play course, the distinction between fiction and reality couldn't always and easily be made by the participatory community, since the blurring of the boundaries was one of the major design strategies of the production companies. Calling Sanningen om Marika (SOM) a participation drama, the producers clearly had the intent to actively engage the participants in the storyline, and to encourage them to imagine and immerse into the fiction as if it was reality rather than just engage in a game. This article will explore the strategies of the blurring of the boundaries between reality and fiction as it occurred in SOM and explain how the different platforms were contributing to its ambiguity.

Pervasive Games: Theory and Design

Quickly emerging from the fast-paced growth of mobile communications and wireless technologies, pervasive games provide a worldwide network of potential play spaces. Now games can be designed to be played in public spaces like conferences, museums, communities, cities, buildings and other non-traditional game venues...and game designers need to understand the medium—both its challenges and its advantages. This book shows game designers how to change the face of play—who plays, when and where they play and what that play means to all involved. Montola and Stenros explore aspects of pervasive games that concern and affect game designers: what makes these games compelling, what makes them possible today, how they are made and by whom, as well as the theoretical and philosophical reasoning behind their designs.

Boxed Pervasive Games: An Experience with User-Created Pervasive Games

Pervasive games are rapidly maturing - from early research experiments with locative games we now start to see a range of commercial projects using locative and pervasive technology to create technology-supported pervasive games. In this paper we report on our experiences in transferring the successful involvement of players in computer games to ‘modding’ for pervasive games. We present the design process, the enabling tools and two sample games provided in boxes to end users. Finally we discuss how our findings inform the design of ‘modding’ tools for a pervasive game community of the future.

The Three-Sixty Illusion: Designing For Immersion in Pervasive Games

Pervasive games are staged in reality and their main attractiveness is generated by using reality as a resource in the game. Yet, most pervasive games that use mobile and location-based technology use reality only in a weak sense, as the location for a computerized game. In this article we analyze two game practices, Nordic style live action role-playing (larp) and alternate reality games (ARG), that instead use reality as their main game resource. We analyze how they go about creating a believable game world and encourage the players to actively take part in this world. We present two example games that do the same with the support of technology, effectively realizing an immersive game world through a combination of physical play and technology-supported play.

The Art of Gamemastering

Coming soon

Five Weeks of Rebellion. Designing Momentum

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Broadcast Culture Meets Role-Playing Culture: Consequences for audience participation in a cross-media production

Changing media landscape forces public service broadcasters to search new ways to attract audiences. One strategy is to engage the audience in multi platform productions. Swedish Television collaborated with a small pervasive games company in the production of an alternate reality game; a spectacular and controversial production offering online and live action role-playing experiences in parallel with traditional TV drama. This article focuses on the cooperation of the companies, the differences in production cultures and how they affected the audience participation. The results show that the conflicting cultures created implications for the possibilities to participate, due to the differing views of what to produce and for whom. The broadcaster used production processes that resulted in ‘interaction for spectators’ while the pervasive games actor designed for ‘coproduction with participants’. The rich empirical data spans from participatory observations, in depth interviews, an online survey, log data and viewer statistics.

Game Mastering a Pervasive Larp. Experiences from Momentum

Coming soon

Play it for Real: Sustained Seamless Life/Game Merger in Momentum. In Baba, Akira

Coming soon

Pervasive Play, Immersion and Story: Designing Interference

Pervasive games are games that are played in the real world – they are not played as a computerized simulation or on a limited physical game arena. The central attraction for pervasive games is that they offer the pleasure of doing things for real. The world is a vast and infinitely changing resource of content for pervasive games. Interference is a pervasive game playable by groups of 6-8 players lasting for a total of 3-4 hours and using both technology (such as GPS positioning and augmented reality) and human actors to create the full experience. In this paper, we describe the design goals for Interference and how these permeate through all aspects of the design of the game to create a coherent experience. Interference shows how an emotionally complex game experience can be achieved without resorting to ambiguity or deep role playing. The game has so far been staged on seven occasions and we briefly report on the experiences from those stagings.

The Magic Lens Box: Simplifying the Development of Mixed Reality Games

days and offer unique experiences to the players. However, development of such games typically still requires expert knowledge and access to Mixed Reality toolkits or frameworks. In this paper, we present the so-called Magic Lens Box that follows a different approach. Based on standard hardware The Magic Lens Box enables game designers with little technological background to create their own Mixed Reality games in a simple yet powerful fashion. We further outline the development process of the magic Lens Box, describe the conceptual model behind it and discuss three games that have been developed with our system. Evaluation of these games shows the viability of our approach, enabling the creation of a variety of rather different Mixed reality games while keeping the development process simple.

