Asimina Vasalou

Digital Crowding: Privacy, Self-Disclosure, and Technology

In this chapter, we introduce and develop the concept of “digital crowding.” Traditionally, crowding has been conceptualized as excessive social contact or insufficient personal space (Altman 1975). Under these circumstances, not only do people show signs of stress, but they also engage in a number of techniques to escape excessive social contact (Baum and Valins 1977). For instance, studies of students in shared, crowded spaces find that they spend more time in their bedrooms than in social spaces, are more likely to seek friendships outside of the crowded area, and even sit further away from strangers in waiting rooms (Baum and Valins 1977). We argue that while much of the discussion of privacy and technology has focused on information flow and leakage, it has ignored the interactive, interpersonal impact of new technology. In this chapter, we begin by examining the key issues raised by technology for privacy. We then discuss earlier, non-technology focused theories that cover interpersonal aspects of privacy. Finally, we examine some ways in which technology might impact on interpersonal privacy, with a specific focus on social network sites.

A case study of non-adoption: the values of location tracking in the family

A number of commercial location tracking systems exist which enable parents to monitor where their children are when outdoors. The adoption of these services and whether, through their design, they reflect parental values has not been investigated. This question was pursued with a large-scale survey of 920 parents from the UK. The use of location tracking was not prevalent amongst parents and only a minority had considered using these technologies. Parents favoring location tracking described it in the context of security, peace of mind and the need to reduce uncertainty. Parents who were against location tracking described a general lack of need as they had established reliable mechanisms for security and valued trust in the family as well as childrens self-direction. Our findings show that location tracking concurrently supports and threatens parental values. By focusing on the values it undermines, we are able to suggest new directions for location systems.

Privacy dictionary: A new resource for the automated content analysis of privacy

This article presents the privacy dictionary, a new linguistic resource for automated content analysis on privacy-related texts. To overcome the definitional challenges inherent in privacy research, the dictionary was informed by an inclusive set of relevant theoretical perspectives. Using methods from corpus linguistics, we constructed and validated eight dictionary categories on empirical material from a wide range of privacy-sensitive contexts. It was shown that the dictionary categories are able to measure unique linguistic patterns within privacy discussions. At a time when privacy considerations are increasing and online resources provide ever-growing quantities of textual data, the privacy dictionary can play a significant role not only for research in the social sciences but also in technology design and policymaking.

Privacy dictionary: a linguistic taxonomy of privacy for content analysis

Privacy is frequently a key concern relating to technology and central to HCI research, yet it is notoriously difficult to study in a naturalistic way. In this paper we describe and evaluate a dictionary of privacy designed for content analysis, derived using prototype theory and informed by traditional theoretical approaches to privacy. We evaluate our dictionary categories alongside privacy-related categories from an existing content analysis tool, LIWC, using verbal discussions of privacy issues from a variety of technology and non-technology contexts. We find that our privacy dictionary is better able to distinguish between privacy and non-privacy language, and is less context-dependent than LIWC. However, the more general LIWC categories are able to describe a greater amount of variation in our data. We discuss possible improvements to the privacy dictionary and note future work.

Fundamentals of Agent Perception and Attention Modelling

Perception and attention mechanisms are of great importance for entities situated within complex dynamic environments. With roles extending greatly beyond passive information services about the external environment, such mechanisms actively prioritise, augment and expedite information to ensure that the potentially relevant is made available so appropriate action can take place. Here, we describe the rationale behind endowing artificial entities, or virtual agents, with real-time perception and attention systems. We cover the fundamentals of designing and building such systems. Once equipped, the resulting agents can achieve a more substantial connection with their environment for the purposes of reacting, planning, decision making and, ultimately, behaving.

Applying Evolutionary Psychology to a Serious Game about Children's Interpersonal Conflict

This article describes the use of evolutionary psychology to inform the design of a serious computer game aimed at improving 9–12-year-old childrens conflict resolution skills. The design of the game will include dynamic narrative generation and emotional tagging, and there is a strong evolutionary rationale for the effect of both of these on conflict resolution. Gender differences will also be taken into consideration in designing the game. In interview research in schools in three countries (Greece, Portugal, and the UK) aimed at formalizing the game requirements, we found that gender differences varied in the extent to which they applied cross-culturally. Across the three countries, girls were less likely to talk about responding to conflict with physical aggression, talked more about feeling sad about conflict and about conflicts over friendship alliances, and talked less about conflicts in the context of sports or games. Predicted gender differences in anger and reconciliation were not found. Results are interpreted in terms of differing underlying models of friendship that are motivated by parental investment theory. This research will inform the design of the themes that we use in game scenarios for both girls and boys.

