Erica Robles

From materials to materiality: thinking of computation from within an Icehotel

Two hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, in a remote landscape dominated by the darkness of long winters, lies Sweden’s most popular tourist destination—the Icehotel. For more than 20 years, this frozen edifice has served as a nexus for convening international teams of artists, designers, engineers, and architects. Each year, they transform the mundane substances of the tundra—snow and ice—into remarkable contemporary designs. The result is a spectacular architecture more than 5,500 square meters (59,209 square feet) filled with ice suites, ice rooms, ice galleries, ice furniture, an ice church, and an ice bar. Every setting is composed almost exclusively of one material—frozen water. What this singular focus on material reformulation offers interaction design is an architectural allegory for examining the relationship of materiality to composition from within a computational moment.

Speech-Based Disclosure Systems: Effects of Modality, Gender of Prompt, and Gender of User

Disclosure of personal information is valuable to individuals, governments, and corporations. This experiment explores the role interface design plays in maximizing disclosure. Participants (N = 100) were asked to disclose personal information to a telephone-based speech user interface (SUI) in a 3 (recorded speech vs. synthesized speech vs. text-based interface) by 2 (gender of participant) by 2 (gender of voice) between-participants experiment (with no voice manipulation in the text conditions). Synthetic speech participants exhibited significantly less disclosure and less comfort with the system than text-based or recorded-speech participants. Females were more sensitive to differences between synthetic and recorded speech. There were significant interactions between modality and gender of speech, while there were no gender identification effects. Implications for the design of speech-based information-gathering systems are outlined.

The connector service-predicting availability in mobile contexts

In this thriving world of mobile communications, the difficulty of communication is no longer contacting someone (the receiver), but rather contacting them in a socially appropriate manner. Ideally, senders should have some understanding of a receivers availability in order to make contact at the right time, in the right contexts, and with the optimal communication medium. This paper describes our ongoing research on the Connector, an adaptive and context-aware service designed to facilitate efficient and appropriate communication. We describe a set of empirical studies whose results converge upon the important subject of peoples availability in mobile contexts.s

The Social Life of Information Displays: How Screens Shape Psychological Responses in Social Contexts

ABSTRACT This article presents the results of two experimental laboratory studies that establish relationships between displays and peoples attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors toward self, others, and social situations. Experiment I investigates how participants (N = 40) engaging in a trivia game respond when their answers and performance feedback evaluations are made public via either a large shared display or each persons laptop display. Using a 2 (answer display: shared vs. personal) × 2 (feedback display: shared vs. personal) between-participants, nested design, we find that participants exhibit differential levels of social anxiety, enjoyment, willingness to change answers, and attributions of coparticipant competence. Participants whose answers are shown on the shared display exhibit greater social anxiety but are attributed with greater competence by their peers. Viewing information on the shared display induces a greater degree of change in answers. Precisely because all information is public throughout the experiment, we are able to isolate the effects of sharing screens as opposed to sharing information. Experiment II (N = 40) builds from Experiment I by employing similar display configurations within an explicitly persuasive context. In a 2 (display: shared vs. personal) × 2 (context: common vs. personal) × 2 (content presentation style: common vs. interpersonal), mixed experimental design we produce systematic differences in the persuasiveness of information, peoples engagement with content, and sense of social distance from each other. Through both experiments strong consistency effects are evident: enjoyment, engagement, and persuasiveness are all diminished where incongruencies are part of the experimental conditions. So too these mismatches increase the sense of social distance from others in the setting. We discuss the implications for future research and design of display ecologies and situated media.

The Connector Service: Representing Availability for Mobile Communication

This chapter will discuss the Connector service. The goal was to build a mobile communication system that could help people better manage the risk of untimely interruptions in an always-on world, where we can reach each other anytime and anyplace. In an iterative process of design, we have developed technologies that intelligently and nondisruptively integrate into human communication processes.