Engaging the whole body in mobile interaction

Research within mobile interaction and applications initially focused on building interfaces that adapt to the limited interaction and presentation resources of mobile devices such as the limited bandwidth and small screens. More recent work has started to address richer interactive experiences by exploring ways of integrating what could be called the “whole body” in interaction in mobile settings. Such work includes for instance location-based systems, social networking, and collaborative applications of different kind. In line with this development our research investigates embodied and experience-oriented interaction with mobile and tangible devices.

Using the sensual evaluation instrument.

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Mirroring bodily experiences over time

The Affective Health system is a mobile lifestyle application that aims to empower people to reflect on their lives and lifestyles. The system logs a mixture of biosensor-data and other contextually oriented data and transforms these to a colorful, animated expression on their mobiles. It is intended to create a mirror and thereby empower users to see activity patterns and relate these to their experiences of stress. People’s different cultural backgrounds and their different physiological and psychological composition give them different perceptions and associations of time. We explore the time dimension of our system through working through a set of different designs that organize events as time going linearly forward, in a circular movement or relating to geographical places. Here we discuss the process of designing a mobile interface for presenting temporal data in a way that allows multiple and subjective interpretation.

More TV! - Support for local and collaborative production and consumption of mobile TV

New mobile phones come with basic video editing facilities. Given a constantly evolving technology, it is possible to envision new mobile devices with more elaborated video editing applications. We suggest that mobile video editing could be informed by collaborative professional TV-production functionalities. It would then allow functionalities supporting collaborative recording of various camera angles and real time editing. It would enable production of content covering distributed events and situations, and almost synchronous production and consumption.

Drivers Using Mobile Phones in Traffic: An Ethnographic Study of Interactional Adaptation.

Mobile phone use in cars is a highly debated issue. Legislation and policy discussions flourish in many countries and coincide with an increased effort in design of new in-car technologies. The studies which influence policy and design decisions use experimental approaches and are based on a cognitive perspective. In this paper, we discuss why this is a problematic approach. Further, we provide data and initial results from an ethnographic study of mobile phone use in traffic, where the aim is to investigate the ‘interactional adaptation’ by which the driver fit the involvement with the phone with driving and vice versa. By taking part of drivers’ daily work, and video recording their activities of driving and handling the mobile phone, we are able to reveal details which we believe could not be found in experimental studies with a constructed setup. We end with a discussion of the benefits of this method and how it can be developed further.

GlowBots: Designing and Implementing Engaging Human Robot Interaction

GlowBots are small tangible, communicating and interactive robots that show eye-catching visual patterns on a round LED display. This paper details the development of the GlowBots from the early user-oriented design phase, through hardware and software development and onto preliminary user studies. In the design phase we outlined a robot application based on a study of how owners relate with unusual pets, such as snakes and lizards. This led to an application concept of a set of ”hobby robots” which would communicate with each other and the user through dynamic patterns. Based on these requirements, we developed a LED display called see-Puck, which together with an open robot platform was used for the GlowBots application itself. One particular issue is dealing with energy consumption problems, as resources in embedded systems often limit the potential time for user interaction. We conclude with a report on early user experiences from demonstrating GlowBots and a preliminary user study in a home environment as well as remarks about future directions.

Beyond Users: Grounding Technology in Experience

This thesis goes beyond a user-centred design approach to explore potential future applications and modes of interaction. With several design cases, we investigate how early technology ideas can be matched with a specific practice to inspire novel design. This involves learning about existing experiences, interests and activities that can be relevant for a potential application, but which are not necessarily found among the intended users. Starting with early technology ideas and then finding a suitable practice to learn from is an alternative perspective of design activities. This can be useful for researchers and designers in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) who are interested in complementing approaches compared to user-centred design. Our approach is also relevant for researchers that face technology-driven starting points, and want to investigate future applications by grounding the design in existing practices. A set of design cases show how the overall research goes from a usability-oriented perspective towards a more experience-oriented one, in order to accommodate technology-driven design situations. The design cases have involved different technical starting points, including information display technologies, surface-based networking, digital photography, and robot technology for everyday settings. The overall design process evolves towards matching the technology with a practice, and to investigate applications by developing one or more research prototypes. This has resulted knowledge of novel applications and interaction for the technology in question, as well as knowledge on how to employ empirical data to inspire novel design. Finally, we provide an overall reflection of the research process and show how a design approach that goes “beyond users” can benefit the design process.

