Aloha May Hufana Ambe

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.

Minding the Gap: Reconciling Human and Technical Perspectives on the IoT for Healthy Ageing

There are two distinct bodies of literature on the Internet of Things, one that derives from a technical perspective, while the other comes from a human perspective. From a technical perspective, sensors can automatically detect physical activity, thus enabling elderly people to live independently, while sensors in essence check that they are active, remind them to take their pills, and so on. From a human perspective, people seek control over their lives, good health, social connection, and a sense of well-being that comes from having purpose and feeling competent in daily routines. So are technologies meant to enable users to stay in control of their lives and manage their relations and preferred routines, or do they undermine it, making elderly people feel subjects of surveillance and incompetent, disrupting their daily arrangements? And is there a middle path that we might take in design that creates innovative technologies that are aesthetic in form and function and empowering to use? In this paper, we offer a framework and examples of designs that bridge these perspectives.

The Ambient Birdhouse: An IoT Device to Discover Birds and Engage with Nature

We introduce the Ambient Birdhouse, a novel IoT design for the home that seeks to encourage awareness and discovery of birds outside. People increasingly have routines and technologies that disconnect them from nature. Moreover birds are hard to come to know, seen but not heard, heard but not seen, or simply around when we are not. The Ambient Birdhouse aims to reconcile these positions, by using local bird media to leverage peoples playfulness and curiosity, calmly sustain interest over time and ultimately to garner interest and engagement in nature and conservation projects. We trialled the Ambient Birdhouse with five families. Key findings are that the playful nature of the Birdhouse has an immediate grasp on children, and through them on the rest of the family. Children were prompt to learn bird calls, and invented and played games that involved the Birdhouse. Learning strategies emerged spontaneously from family routines and arrangements, with each family creating different moments and spaces for learning.

Design participation lab

How would you describe your lab to visitors? At the Design Participation Lab, our projects have a humanitarian or environmental focus. We work with Indigenous communities, older people, children with autism, and people with intellectual disabilities, seeking to understand how they appropriate technologies and how we might co-design desirable technologies. We value pluralism, seeking to make technologies that reflect the rich diversity and idiosyncrasies of people and the ways in which they wish to interact. Recently we have extended our work to exploring interaction between people and nature. Working with ecologists, eco-acoustics researchers, communities, and government organizations, we aim toward new kinds of socio-enviro-technical systems that make it easier, more interesting, and more fun to monitor and understand species.

Make and connect: enabling people to connect through their things

Staying connected is vital to maintaining good relationships, yet feelings of disconnection or isolation distance, time differences, or simply busy lives. Everyday interactions, family rituals and habits are often lost, in spite of the pervasiveness of smart-phones and personal multi-purpose devices. This project explores novel ways of connecting people over distance through smart objects designed to facilitate routine activities. Our aim is to democratize the design and making of the Internet of Things, by researching and creating easy-to-use kit technologies. This will enable everybody to design and make networks of internet connected things and people to suit their own interest and needs, fostering new kinds of creative thinking, designing and connection. The project aims to connect families through their things to better enable social engagement and connectedness between generations, diaspora and for different cultures.

Reflections from East Asia's ageing population: an interaction designers' challenge

As Asia experiences the demographic imbalance between working and ageing populations, the need for attention in this area is highlighted. The shift of a countrys age structure that results from people having small families and living long lives, where previously they had large families and lived short lives, results in more workers and fewer dependents creating economic growth, known as the demographic dividend. However for a generation after this bulge and dividend, a disproportionate number of older people must be supported by a smaller working population, a current concern in Asia with its rapidly growing number of older adults. This extended abstract draws practical and unique insights from three of the oldest and richest nations in Asia - Japan, South Korea and China, on the perspective of interactive technology design for older adults. ICT has powerful potential to ameliorate the imbalance in the population demographic through its potential to leverage various kinds of support. As HCI researchers, this is a challenge we embrace; a challenge for the ageing society of unique individuals to exploit the technologies that they have helped to create. The paper draws lessons from key sample studies, one from each country, which aimed to understand their ageing population. The insights for interaction designers are presented in the form of a practical set of reflections to guide the authors, who are in the early stages of research on technology design for older adults.