Chiara Leonardi

Multimodal support to group dynamics

The complexity of group dynamics occurring in small group interactions often hinders the performance of teams. The availability of rich multimodal information about what is going on during the meeting makes it possible to explore the possibility of providing support to dysfunctional teams from facilitation to training sessions addressing both the individuals and the group as a whole. A necessary step in this direction is that of capturing and understanding group dynamics. In this paper, we discuss a particular scenario, in which meeting participants receive multimedia feedback on their relational behaviour, as a first step towards increasing self-awareness. We describe the background and the motivation for a coding scheme for annotating meeting recordings partially inspired by the Bales’ Interaction Process Analysis. This coding scheme was aimed at identifying suitable observable behavioural sequences. The study is complemented with an experimental investigation on the acceptability of such a service.

Knocking on elders' door: investigating the functional and emotional geography of their domestic space

The domestic environment is more than a place where to live. It is a territory of meaning, a place where pleasure, affect and aesthetics are deeply interwoven with the functional and utilitarian dimensions. With the aging process, the home is progressively invested with new meanings and functions, and becomes the emotional center of older peoples life. This paper presents a user study based on cultural probes on how domestic spaces are managed and perceived by older adults, uncovering some of the complex interrelations among the daily activities, objects and meanings revolving around the home. The findings provide suggestions on how the dimensions of remembrance, perception of safety and environmental stability may affect the design of domestic technology for elderly people.

An exploratory study of a touch-based gestural interface for elderly

This paper presents the design ideas and a preliminary study of a touch-based gestural interface to support older adults in social networking. We had the hypothesis that the directness of gestures made them well suited to implement an interaction metaphor based on familiarity. Although preliminary, this hypothesis can be sustained. In particular, we found that most of the gestures (and in particular the iconic and the dynamic ones) have a hedonic quality that attracted and motivated our participants. We think that our results may contribute to the ongoing debate about gestural interfaces and help in understanding the value and the issue of this form of interaction.

A single-user tabletop card game system for older persons: General lessons learned from an in-situ study

This paper discusses some general results from an in-situ study of the use of a tabletop system for card playing that differs in several ways from most tabletop systems: 1. It was designed primarily for use by senior citizens with little or no computer experience. 2. It is a single-user system, though social interaction with nearby persons during its use is typical. 3. It includes a simple conversational agent (representing the gamepsilas other player). 4. It is used in a setting (a senior citizenspsila center) in which the users also play cards in the traditional ways. A total of 42 regular visitors of the center participated over a 4-week period. From our observations and results, we draw several conclusions that should apply to other tabletop systems that share one or more of the characteristics just listed.

Design as intercultural dialogue: coupling human-centered design with requirement engineering methods

In the design of information technologies, the challenge of integrating a human-centered design approach with software engineering methods emerge in different forms. The main challenge is to set the ground for different disciplines and professional cultures communicate and work together. The orchestration of different contributions and the establishment of communication practices that facilitates the integration of the different languages and procedures are crucial steps to take full advantage of different research traditions. This paper presents a case study in which human-centered design and requirement engineering methodologies have been used within a large research projects aiming at developing innovative technologies and services to support professionals in nursing homes. The design process took the form of an intercultural dialogue that required human-centered and requirement-engineering professionals to work across borders. Starting from our case study, the paper presents the boundaries identified between the human-centered and the engineering perspective and proposes a framework to guide the integration process conceived as an intercultural dialogue between disciplines.

The Mobile Territorial Lab: a multilayered and dynamic view on parents’ daily lives

The exploration of people’s everyday life has long been of interest to social scientists. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in analyzing human behavioral data generated by technology (e.g. mobile phones). To date, a few large-scale studies have been designed to measure human behaviors and interactions using multiple sources of data. A common characteristic of these studies is the population under investigation: students having similar daily routines and needs. This choice constraints the range of behaviors, of places and the generalization of the results. In order to widen this line of studies, we focus on a different target group: parents with young children aged 0 through 10 years. Children influence multiple aspects of their parents’ lives, from the satisfaction of basic human needs and the fulfillment of social roles to their financial status and sleep quality.In this paper, we describe the Mobile Territorial Lab (MTL) project, a longitudinal living lab which has been sensing by means of technology (mobile phones) the lives of more than 100 parents in different areas of the Trentino region in Northern Italy. We present the preliminary results after two years of experimentation of, to the best of our knowledge, the most complete picture of parents’ daily lives. Through the collection and analysis of the collected data, we created a multi-layered view of the participants’ lives, tracking social interactions, mobility routines, spending patterns, and personality characteristics.Overall, our results prove the relevance of living lab approaches to measure human behaviors and interactions, which can pave the way to new studies exploiting a richer number of behavioral indicators. Moreover, we believe that the proposed methodology and the collected data could be very valuable for researchers from different disciplines such as social psychology, sociology, computer science, economy, etc., which are interested in understanding human behaviour.

The Collaborative Workspace: A Co-located Tabletop Device to Support Meetings

In this chapter, we describe the design and development of co-located multi user collaborative displays that aim to support effective social interactions within a small group of professionals engaged in meeting activities. Several studies have investigated and tried to go beyond the design paradigm developed for single-user/singledesktop interaction in order to support face-to-face collaborative activities. Several helpful design principles have emerged from research on shared workspaces and colocated technologies.

Ahab's leg: exploring the issues of communicating semi-formal requirements to the final users

In this paper, we present our experience in using narrative scenarios as a tool to communicate and validate semi-formal requirements with the stakeholders in a large software project. The process of translating the semiformal language of Tropos into the narrative form of scenarios is introduced and some unintended implications of this process are discussed. In particular, we define the notion of Ahabs leg to describe the necessity to introduce new constraints or features in a description when moving to a different representational language. Starting from the lessons learned with this specific case study, we derive some general implications concerning the issue of requirement translation for validation tasks and we propose some methodological guidelines to address the Ahabs leg dilemma.

Virtual helper or virtual card player? contrasting responses of older users

In the NETCARITY project, we conducted several complementary investigation activities with elderly people revolving around the design of technology for the home environment. In this paper, we investigate the potential impact of virtual characters in making the interaction with the technology-enhanced home more effective and engaging. We briefly discuss two experiences in using a virtual agent as an interface metaphor for a computer system targeted to elderly people with very low computer skill. The lesson that can be learned from those experiences is that a virtual agent may sometimes be effectively used to improve the acceptance of new technologies for this class of users. In particular, in settings characterized by a social interaction, where emotional stress is low (as with entertainment applications), the presence of a virtual character facilitates the acceptance of the technology by helping it to fit into the social environment. In the opposite case, in contexts where trust is an important factor or in life-threatening situations, a virtual agent is less likely to be credible.

Design Opportunities for Wearable Devices in Learning to Climb

In this paper, we present a field study on the learning of climbing aimed at defining the design space of wearable devices to support beginners. Three main findings have emerged from our study. First, climbing has a strong emotional impact on beginners; therefore, learning to climb requires mastering new motor patterns as well as negative emotions, such as stress and fear. Second, the feeling of danger that climbers often experience can be mitigated by trust in the climbing partner and the perception of her active presence. Finally, a big problem in climbing is the communication difficulty between the climbing partners and between climber and instructor. We conclude the paper presenting four design considerations for the design of wearable devices meant to support the learning of climbing by providing the actors involved with augmented communication. Such augmented communication should address both the physical and the emotional difficulties of this sport.