Ubicomp challenges in collaborative scheduling: Pin&Play at the Göteborg film festival

Ubicomp technology faces many technical challenges, which makes it difficult to test in real world situations. However, understanding and building for everyday practices is crucial for ubicomp designers, in order to push the technological development in the directions needed. We have developed and tested a ubiquitous computing prototype supporting collaborative scheduling. It is based on Pin&Play, a surface-based networking technology with interactive pushpins. The team of a local film festival was engaged in the development process, which resulted in a partial implementation illustrating how their current work practice could be supported. Drawing on this particular design case, we report findings and discuss challenges for ubicomp technology in general.

On the Edge: Mobile 2.0

By now no one can have failed to notice the latest hype: Web 2.0. Everybody is on Flickr and MySpace, blogging away and running their lives through Google’s map and calendar services. According to Web 2.0 stalwart Wikipedia, the term refers to “a supposed second generation of Internet-based services such as social-networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways.” It also implies accessing services through a unified, distributed interface i. e., Web browsers. In fact, what the user sees often looks just like a stand-alone application, except that it runs in a browser window.

Transfer Scenarios: Grounded Innovation with Marginal Practices

Transfer scenarios is a method developed to support the design of innovative interactive technology. Such a method should help the designer to come up with inventive ideas, and at the same time provide grounding in real human needs. In transfer scenarios, we use marginal practices to encourage a changed mindset throughout the design process. A marginal practice consists of individuals who share an activity that they find meaningful. We regard these individuals not as end-users, but as valuable input in the design process. We applied this method when designing novel applications for autonomous embodied agents, e.g. robots. Owners of unusual pets, such as snakes and spiders, were interviewed - not with the intention to design robot pets, but to determine underlying needs and interests of their practice. The results were then used to design a set of applications for more general users, including a dynamic living-room wall and a set of communicating hobby robots.

Designing for New Photographic Experiences: How the Lomographic Practice Informed Context Photography

This paper reports on how we learned from an alternative practice in order to design engaging interactive technology intended for a more general user group. When investigating new types of digital photography we designed context photography, where real-time context data visually affects digital pictures as they are taken. To understand how to design for a meaningful photographic experience, we took inspiration from an amateur practice involving a particular type of analogue camera – Lomography. This paper shows how such alternative or marginal practices can help to ground design of interactive technology in existing human interests, while at the same time leading to a novel design outcome.

GlowBots: Robots That Evolve Relationships

GlowBots are small wheeled robots that develop complex relationships between each other and with their owner. They develop attractive patterns which are affected both by user interaction and communication between the robots. The project shows how robots can interact with humans in subtle and sustainable ways for entertainment and enjoyment.

Facilitating Mobile Music Sharing and Social Interaction with Push!Music

Push!Music is a novel mobile music listening and sharing system, where users automatically receive songs that have autonomously recommended themselves from nearby players depending on similar listening behaviour and music history. Push!Music also enables users to wirelessly send songs between each other as personal recommendations. We conducted a two-week preliminary user study of Push!Music, where a group of five friends used the application in their everyday life. We learned for example that the shared music in Push!Music became a start for social interaction and that received songs in general were highly appreciated and could be looked upon as ‘treats’.

Gifts from friends and strangers: A study of mobile music sharing

Mobile technology has turned the traditionally collective activity of enjoying music into an often private one. New technologies such as wireless ad hoc networks have the potential to re-connect listeners who are now separated by headphones. We report on a field study of Push!Music, a novel mobile music sharing system. Push!Music allows both manual and automatic sharing of music between users through ad hoc wireless networking, and also provides a social awareness of other users nearby. The system was used by 13 subjects for three weeks. In post-study interviews, we identified four categories of results: social awareness, sharing music with friends, sharing music with strangers, and sharing automatically. Based on this, we present implications for design that can be applied not only to mobile music sharing systems, but to mobile media sharing in general: Allow division into active and passive use; enhance the awareness of who, where and when; support reciprocity; and finally, support identity and impression management.

