André O. Bueno

Sharing Wishes on Public Displays: Using Technology to Create Social Places

We present a public-display-and-mobile-based digital art installation named WishBoard that translates the essence of a chalk-and-wall based art installation called ‘Before I Die’ into a technological communal expression. Our studies show that public sharing of personal wishes leverage the connection inside a community, creating a feeling of neutral ground for gathering, giving a sense of third place independent of physical constrains, named thirdplaceness. The installation allows people to freely express their wishes, with certain personalization, and provides a public visualization of all shared wishes promoting face-to-face conversations. We conducted two deployments using our installation in a ‘socially abandoned’ space. Analyzing the shared wishes content and people’s behavior when observing the wishes popping up on the public displays, we were able to notice the essential role that public displays combined to mobile devices interaction can play in creating a community meeting place when providing a way for self-expression.

Understanding and Facilitating the Communication Process among Healthcare Professionals

We present a system for e-health considering natural user interactions for mobile through analysis of healthcare professionals’ activities. The healthcare professionals have to manager patients´ care and their activities, take notes of all of them and share information. Communication between healthcare professionals is carried out through notations on paper, verbally and sometimes through messages by mobile. These procedures make the communication process inefficient and slow. We studied the relation between healthcare professionals, how they interacting and how they communicate in a hospital to propose a better way of communication, supported by technology. The analysis of activities ensured that the needs of the healthcare professionals were hit and the routine of these professionals was maintained, making this interaction more natural. This experiments show us how the healthcare professionals communicate themselves, to do regular activities related to their work, to exchange experience and to talk about trivial matters. The use of technological accelerated the communication, and the tasks disseminated through big screen TV, allowed that everyone could share the tasks and resolve them quickly by the team.

A cultural knowledge-based method to support the formation of homophilous online communities

We propose a three-step method to identify people in social networks sites (SNS) who are talking about the same topics, even though they may be from different cultural backgrounds. Our method uses a cultural knowledge base from the OMCS-Br project to normalize cultural differences and find common interest among users based on statements they make various topics in a SNS. We evaluated three initial phrases that were used to search for sentences in a large social network using the cultural translation; we found that 81% of the retrieved sentences were judged to be related to the initial phrases. Thus, we have evidence that cultural normalization can support finding people talking about the same topic in a SNS even when they have different ways of saying the same thing. We believe that these culturally translated similarities can be used in a recommender system to contribute to the formation of homophilous online communities.

Designing ICT for Thirdplaceness

Thirdplaceness is the sense of being in a third place without architectural constraints. Third places are places that host regular, spontaneous, democratic, neutral, informal, and pleasurable anticipated gathering of individuals in which people can express themselves freely. These places contrast with the realms of home and work (first and second places), having an important role in community life in supporting civic engagement and community strength. Oldenburg defined the need for and properties of third places more than two decades ago, describing them as the heart of a community’s social vitality. Bars, bakeries, parks, town squares, theaters, and churches are typical examples of potential third places. In third places, thirdplaceness occurs often maintaining and reinforcing in the community this sense of third place. Once society and technology have changed since Oldenburg introduced the concept of third place, we describe in this chapter how to design applications for public spaces in order to promote thirdplaceness. In addition, we present and discuss two public installations—Selfie Cafe and WishBoard—used to observe the incidence of thirdplaceness that emerged through the interaction with the interactive system. In both installations, we were able to notice the essential role that Information and Communications Technology (ICTs) can play in promoting self-expression supporting, encouraging, and fostering social interaction and thirdplaceness creating a social place.

RED: a framework for prototyping multi-display applications using web technologies

We present the Really Easy Displays framework (RED), a web-based platform to facilitate spontaneous interaction between devices and applications. RED provides a single abstraction for content and interaction between display types, data streams and interaction modalities, and allows developers to create multi-display applications by enabling the sharing of web document object models (DOMs) across displays. We present lessons learned from using RED in our own research, hands-on workshops with developers and interviews with long-term developers over the course of a year. We provide initial evidence that the use of web-technologies in a framework like RED can mitigate some barriers encountered in by multi-display interaction scenarios, and we propose future work to improve RED.