The application of forgiveness in social system design

When an offence occurs, the victim and offender can overcome the harm done through forgiveness. This paper demonstrates how forgiveness can be supported in social system design. We first describe what forgiveness is, how it is motivated and what benefits follow from forgiveness. Based on this theoretical analysis, we propose five provisions to guide designers who want to encourage reparation in social systems.

Associating gesture expressivity with affective representations

Affective computing researchers adopt a variety of methods in analysing or synthesizing aspects of human behaviour. The choice of method depends on which behavioural cues are considered salient or straightforward to capture and comprehend, as well as the overall context of the interaction. Thus, each approach focuses on modelling certain information and results to dedicated representations. However, analysis or synthesis is usually done by following label-based representations, which usually have a direct mapping to a feature vector. The goal of the presented work is to introduce an interim representational mechanism that associates low-level gesture expressivity parameters with a high-level dimensional representation of affect. More specifically, it introduces a novel methodology for associating easily extracted, low-level gesture data to the affective dimensions of activation and evaluation. For this purpose, a user perception test was carried out in order to properly annotate a dataset, by asking participants to assess each gesture in terms of the perceived activation (active/passive) and evaluation (positive/negative) levels. In affective behaviour modelling, the contribution of the proposed association methodology is twofold: On one hand, when analysing affective behaviour, it can enable the fusion of expressivity parameters alongside with any other modalities coded in higher-level affective representations, leading, in this way, to scalable multimodal analysis. On the other hand, it can enforce the process of synthesizing composite human behaviour (e.g. facial expression, gestures and body posture) since it allows for the translation of dimensional values of affect into synthesized expressive gestures.

Evaluation of Affective Interactive Applications

Methods are developed for different audiences and purposes. HCI researchers develop methods to shape the future through pure, applied and blue sky research – as is still the case with most affective interactive applications. Unsurprisingly, practitioners will be more concerned that the methods they use not only are tractable but produce better and more innovative results in terms of the systems they ultimately release into the world. Researchers, on the other hand, may have other concerns, such as the novelty of their techniques. Up until recently, most HCI methods (both for researchers and practitioners) were developed for work applications and desktop situations. They focused on efficiency, learnability, transparency, control and other work-related values. They were developed in response to a theoretical orientation which viewed the user as an information processing system not so dissimilar to the computer itself. But now that HCI is concerned with technologies that enter all aspects of life, our methods have begun to change and will need to continue to change. In keeping with our changing conception of what a “user” is and a wider concern with their experience of use of new technologies, a key challenge will be to develop and expand methods for analyzing not just what people do with the technology but how it makes them feel, and not just how people understand technology but how they make sense of it as part of their lives. Methods must be concerned, not only with issues of usefulness and usability, but also with issues of aesthetics, expression, and emotion. In addition we need to focus on evaluating technology not just in the short term under controlled conditions but also in the longer term and in broader social and cultural contexts. In this section, we will therefore provide two strands of evaluation methods. The first concerns what we might see as more traditional usability evaluation: is my system usable for the purpose it was designed for? The second strand tries to get at what we have named “third wave of HCI” in the previous chapters: does my system provide for the kind of (emotional) experience that it aimed to do?

Understanding and Designing for Conflict Learning Through Games

Conflict resolution skills are fundamental to navigating daily social life, yet means to learn constructive conflict resolution skills are limited. In this chapter, we describe Village Voices, a multiplayer serious game we designed that supports children in learning and experimenting with conflict resolution approaches. Drawing on experiential learning as an underlying learning philosophy, and based on Bodine and Crawford’s six-phase model of resolving conflict, Village Voices puts players in the role of interdependent villagers who need to work their way through conflicts and quests that arise in the game world. In this chapter, we first present Village Voices through the design qualities of competitive collaboration, local familiar multiplayer, playing around the game, reimagining the real, and persistence. We then present a case study that examines the learning experiences of players over four weeks, focusing on the role of time, emotion, the relationship between in-game conflict and learning, and requirements for learning moments.