Mobile Life: A Research Foundation for Mobile Services

The telecom and IT industry is now facing the challenge of a second IT-revolution, where the spread of mobile and ubiquitous services will have an even more profound effect on commercial and social life than the recent Internet revolution. Users will expect services that are unique and fully adapted for the mobile setting, which means that the roles of the operators will change, new business models will be required, and new methods for developing and marketing services have to be found. Most of all, we need technology and services that put people at core. The industry must prepare to design services for a sustainable web of work, leisure and ubiquitous technology we can call the mobile life. In this paper, we describe the main components of a research agenda for mobile services, which is carried out at the Mobile Life Center at Stockholm University. This research program takes a sustainable approach to research and development of mobile and ubiquitous services, by combining a strong theoretical foundation (embodied interaction), a welldefined methodology (user-centered design) and an important domain with large societal importance and commercial potential (mobile life). Eventually the center will create an experimental mobile services ecosystem, which will serve as an open arena where partners from academia and industry can develop our vision an abundant future marketplace for future mobile services.

Context Photography

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Seeing ethnographically: Teaching ethnography as part of CSCW

While ethnography is an established part of CSCW research, teaching and learning ethnography presents unique and distinct challenges. This paper discusses a study of fieldwork and analysis amongst a group of students learning ethnography as part of a CSCW & design course. Studying the students’ practices we explore fieldwork as a learning experience, both learning about fieldsites as well as learning the practices of ethnography. During their fieldwork and analysis the students used a wiki to collaborate, sharing their field and analytic notes. From this we draw lessons for how ethnography can be taught as a collaborative analytic process and discuss extensions to the wiki to better support its use for collaborating around fieldnotes. In closing we reflect upon the role of learning ethnography as a practical hands on – rather than theoretical – pursuit.

Columbus: Physically Exploring Geo-tagged Photos

This paper presents Columbus – a mobile application for physically exploring the world of geo-tagged photos. Using GPS, users must go to a photo’s physical location to discover it. This allows individuals and groups to explore the world around them and make the discovering of geo-tagged photos a fun and exciting endeavor.

Tools for Students Doing Mobile Fieldwork

Students are not always sitting at their desk but are also out in the world. In a university course teaching ethnography and design students were out in the field making observations and collecting data. We gave them access to a wiki, which they used to upload field notes and material as a support for collaboration. In this paper we present three tools we built and deployed to aid the students when in field and when collaborating. The first is a mobile tool used to gather data: a program running on the students’ mobile phones let them take photos, record video and audio, and write simple text notes, which are automatically uploaded to the wiki. The second is an awareness tool that enables the students to quickly see what the others have done in the wiki. The third is a novel browser for the uploaded data, which relates objects by both time and location. We also talk about the experience from having students using the tools live during the course.

The see-Puck: A Platform for Exploring Human-Robot Relationships

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Bringing Context to the Foreground: Creative Engagement in a Novel Still Camera Application

Sensor-based interaction has enabled a variety of new creative practices. With ubiquitous computing, designing for creative user experience with sensor-based devices benefits from new opportunities as well as new challenges. We propose a design approach where surrounding context information is brought to the foreground to become a resource for interaction, available at hand and in real time to the users. We illustrate this approach with our project context photography as a design case. Context photography consists of taking still pictures that capture not only incoming light but also some of the additional context surrounding the scene, with real-time context information visually affecting the pictures as they are taken. Based on the design and use of our context camera prototypes, this paper brings insight into implications of our approach to the design of sensor-based ubiquitous computing systems for creative purposes.

Mobile Life Centre - Publications

GDD as a Communication Medium

The challenges of designing a gender-aware pervasive game

Framing games.

Athletes and street acrobats: Designing for play as a community value in Parkour

PhySeEar. Moving Yourself to Shine and Sound in Geriatric Physiotherapy Interventions

Revive! Reactions to Migration Between Different Embodiments When Playing With Robotic Pets

Personalized and autonomous are already everywhere; let’s focus on awareness over trust.

Using Computer Vision Technologies to Make the Virtual Visible.

Services as Materials: Using Mashups for Research

Face to face makes a difference: Recommendation Practices of Users of Mobile Services

Workshop on Ethics, Logs and Videotape: Ethics in Large Scale User Trials and User Generated Content

2nd Workshop on Research in the Large: App Stores, Wide distribution channels & Big Data in Research

An introduction to Research in the Large

Interaction & the built environment: some challenges.

Drawing the city: differing perceptions of the urban environment.

