Antti Salovaara

Active construction of experience through mobile media: a field study with implications for recording and sharing

To fully appreciate the opportunities provided by interactive and ubiquitous multimedia to record and share experiences, we report on an ethnographic investigation on the settings and nature of human memory and experience at a large-scale event. We studied two groups of spectators at a FIA World Rally Championship in Finland, both equipped with multimedia mobile phones. Our analysis of the organization of experience-related activities in the mass event focuses on the active role of technology-mediated memories in constructing experiences. Continuity, reflexivity with regard to the Self and the group, maintaining and re-creating group identity, protagonism and active spectatorship were important social aspects of the experience and were directly reflected in how multimedia was used. Particularly, we witnessed multimedia-mediated forms of expression, such as staging, competition, storytelling, joking, communicating presence, and portraying others; and the motivation for these stemmed from the engaging, processual, and shared nature of experience. Moreover, we observed how temporality and spatiality provided a platform for constructing experiences. The analysis advocates applications that not only store or capture human experience for sharing or later use but also actively participates in the very construction of experience. The approach conveys several valuable design implications.

Extending large-scale event participation with user-created mobile media on a public display

Most large public displays have been used for providing information to passers-by with the primary purpose of acting as one-way information channels to individual users. We have developed a large public display to which users can send their own media content using mobile devices. The display supports multi-touch interaction, thus enabling collaborative use of the display. This display called CityWall was set up in a city center with the goal of showing information of events happening in the city. We observed two user groups who used mobile phones with upload capability during two large-scale events happening in the city. Our findings are that this kind of combined use of personal mobile devices and a large public display as a publishing forum, used collaboratively with other users, creates a unique setting that extends the groups feeling of participation in the events. We substantiate this claim with examples from user data.

Supporting the shared experience of spectators through mobile group media

Interesting characteristics of large-scale events are their spatial distribution, their extended duration over days, and the fact that they are set apart from daily life. The increasing pervasiveness of computational media encourages us to investigate such unexplored domains, especially when thinking of applications for spectator groups. Here we report of a field study on two groups of rally spectators who were equipped with multimedia phones, and we present a novel mobile group media application called mGroup that supports groups in creating and sharing experiences. Particularly, we look at the possibilities of and boundary conditions for computer applications posed by our findings on group identity and formation, group awareness and coordination, the meaningful construction of an event experience and its grounding in the event context, the shared context and discourses, protagonism and active spectatorship. Moreover, we aim at providing a new perspective on spectatorship at large scale events, which can make research and development more aware of the socio-cultural dimension.

Comedia: mobile group media for active spectatorship

Previous attempts to support spectators at large-scale events have concentrated separately on real-time event information, awareness cues, or media-sharing applications. CoMedia combines a group media space with event information and integrates reusable awareness elements throughout. In two field trials, one at a rally and the other at a music festival, we found that CoMedia facilitated onsite reporting to offsite members, coordination of group action, keeping up to date with others, spectating remotely, and joking. In these activities, media, awareness cues, and event information were often used in concert, albeit assuming differing roles. We show that the integrated approach better supports continuous interweaving of use with the changing interests and occurrences in large-scale events.

Appropriation of a MMS-based comic creator: from system functionalities to resources for action

Technologies can be used - or appropriated - in different ways by different users, but how do the use patterns evolve, and how can design facilitate such evolution? This paper approaches these questions in light of a case study in which a group of 8 high school students used Comeks, a mobile comic strip creator that enables users to exchange rich, expressive multimedia messages. A qualitative analysis of the use processes shows how users turned the functionalities embodied in Comeks into particular resources for communication during the 9-week trial period. The paper discusses the relationship of functionalities of the artifact and the development of resources by presenting how functionalities can be designed to support three ways to appropriate communication technologies: increasing technical mastery, re-channeling existing communication into the new medium and inventing new communicative acts between users.

