Alex S. Taylor

Machine intelligence

Under certain conditions, we appear willing to see and interact with computing machines as though they exhibited intelligence, at least an intelligence of sorts. Using examples from AI and robotics research, as well as a selection of relevant art installations and anthropological fieldwork, this paper reflects on some of our interactions with the kinds of machines we seem ready to treat as intelligent. Broadly, it is suggested that ordinary, everyday ideas of intelligence are not fixed, but rather actively seen and enacted in the world. As such, intelligence does not just belong to the province of the human mind, but can emerge in quite different, unexpected forms in things. For HCI, it is proposed this opens up a new set of possibilities for design; examining the ways intelligence is seen and enacted gives rise to a very different way of thinking about the intersection between human and machine, and thus promotes some radically new types of interactions with computing machines.

The Gift of the Gab? : A Design OrientedSociology of Young People's Use of Mobiles

This paper reports ethnographically informedobservations of the use of mobile phones andtext messaging services amongst young people.It offers a sociological explanation for thepopularity of text messaging and for thesharing of mobile phones between co-proximatepersons. Specifically, it reveals that youngpeople use mobile phone content and the phonesthemselves to participate in the practices ofgift exchange. By viewing mobile phone use inthis way, the paper suggests a number ofpossibilities for future phone-basedapplications and supporting hardware.

Artful systems in the home

In this paper we introduce the idea of organizing systems. Through a number of examples from an ongoing ethnographic study of family life, we suggest that organizing systems come about through the artful design and use of informational artifacts in the home, such as calendars, paper notes, to-do lists, etc. These systems are not only seen to organize household routines and schedules, but also, crucially, to shape the social relations between family members. Drawing attention to the material properties of informational artifacts and how assemblies of these artifacts come to make up organizing systems, we discuss some general implications for designing information technology for the home. Most importantly, we suggest that technologies must be designed to accommodate the rich and diverse ways in which people organize their homes, providing them with the resources to artfully construct their own systems rather than enforcing ones that are removed from their own experiences.

Driving and 'Passengering': Notes on the Ordinary Organization of 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 paper we begin to document what happens during car 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 re‐assembled 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 paper touches upon the unusual form of hospitality which emerges in car‐sharing.

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 media-specific 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.

Homes that make us smart

In this article we consider what it should mean to build “smartness” or “intelligence” into the home. We introduce an argument suggesting that it is people who imbue their homes with intelligence by continually weaving together things in their physical worlds with their everyday routines and distinct social arrangements. To develop this argument we draw on four ongoing projects concerned with designing interactive surfaces. These projects illustrate how, through the use of surfaces like fridge doors and wall displays, and even bowl shaped surfaces, we keep in touch with one another, keep the sense of our homes intact, and craft our homes as something unique and special. Intelligence, here, is seen to be something that emerges from our interactions with these surfaces—seen in the thoughtful placement of things throughout the home’s ecology of surfaces. IT for the home is thus understood less as something to be designed as intelligent and more as a resource for intelligence.

CamWorks: a video-based tool for efficient capture from paper source documents

We describe the design and evaluation of CamWorks, a system that employs a video camera as a means of supporting capture from paper sources during reading and writing. The user can view a live video image of the source document alongside the electronic document in preparation. We describe a novel user interface developed to support selection of text in the video window, and several new techniques for segmentation, restoration and resolution enhancement of camera images. An evaluation shows substantially faster text capture than with flatbed scanning.

On the naturalness of touchless: Putting the “interaction” back into NUI

Normans critique is indicative of the issue that while using the word natural might have become natural, it is coming at a cost. In other words, precisely because the notion of naturalness has become so commonplace in the scientific lexicon of HCI, so it is becoming increasingly important, it seems that there is a critical examination of the conceptual work being performed when it is used. There is a need to understand the key assumptions implicit within it and how these frame approaches to design and engineering in particular ways. A second significant element of this perspective comes from Wittgenstein, and his claim that, through action, people create shared meanings with others, and these shared meanings are the essential common ground that enable individual perception to be cohered into socially organized, understood, and coordinated experiences.

Inspirational bits: towards a shared understanding of the digital material

In any design process, a mediums 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.

Making place for clutter and other ideas of home

In this article, we examine the containment of clutter in family homes and, from this, outline considerations for design. Selected materials from an ethnographically informed study of home life are used to detail the ways in which families contain their clutter in bowls and drawers. Clutter, within these containers, is found to be made up of a heterogeneous collection of things that, for all manner of reasons, hold an ambiguous status in the home. It is shown that bowls and drawers provide a “safe” site of containment for clutter, giving the miscellany of content the “space” to be properly dealt with and classified, or to be left unresolved. The shared but idiosyncratic practices families use to contain their clutter are seen to be one of the ways in which the home, or at least the idea of home, is collectively produced. It is also part of the means by which families come to make their homes distinct and unique. These findings are used to consider what it might mean to design for the home, and to do so in ways that are sensitive to the idiosyncratic systems of household organization. In conclusion, thought is given to how we design for peoples ideas of home, and how we might build sites of uncertainty into homes, where physical as well as digital things might coalesce.