Animal-Computer Interaction SIG

Mobile ActDresses: Programming Mobile Devices by Accessorizing

Always-On + Adoption – a method for longitudinal studies

Transfer Interviews - gathering design input to design for longitudinal use

Couch Mobility – The Cell Phone’s Most Important Feature at Home is Mobility

Introduction to special issue: Experiencing games: Games, play and players

Mobile Digital Interactive Storytelling – A winding path

Revisiting the Jacquard Loom: Threads of History and Current Patterns in HCI

Understanding Agency in Interaction Design Materials

Appreciating plei-plei around mobiles: Playfulness in Rah Island

Mobile Service Distribution from the End-User Perspective - A Survey Study on Recommendation Practices

Universal Robots as ‘Solutions’ to Wicked Problems: Debunking a Robotic Myth

ViPleo and PhyPleo: Artificial pet with two embodiments

Hospital robot at work: Something alien or an intelligent colleague?

Immaterial Materials: Designing with Radio

Beyond Speculative Ethics in HRI? Ethical Considerations and the Relation to Empirical Data

Questions, inspiration, feedback, and contributions: How entrepreneurs network online

Move that Body! Involving users emotionally, bodily and socially

Reflecting on the Design Process of Affective Health

Magical Bits: Designing Through Experiencing the Future End Product

Experiential Artifacts as a Design Method for Somaesthetic Service Development

‘Outfit-centric Accessory’ Design in Mobile Innovation

Amateur Vision and Recreational Orientation: creating live video together

Mobile Life VINN Excellence Centre – A model for strategic innovation of next generation mobile services

Fashion as System or Action Net in ‘Fashion in All Things’: The Case of Colour in the Design of Mobile Phones

Towards an empirical program of drivers’ ethnomethods of sharing the means for transport

Time to Revisit Mobility in Mobile HCI?

Narrative Friction in Alternate Reality Games: Design Insights from Conspiracy For Good

Performative Gestures for Mobile Augmented reality interaction.

Mobile exploration of geotagged photographs

Performing a Check-in: Emerging Practices, Norms and ‘Conflicts’ in Location-Sharing Using Foursquare

The LEGA: A Device for Leaving and Finding Tactile Traces

Things that Tweet, Check-In and are Befriended. Two Explorations on Robotics & Social Media

Pixel crush doesn't begin to explain it!

Navigating the world and learning to like it - mobility training through a pervasive game.

Studying the Elusive Experience of Pervasive Games

I’m in love with someone who doesn’t exist! Bleed in the context of a computer game

Developing Physical Check-In Methods for Location-Sharing Services and Analysing Their Influence on the User Experience

Some themes in bodily interaction

MoBoogie. Creative Expression Through Whole Body Musical Interaction

Designer Experience through Magical Bits

Bodies, boogies, bugs & buddies: Shall we play?

Ethnography of the telephone: Changing uses of communication technology in village life

Unpacking Social Interaction that Make us Adore – On the Aesthetics of Mobile Phones as Fashion Items

EcoFriends – the non-guilt feeling mobile system for inspiration and engagement

Social Media on the Road: Mobile Technologies and Future Traffic Research

Sketching in Software and Hardware: Bluetooth as a Design Material

Weather Gods and Fruit Kids – Embodying abstract concepts using tactile feedback and Whole Body Interaction

Gamification and location-sharing: some emerging social conflicts

Bodily Orientations around Mobiles: Lessons learnt in Vanuatu

Inspirational Bits

Video interaction - Making broadcasting a successful social media.

Understanding People and Animals: On Ordinary Human-Canine Interaction and the Use of a Positioning System in the Wild

Into the wild: Challenges and opportunities for field trial methods.

Communication Technology for Human-Dog Interaction: Exploration of Dog Owners’ Experiences and Expectations

The Effects of Interaction Techniques on Talk Patterns in Collaborative Peer Learning around Interactive Tables

Inspirational Bits - Towards a shared understading of the digital material

Real-time markerless tracking of objects on mobile devices

Interactive augmented reality

Rudiments 1, 2 & 3: Design Speculations on Autonomy

Design qualities for Whole Body Interaction – Learning from Golf, Skateboarding and BodyBugging

Please Enjoy!? Workshop on Playful Experiences in Mobile HCI

Research in the large: Using App Stores, Markets and other wide distribution channels in UbiComp research

Are we living in a robot cargo cult?

Ethnography of the telephone:  Changing uses of communication technology in village life