Daniel Fitton

Smart objects as building blocks for the Internet of things

The combination of the Internet and emerging technologies such as nearfield communications, real-time localization, and embedded sensors lets us transform everyday objects into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment. Such objects are building blocks for the Internet of Things and enable novel computing applications. As a step toward design and architectural principles for smart objects, the authors introduce a hierarchy of architectures with increasing levels of real-world awareness and interactivity. In particular, they describe activity-, policy-, and process-aware smart objects and demonstrate how the respective architectural abstractions support increasingly complex application.

Exploring bluetooth based mobile phone interaction with the hermes photo display

One of the most promising possibilities for supporting user interaction with public displays is the use of personal mobile phones. Furthermore, by utilising Bluetooth users should have the capability to interact with displays without incurring personal financial connectivity costs. However, despite the relative maturity of Bluetooth as a standard and its widespread adoption in todays mobile phones, little exploration seems to have taken place in this area - despite its apparent significant potential. This paper describe the findings of an exploratory study involving our Hermes Photo Display which has been extended to enable users with a suitable phone to both send and receive pictures over Bluetooth. We present both the technical challenges of working with Bluetooth and, through our user study, we present initial insights into general user acceptability issues and the potential for such a display to facilitate notions of community.

Probing communities: study of a village photo display

In this paper we describe a technology probe aiming to aid understanding of how digital displays can help support communities. Using a simple photo gallery application, deployed in a central social point in a small village and displaying user-generated photos and videos, we have been able to gain an understanding of this setting, field test our device and inspire new ideas directly from members of the community. We explore the process of deploying this display, the response from residents and how the display has taken a place within the community.

Exploring Issues of User Model Transparency and Proactive Behaviour in an Office Environment Control System

It is important that systems that exhibit proactive behaviour do so in a way that does not surprise or frustrate the user. Consequently, it is desirable for such systems to be both personalised and designed in such a way as to enable the user to scrutinise her user model (part of which should hold the rules describing the behaviour of the system). This article describes on-going work to investigate the design of a prototype system that can learn a given user’s behaviour in an office environment in order to use the inferred rules to populate a user model and support appropriate proactive behaviour (e.g. turning on the user’s fan under appropriate conditions). We explore the tension between user control and proactive services and consider issues related to the design of appropriate transparency with a view to supporting user comprehensibility of system behaviour. To this end, our system enables the user to scrutinise and possibly over-ride the ‘IF-THEN’ rules held in her user model. The system infers these rules from the context history (effectively a data set generated using a variety of sensors) associated with the user by using a fuzzy-decision-tree-based algorithm that can provide a confidence level for each rule in the user model. The evolution of the system has been guided by feedback from a number of real-life users in a university department. A questionnaire study has yielded supplementary results concerning the extent to which the approach taken meets users’ expectations and requirements.

Touch-screen technology for children: giving the right instructions and getting the right responses

While devices such as iPhones, iPads and Surface tables enable a wide range of interaction possibilities, we do not yet have a set of widely understood terminology that conveys the new and unfamiliar touch-screen gestures required for interaction. In this paper we explore terminology for touch-screen gestures and in particular the implications for child users. An initial study exploring touch-screen language with 6-7 year-olds is presented as an illustration of some of the key problems that designers need to be aware of. The children were able to perform a range of touch-screen gestures and transfer metaphors from other contexts but mistakes were observed. From this study we present a set of suggestions as to how designers of touch-screen applications can support children more effectively.

Exploring awareness related messaging through two situated-display-based systems

ABSTRACT This article focuses on our exploration of awareness issues through the design and long-term deployment of two systems: the Hermes office door display system (which enabled staff in a university department to post awareness messages to their door displays) and SPAM (a messaging system for supporting coordination between staff at two associated residential community care facilities). In the case of both systems, a significant number of the messages sent could be classified as relating to awareness. Furthermore, with both systems, the situatedness of displays (outside office doors in the case of Hermes and in staff offices in the case of SPAM) had a significant impact on the design and subsequent use of the deployed systems. In particular, the placement of displays provided significant context for awareness messages, including, for example, the identity of the sender of the message and the intended audience of the message. Both systems highlight the need for interaction methods that fit in with both normal working practices (and unplanned events) and that enable the user to manage communication channels. The need for appropriate levels of expressiveness and user control is also apparent: We present numerous examples of users controlling the precision of awareness information and sending awareness messages that have as much to do with playfulness as supporting coordination through activity awareness. This work is funded by the EPSRC funded CASIDE project (grant EP/C005589). The work also builds on work carried out under the EPSRC-funded Equator and CASCO projects. For links to these projects and related work, see http://www.hcibook.com/alan/papers/exploring-awareness-2007/

Exploring the Evolution of Office Door Displays

Within the field of ubiquitous computing, many of the issues related to the notion of ‘situated interaction’ remain very much under explored. For example, there is little understanding of the kinds of interactions or uses that are likely to occur when large numbers of interactive displays are publicly situated throughout an office environment. In this chapter, we describe the development, deployment and initial evaluation of the Hermes system, a system that comprises a collection of small interactive display units placed outside a number of offices within a University department. The placement outside offices is enabling us to explore some of the issues, such as appropriation control, that arise when interactive displays are situated in places that exhibit both public and private properties. To date, the development of the system has been guided by the principles of participatory design and our intention is that the use of the Hermes system will continue to evolve over a longitudinal period of time as it is used on a day-to-day basis by university staff and students alike.

CHECk: a tool to inform and encourage ethical practice in participatory design with children

When working with children in participatory design activities ethical questions arise that are not always considered in a standard ethics review. This paper highlights five challenges around the ethics of the value of design and the ethics of the childrens participation and presents a new tool, CHECk that deals with three of these challenges by virtue of two checklists that are designed to challenge researchers in CCI and HCI to critically consider the reasons for involving children in design projects and to examine how best to describe design activities in order that children can better consent to participate.

Developing Digital Records: Early Experiences of Record and Replay

In this paper we consider the development of ‘digital records’ to support ethnographic study of interaction and collaboration in ubiquitous computing environments and articulate the core concept of ‘record and replay’ through two case studies. One focuses on the utility of digital records, or records of interaction generated by a computer system, to ethnographic inquiry and highlights the mutually supportive nature of digital records and ethnographic methods. The other focuses on the work it takes to make digital records support ethnography, particularly the work of description and representation that is required to reconcile the fragmented character of interaction in ubiquitous computing environments. The work involved in ‘making digital records work’ highlights requirements for the design of tools to support the endeavour and informs the development of a Replay Tool. This tool enables ethnographers to visualize the data content of digital records; to extract sequences of relevance to analysis and remove non-relevant features; to marry recorded content with external resources, such as video; to add content from internal and external resources through annotation; and to reorder digital records to reflect the interactional order of events rather than the recorded order of events.

Exploring the Utility of Remote Messaging and Situated Office Door Displays

In recent years, the proliferation in use of the GSM short message service (or SMS) has prompted numerous studies into person to person messaging via mobile devices. However, to date, there has been relatively little exploration of systems that enable mobile messaging to (potentially ubiquitous) situated displays rather than the mobile devices of particular individuals. In this paper, we describe the results of an ongoing trial to explore the utility of a system that enables lecturers in a computing department to use their mobile phones to send messages to digital displays situated outside their offices.