Dynamic tactile guidance for visual search tasks

Visual search in large real-world scenes is both time consuming and frustrating, because the search becomes serial when items are visually similar. Tactile guidance techniques can facilitate search by allowing visual attention to focus on a subregion of the scene. We present a technique for dynamic tactile cueing that couples hand position with a scene position and uses tactile feedback to guide the hand actively toward the target. We demonstrate substantial improvements in task performance over a baseline of visual search only, when the scenes complexity increases. Analyzing task performance, we demonstrate that the effect of visual complexity can be practically eliminated through improved spatial precision of the guidance.

A cognitive meta-analysis of design approaches to interruptions in intelligent environments

Minimizing interruptions to users is a crucial and acknowledged precondition for the adoption of new intelligent technologies such as ubiquitous and proactive computing. This paper takes a step toward achieving a consensus among the numerous existing approaches addressing the challenge posed by interruptions. We start by explicating why interruptions are considered important. We then reveal similarities and differences among the approaches from a cognitive viewpoint. It appears that the approaches draw from different assumptions about human cognition. Some of the approaches contain inconsistencies. The cognitive analysis also inspires directions for future work.

Acceptance or Appropriation? A Design-Oriented Critique of Technology Acceptance Models

Technology acceptance models (TAMs) are tools for predicting users’ reception of technology by measuring how they rate statements on a questionnaire scale. It has been claimed that these tools help to assess the social acceptance of a final IT product when its development is still under way. However, their use is not without problems. This chapter highlights some of the underlying shortcomings that arise particularly from a simplistic conception of “acceptance” that does not recognize the possibility that users can invent new uses for (i.e., appropriate) technology in many situations. This lack of recognition can easily lead one to assume that users are passive absorbers of technological products, so that every user would adopt the same usages irrespective of the context of use, the differences in work tasks, or the characteristics of interpersonal cooperation. In light of recent research on appropriation, technology use must actually be understood in a more heterogeneous way, as a process through which different users find the product useful in different ways. This chapter maintains that if, in fact, a single technology can be used for multiple purposes, then subscribing to the thinking arising from technology acceptance model research may actually lead one to suboptimal design solutions and thus also compromise user acceptance. This chapter also presents some starting points for designing specifically for easier technology appropriation.

Everyday appropriations of information technology: A study of creative uses of digital cameras

Repurposive appropriation is a creative everyday act in which a user invents a novel use for information technology (IT) and adopts it. This study is the first to address its prevalence and predictability in the consumer IT context. In all, 2,379 respondents filled in an online questionnaire on creative uses of digital cameras, such as using them as scanners, periscopes, and storage media. The data reveal that such creative uses are adopted by about half of the users, on average, across different demographic backgrounds. Discovery of a creative use on ones own is slightly more common than is learning it from others. Most users discover the creative uses either completely on their own or wholly through learning from others. Our regression model explains 34% of the variance in adoption of invented uses, with technology cognizance orientation, gender, exploration orientation, use frequency, and use tenure as the strongest predictors. These findings have implications for both design and marketing.

Music on YouTube

We present the first study of YouTubes most popular content genre, music videos.Our analysis of popular music videos identified three main types and 12 subtypes.User-appropriated videos emerged as the most important new category of videos.Derivative music videos stirred the highest levels of engagement among music videos.We discuss a halo effect that may explain the popularity of user-appropriated videos. YouTube is the leading Internet video service and one of the most popular websites in 2014. Music videos hold top positions in different YouTube charts, but the music video types or engagement patterns with them have not been systematically studied. In this paper we present three studies that focus on YouTube music. We first show that music videos are the most popular content genre in YouTube. We then present a typology of traditional and user-generated music videos discovered in YouTube. It includes twelve subtypes of music videos under three main types: traditional, user-appropriated, and derivative. Last, we present findings on user engagement statistics that go beyond view, comment, and vote counts. These metrics show that while music videos gather more views, engagement differences with other content genres are miniscule. However, there are notable differences in engagement between different music video types. This is prominent between different artists on one hand, and between traditional and user-generated videos on the other. We synthesize these findings by discussing the importance of user-generated videos in YouTubes music ecosystem.