Alessandro Soro

Integrating XP project management in development environments

Extreme Programming (XP) is an Agile Methodology (AM) which does not require any specific supporting tool for being successfully applied. Despite this starting observation, there are many reasons leading a XP team to adopt Web based tools to support XP practices. For example, such tools could be useful for process and product data collection and analysis or for supporting distributed development. In this article, we describe XPSuite, a tool composed of two parts: XPSwiki, a tool for managing XP projects and XP4IDE, a plug-in for integrating XPSwiki with an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Moreover, we will show how the full Object Oriented implementation provides a powerful support for extracting all data represented in the model that the system implements.

Cross-Cultural Dialogical Probes

This paper explores the use of probes in a very remote Australian Aboriginal community where the rich traditional and post-colonial culture is worlds away from the urban Australian home of the research team. Cultural probes and technology probes have seen an enormous uptake in HCI as methods to develop inspiration from and insights into culture. Typically they are left behind, as unmanned probes, to collect and send data (or inspiring contributions) back to the design team. We investigate how probes align with indigenous ways of knowing, in particular a preference for situated knowledge creation, orality and co-presence. Through a case study we articulate how a technology probe became used as a means to engage in dialogue and co-creation with the local community. We found that co-presence of researchers and participants is crucial to foster engagement, unanticipated insights into culture and openings beyond the original problem-solution design framework. To highlight this, departing from the original conceptualization of probes, we propose and discuss the concept of manned cross-cultural dialogical probes.

Bi-Cultural Content Publication on a Digital Noticeboard: a Design and Cultural Differences Case Study

We present our observations of Aboriginal Australian practices around a custom digital noticeboard and compare our insights to related research on cultural differences, literacy and ICT4D. The digital noticeboard was created, upon a request by the community Elders, to foster communication across the community. The initial design, informed by discussions and consultations, aimed at supporting the local Aboriginal language and English, both in written and spoken form, at supporting the oral tradition, and at accommodating for different perceptions and representations of time. This paper presents observations about the first encounters with the digital noticeboard by those members of the community that took part in its conceptualization. Such observations reinforce existing knowledge on such cultural phenomena as collectivism and time perception, issues related to literacy, moderation and censorship. We contribute to framing such knowledge within a concrete case study and draw implication for design of tools for bi-cultural content publication.

Using Augmented Video to Test In-Car User Experiences of Context Analog HUDs

Automotive interactive technologies represent an exemplar challenge for user experience (UX) designers, as the concerns for aesthetics, functionality and usability add up to the compelling issues of safety and cognitive demand. This extended abstract presents a methodology for the user-centred creation and evaluation of novel in-car applications, involving real users in realistic use settings. As a case study, we present the methodologies of an ideation workshop in a simulated environment and the evaluation of six design idea prototypes for in-vehicle head up display (HUD) applications using a semi-naturalistic drive. Both methods rely on video recordings of real traffic situations that the users are familiar with and/or experienced themselves. The extended abstract presents experiences and results from the evaluation and reflection on our methods.

Technology Individuation: The Foibles of Augmented Everyday Objects

This paper presents the concept of technology individuation and explores its role in design. Individuation expresses how, over time, a technology becomes personal and intimate, unique in purpose, orchestrated in place, and how people eventually come to rely on it to sustain connection with others. We articulate this concept as a critical vantage point for designing augmented everyday objects and the Internet of Things. Individuation foregrounds aspects of habituation, routines and arrangements that through everyday practices reveal unique meaning, reflect self-identity and support agency. The concept is illustrated through three long term case studies of technology in use, involving tangible and embodied interaction with devices that afford communication, monitoring, and awareness in the home setting. The cases are analysed using Hornecker and Buurs Tangible Interaction Framework. We further extend upon this framework to better reveal the role played by personal values, history of use, and arrangements, as they develop over time in the home setting, in shaping tangible and embodied interaction with individuated technologies.

Towards an Analysis Framework of Technology Habituation by Older Users

Smart everyday objects could support the wellbeing, independent living and social connectedness of ageing people, but their successful adoption depends upon them fitting with their skills, values and goals. Many technologies fail in this respect. Our work is aimed at designs that engage older people by building on their individual affective attachment to habituated objects and leveraging, from a participatory design perspective, the creative process through which people continuously adapt their homes and tools to their own lifestyle. We contribute a novel analytic framework based on an analysis of related research on appropriation and habituated objects. It identifies steps in appropriation from inspection to performance and habituation. We test this framework with the preliminary testing of an augmented habituated object, a messaging kettle. While only used in one home so far, its daily use has provoked many thoughts, scenarios and projections about use by friends, both practical, utopian and dystopian.

Improving FTIR based multi-touch sensors with IR shadow tracking

Frustrated Total Internal Reflection (FTIR) is a key technology for the design of multi-touch systems. With respect to other solutions, such as Diffused Illumination (DI) and Diffused Surface Illumination (DSI), FTIR based sensors suffer less from ambient IR noise, and is, thus, more robust to variable lighting conditions. However, FTIR does not provide (or is weak on) some desirable features, such as finger proximity and tracking quick gestures. This paper presents an improvement for FTIR based multi-touch sensing that partly addresses the above issues exploiting the shadows projected on the surface by the hands to improve the quality of the tracking system. The proposed solution exploits natural uncontrolled light to improve the tracking algorithm: it takes advantage of the natural IR noise to aid tracking, thus turning one of the main issues of MT sensors into a useful quality, making it possible to implement pre-contact feedback and enhance tracking precision.

Interactive calibration of a multi-projector system in a video-wall multi-touch environment

Wall-sized interactive displays gain more and more attention as a valuable tool for multiuser applications, but typically require the adoption of projectors tiles. Projectors tend to display deformed images, due to lens distortion and/or imperfection, and because they are almost never perfectly aligned to the projection surface. Multi-projector video-walls are typically bounded to the video architecture and to the specific application to be displayed. This makes it harder to develop interactive applications, in which a fine grained control of the coordinate transformations (to and from user space and model space) is required. This paper presents a solution to such issues: implementing the blending functionalities at an application level allows seamless development of multi-display interactive applications with multi-touch capabilities. The description of the multi-touch interaction, guaranteed by an array of cameras on the baseline of the wall, is beyond the scope of this work which focuses on calibration.

XPlaces: An Open Framework to Support the Digital Living at Home

In this paper we describe our research in the design and evaluation of novel interaction techniques for pervasive computer technology at home. We particularly focus on supporting every day life by the means of an open source, multi-platform framework called XPlaces (extensible Places) designed to enable interactive applications for several environments. Its main aim is to give to the ambient the role of a medium able to hide technological complexity implicit in everyday objects and to make easier people activities encouraging interaction with services and applications. It is primarily concerned with the human aspects of ubiquitous computing, applied to enhance the possible interactions between people and the technologies blended with an ambient. This paper is organized as follows: first we present the idea and the motivation behind the framework. Then, the architecture and the models for interaction are described, followed by integration issues of the current XPlaces specification. Finally we discuss some observation and conclusions.

Natural exploration of multimedia contents

In this paper we present a research experience of tangible exploration of multimedia contents: the troll, as we dubbed it, consists in the coupling of a paper brochure and a LCD display. Browsing the brochure the user can access multimedia contents that are displayed on the screen; the animations and movies are related to each specific page of the brochure, that in turn reports a description of our projects. We show the rationale behind the exploitation of TUIs in the specific design space of the demo corner of our research lab, discuss the implementation and evaluation with users of a working prototype, and suggest a broader viewpoint in the context of natural interaction as well as further work.