Assunta Matassa

Workshop on full-body and multisensory experience in ubiquitous interaction

The ubiquitous computing era is bringing to the human the possibility to interact always and everywhere with digital information. However, the interaction means used to access this information exploit only few of the human sensorimotor abilities. Most of these interactions happen through traditional desktop or mobile interfaces, which often involve just vision and hearing senses and require the movement of only one finger. The aim of this workshop is rediscovering the role of human body and senses, focusing on abilities that are often forgotten by the HCI designers, in order to provide new body experiences through the design of novel interactions in smart environments. The focus of this workshop will go beyond the mere design of multimodal interfaces and will exploit theories of embodied cognition to design new full-body experiences to explore ambient space and, more in general, the environment.

Eliciting Affordances for Smart Objects in IoT Era

In this paper we suggest a design research method for eliciting affordances and new meanings for Smart Objects in the Internet of Things Era. After an introduction to the topic and the description of some open issues, we propose to adopt a Critical Design approach, where the role of Ambiguity is twofold: on the one hand, it is the objective of the observation for defining a set of ambiguous objects or affordances; on the other hand, it is the result of a design conceptualization of smart objects aiming at provoking cognitive dissonance and finalized to understand people adaptation processes and behaviors.

Adopting a user modeling approach to quantify the city

Quantified Self movement allows to collect a lot of personal data which can be used to nurture the model of the users. Evenly, when aggregated, these personal data become a picture of the people of a space in a City Model. This model can be fed also by data coming from crowdsensing. The resulting City Model can be used to provide personalized services to citizen, and to increase people awareness about their behaviour that can help in promoting collective behavioural change. The paper describes a preliminary step in the latter direction.

Designing for smart cities: connecting and binding citizens to urban spaces through a new wearable interactive system

In this paper we present a wearable interactive system that has the aim to strengthen the bond between individuals and urban spaces, leveraging the personal memories of the citizens.

Body experience in the ubiquitous era: towards a new gestural corpus for smart spaces

Our research question is the role of body in a Ubiquitous era. To answer this question, we propose a study for the design of an innovative gestural corpus to allow a natural, simple interaction and communication in social smart space through the body. The goals of this work are 1) to examine the relation between body and space in Ubiquitous era; 2) to investigate the potential of body and senses to improve ones ability to interact with surroundings; 3) to present a study for a new gestural corpus for smart spaces, adopting a bodystorming approach. This paper introduces the general approach, describes our current statement of research and outlines the planned study design.

Towards Multisensory Storming

Current digital system interfaces are mainly based on vision and hearing. HCI practitioners and researchers need to introduce unconventional senses in interaction design in order to avoid sensory deprivation in digital life and enhance information accessibility. In this paper, we present a novel technique, called Multisensory Storming, which aims at supporting the multisensory interaction design process. Multisensory Storming is a group method enabling the generation of new ideas and design proposals in physical contexts through exercises that allow exploring all the human senses.

TANGAEON: Tangible Interaction to Support People in a Mindfulness Practice

ABSTRACT Recently, Tangible and Embodied Interaction (TEI) approaches to support people in mindfulness practices have been proposed in the literature, but they have scarcely explored the use of real natural elements in the interaction. In this article, we first present TANGAEON, a TEI system that augments the AEON mindfulness mobile app with an interactive, water-filled glass container. Second, we evaluate TANGAEON by contrasting it with two traditional mindfulness techniques and with AEON. TANGAEON obtained better results in terms of achieved mindfulness, perceived level of difficulty, and degree of pleasantness than the two traditional techniques. Moreover, considering all techniques, participants achieved the highest level of mindfulness with TANGAEON, and rated it as the most pleasant and preferred approach to practice. These results suggest that the use of TEI based on a natural element can offer a novel and effective way to help people approach and practice mindfulness, and to augment existing mindfulness apps.

Discovering Good Links Between Objects in the Internet of Things.

The Internet of Things is an emerging paradigm allowing the control of the physical world via the Internet protocol and both human-to-machine and machine-to-machine communication. In this scenario, one of the most challenging issues is how to choose links among objects in order to guarantee an effective access to services and data. In this paper, we present a new selection criterion that improves the classical approach. To reach this goal, we extract knowledge coming from the social network of humans, as owners of objects, and we exploit a recently proven property called interest assortativity. The preliminary experimental results reported in this paper give a first evidence of the effectiveness of our approach, which performs better than classical strategies. This is achieved by choosing only not redundant links in such a way that network connectivity is preserved and power consumption is reduced.

Principles to Design Smart Physical Objects as Adaptive Recommenders

Recommenders have proven to be useful means to support people in their activities and in making decisions. They evolved from online recommenders to context-aware and ubiquitous recommenders. Moving forward along this line, this paper introduces the new emerging class of smart physical recommenders: context-aware recommender systems that are embedded into physical everyday objects. This paper describes the features of these systems and presents a conceptual model to design them, by analyzing a number of issues that have to be addressed by a designer and discussing the consequences of different design choices with their impact on the smartness of the designed object. The model is structured in a number of layers corresponding to different conceptual design phases in which different requirements are analyzed. The contribution of this paper is to discuss and provide design guidelines for a new rising class of recommenders that combine the features of intelligent agents, cyber-physical objects, and recommender-support systems. The description of the model is complemented by an exemplary analysis of its application.

Multisensory experiences for singers: a first tangible prototype

When performing a piece of music, body, senses, and cognition are strictly connected to each other. This connection, however, is not always particularly evident. As a consequence, it is extremely important for musicians to be able to control their performance by relying on other sensorial modalities that complement the auditory cue. Sight, in particular, is paramount for most instrumentalists as it helps learning new techniques, recognising errors, correcting expressiveness, and memorize complex passages. As opposed to other musicians, singers can almost exclusively rely on the auditory feedback coming from their voice to adjust their singing. Starting from this statement, we conduct a user study to find possible solutions to provide singers with further feedback during their performance. This paper is a preliminary study in this direction.