Supporting Conversation and Community Interaction With A Table-Top Community Garden Application

Third places are social places like coffee shop and bars, where people come together to catch up with friends and meet new people. Our research explores how Ubiquitous Computing experiences in public space, particularly interactive public displays, can be leveraged to encourage interaction between strangers. We present a multi-display application based on the metaphor of a table-top community garden. This application is built using our Really Easy Displays (RED) framework, a set of web based technologies that allow the rapid development of applications that span multiple displays, sensors and actuators. The prototype makes use of a situated large screen, a projected surface and an Arduino microcontroller to support collaborative interaction, by allowing groups of people to collectively nurture a table-top garden by interacting with furniture, touch-enabled projections and mobile phones.

e-Rural: a framework to generate hyperdocuments for milk producers with different levels of literacy to promote better quality milking

We created and tested e-Rural, an approach to allow educators to dynamically adjust the target literacy level for their online learning content using a combination of three tools: PACO-T for planning, COGNITOR for editing hyper documents and Simplifica for text simplification. PACO-T and COGNITOR use the Brazilian Open Mind Common Sense knowledgebase (OMCS-Br) to provide access to commonly held understandings and beliefs on a diverse set of topics associated with a large range of Brazilian demographics, including, people with low literacy. We tested our experiment with 13 users that were creating hyperdocument-based learning content to describe important methods to milk production. We chose milk production as this is one of Brazils primary agricultural products and yet it has been established that there is a wide gap between the content from researchers with methods to greatly enhance the quality and economic power of milk production and the tacit knowledge and procedures of the farmers who actually produce the milk who are often at low literacy levels consistent with Brazils low literacy levels being around 75% of the population. Our experiments reveal that educators are able to produce milk related learning content geared towards different literacy levels using our tools with a very satisfying efficacy and efficiency levels. Thus, we believe that the use of our approach that introduces demographically sensitive common sense holds promise to bridge the gap between high literacy researchers with evidence-based approach to milk production and tacitly-based, low-literacy milk producers to better develop the milk industry in Brazil.

Creating and Supporting Virtual Communities

During the last years, the number of Online Social Networks (OSNs) users has been growing in a fast pace. In this context, it is common for people to be part of virtual communities, which may range from neighbourhood communities to communities of an artist’s fans. However, creating and managing successful municipal virtual communities remains a challenge. In this paper, we describe a five years experiment encompassing the creation and management of a virtual community of a Brazilian town with 21,400 inhabitants using the Facebook Groups Tool. Currently, the group has 14,132 members, which corresponds to 66% of the population. Since the beginning, we follow Scott Peck’s theory of community building. As a result, we describe a number of strategies involving the creation and management of municipal virtual communities. Besides, we list some difficulties we faced because of the lack of support from Facebook Groups tool for this type of communities.

Failures Supporting the Evolutionary Design in the Wild of Interactive Systems for Public Spaces

In this paper, we describe the lessons learned from an experience of deploying an interactive public installation adopting a methodology that intertwines aspects of in-the-wild study and evolutionary design. This methodology shrinks the cycle of design of a prototype and allows researchers and practitioners continuously design improvements while they learn from evaluating the prototype in the wild. Thereby, multiple settings can be explored, minimizing the need to conduct new experiments that demand time and resources. Considering the metaphor of a wishing well, we designed a public interactive installation, allowing people to make wishes using their personal or a shared device to throw a virtual coin into a real water fountain augmented with a wall-sized screen displaying a “pool of wishes.” We deployed this interactive installation in a passageway of building for eight days, collecting data from observations, questionnaires, interviews, photos and video recordings. Based on the failures in our first cycle of design with the prototype, we present our findings and directions to apply our methodology. We claim the need of a pilot study in situ and having a team committed in collecting and analyzing data, discussing the insights and changes. In addition, the system design must support predictable, orderly and managed evolution. Finally, we contribute to the ubicomp field, demonstrating the implications for evaluating evolutionary prototype in the wild.

Selfie cafe: socialization in public spaces

Once Online Social Networks became popular in the last decade, people tend to spend a fair amount of time in the virtual world. As a consequence, real encounters, especially with non-related people tend to not be encouraged or even exciting anymore. Aware that mobile devices become more popular and powerful considering pervasiveness and ubiquitousness, we strategically decided to use technology in order to support and promote people gathering in public spaces. In this paper, we present Selfie Cafe, an Urban Computing application for leveraging socialization. The application was deployed in the wild to see how people would react to it in specific places where socialization would be expected but was not happening. Results of the Selfie Cafe installation show that it helped setting a more playful mood in the place, an increase in the time spent by people in there as well as supporting interactions among locals, acquaintances and strangers.