Darren Edge

Designing sports: a framework for exertion games

Exertion games require investing physical effort. The fact that such games can support physical health is tempered by our limited understanding of how to design for engaging exertion experiences. This paper introduces the Exertion Framework as a way to think and talk about Exertion Games, both for their formative design and summative analysis. Our Exertion Framework is based on the ways in which we can conceive of the body investing in game-directed exertion, supported by four perspectives on the body (the Responding Body, Moving Body, Sensing Body and Relating Body) and three perspectives on gaming (rules, play and context). The paper illustrates how this framework was derived from prior systems and theory, and presents a case study of how it has been used to inspire novel exertion interactions.

Cascade: crowdsourcing taxonomy creation

Taxonomies are a useful and ubiquitous way of organizing information. However, creating organizational hierarchies is difficult because the process requires a global understanding of the objects to be categorized. Usually one is created by an individual or a small group of people working together for hours or even days. Unfortunately, this centralized approach does not work well for the large, quickly changing datasets found on the web. Cascade is an automated workflow that allows crowd workers to spend as little at 20 seconds each while collectively making a taxonomy. We evaluate Cascade and show that on three datasets its quality is 80-90% of that of experts. Cascade has a competitive cost to expert information architects, despite taking six times more human labor. Fortunately, this labor can be parallelized such that Cascade will run in as fast as four minutes instead of hours or days.

MicroMandarin: mobile language learning in context

Learning a new language is hard, but learning to use it confidently in conversations with native speakers is even harder. From our field research with language learners, with support from Cognitive Psychology and Second Language Acquisition, we argue for the value of contextual microlearning in the many breaks spread across different places and throughout the day. We present a mobile application that supports such microlearning by leveraging the location-based service Foursquare to automatically provide contextually relevant content in the worlds major cities. In an evaluation of Mandarin Chinese learning, a four-week, 23-user study spanning Beijing and Shanghai compared this contextual system to a system based on word frequency. Study sessions with the contextual version lasted half as long but occurred in twice as many places as sessions with the frequency version, suggesting a complementary relationship between the two approaches.

Balancing exertion experiences

Exercising with others, such as jogging in pairs, can be socially engaging. However, if exercise partners have different fitness levels then the activity can be too strenuous for one and not challenging enough for the other, compromising engagement and health benefits. Our system, Jogging over a Distance, uses heart rate data and spatialized sound to create an equitable, balanced experience between joggers of different fitness levels who are geographically distributed. We extend this prior work by analyzing the experience of 32 joggers to detail how specific design features facilitated, and hindered, an engaging and balanced exertion experience. With this knowledge, we derive four dimensions that describe a design space for balancing exertion experiences: Measurement, Adjustment, Presentation and Control. We also present six design tactics for creating balanced exertion experiences described by these dimensions. By aiding designers in supporting participants of different physical abilities, we hope to increase participation and engagement with physical activity and facilitate the many benefits it brings about.

Understanding family communication across time zones

Nowadays it has become increasingly common for family members to be distributed in different time zones. These time differences pose specific challenges for communication within the family and result in different communication practices to cope with them. To gain an understanding of current challenges and practices, we interviewed people who regularly communicate with immediate family members living in other time zones. We report primary findings from the interviews, and identify design opportunities for improving the experience of cross time zone family communication.

Correlates of the cognitive dimensions for tangible user interface

We describe an application of the cognitive dimensions (CDs) of notations framework to tangible user interfaces (TUIs)—interaction with computers using physical devices other than mice and keyboards. We are particularly interested in situations where the TUI is used to construct some information structure (a manipulable solid diagram) and where that structure is intended to specify computer behaviour other than by direct manipulation (a tangible programming language). We analyse several tangible programming languages that have been described in previous research, considering the ways in which their physical properties influence the manipulability of the diagrammatic structure. This is the contribution that a CDs analysis would provide for any notation, but we find consistent ways in which particular dimensions can be predicted to apply to any solid diagram. We describe these as the tangible correlates of those dimensions. We then demonstrate that the tangible correlates can be used for both generative and analytic purposes in early stages of TUI design, much as CDs are applicable to the design of visual notations, but more immediately recognisable in their physical implications. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

HyperSlides: dynamic presentation prototyping

Presentations are a crucial form of modern communication, yet there is a dissonance between everyday practices with presentation tools and best practices from the presentation literature. We conducted a grounded theory study to gain a better understanding of the activity of presenting, discovering the potential for a more dynamic, automated, and story-centered approach to prototyping slide presentations that are themselves dynamic in their ability to help presenters rehearse and deliver their story. Our prototype tool for dynamic presentation prototyping, which we call HyperSlides, uses a simple markup language for the creation of hierarchically structured scenes, which are algorithmically transformed into hyperlinked slides of a consistent and minimalist style. Our evaluation suggests that HyperSlides helps idea organization, saves authoring time, creates aesthetic layouts, and supports more flexible rehearsal and delivery than linear slides, at the expense of reduced layout control and increased navigation demands.

Designing for Bodily Interplay in Social Exertion Games

While exertion games facilitate, and benefit from, social play, most exertion games merely support players acting independently. To help designers explore the richness of social play in exertion games, we present the design dimension “bodily interplay” that gives critical focus to how players’ bodies interact with one another. We offer two broad categories of bodily interplay—parallel and interdependent play—to explain how exertion games can facilitate independent and offensive/defensive-type experiences. These categories can be applied to both the physical and virtual space, and by looking at all permutations of these categories, we articulate four ways of coupling the spaces: comparative, actuated, derived, and projected coupling. This article illustrates the inspirational power of the dimensions by applying them to the analysis of four exertion games. Altogether, we articulate a vocabulary that can guide designers in the creation of social exertion games, helping players profit from the many benefits of exertion.

Designing mediated combat play

Supporting physical exertion is a growing trend in digital technology design. However, most experiences focus on bodily actions in which participants act independently of each other. In contrast, we focus on virtual body-to-body interactions between multiple participants, inspired by combat-oriented sports such as boxing that highlight the need to act while avoiding reciprocal bodily action. Mediating such body-to-body interactions with technology is challenging, particularly when participants are not co-located. Prior systems have often involved a mixture of novel physical interfaces and interactions through virtual avatars. This paper charts a design space for virtual combat play experiences and offers a set of design dimensions and recommendations for future systems. We draw on our experiences of designing and evaluating Remote Impact - a boxing-style exertion game involving aggressive bodily interaction with a large force-sensing projection surface. By expanding our knowledge of mediated exertion with an understanding of combat interactions we extend the social experience space of exertion play.

Bimanual tangible interaction with mobile phones

In the context of tangibility, mobile phones are rapidly becoming sensor-rich handheld computers with the potential to take better advantage of our physical capabilities and our lifetime of experiences interacting both in and with the world around us. In this paper, we analyse four different ways in which mobiles can be used to represent and control digital information, showing that each resulting interaction style is characterized by a unique coordination of the users attention and two hands in relation to the mobile device. We present our analysis in terms of a framework that can be used to critically examine future schemes of bimanual interaction with mobile phones.