Filip Kis

Enough power to move: dimensions for representing energy availability

Energy and design of energy-feedback are becoming increasingly important in the mobile HCI community. Our application area concerns electric vehicles, we thus depart from home and workplace appliances and address range and energy anxiety caused by short driving distance capabilities and long charging times in mobile settings. Meanwhile some research has been done on energy management of mobile devices, less has been done on mobility devices like electric vehicles. We explore this topic by letting conventional fuel car drivers reflect on their current driving habits through an exploration tool that we developed. Our results demonstrate three dimensions related to energy availability to consider for design of energy dependent mobility devices and provide explanations on how these dimensions could be utilize in our design through energy visualizations. With this we contributed not only by demonstrating aspects of energy availability and mobility, but also through opening up for new interesting possibilities and inquires in our and possibly other domains.

Linking Data to Action: Designing for Amateur Energy Management

Design of eco-feedback has primarily aimed at persuading individuals to change behaviours into more environmentally sustainable ones. However, it has been questioned how effective such feedback is in supporting long-term change. As an alternative focus for energy feedback, we present a case study of amateur energy management work in apartment buildings owned by housing cooperatives, and the design of an app that aims to stimulate and support cooperatives in taking energy actions that significantly reduce the cooperatives collective energy use. By linking energy data to energy actions, the users can see how actions taken in their own and other cooperatives affected the energy use, learn from each others experiences and become motivated as energy amateurs. Based on our housing cooperative case, we reflect on design aspects to consider when designing for energy management in amateur settings.

Augmenting PBL with large public presentations: a case study in interactive graphics pedagogy

We present a case study analyzing and discussing the effects of introducing the requirement of public outreach of original student work into the project-based learning of Advanced Graphics and Interaction (AGI) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. We propose Expo-Based Learning as Project-Based Learning augmented with the constructively aligned goal of achieving public outreach beyond the course. We promote this outreach through three challenges: 1) large public presentations; 2) multidisciplinary collaboration; and 3) professional portfolio building. We demonstrate that the introduction of these challenges, especially the public presentations, had lasting positive impact in the intended technical learning outcomes of AGI with the added benefit of learning team work, presentation skills, timeliness, accountability, self-motivation, technical expertise, and professionalism.

Lightweight Low-Level Query-Centric User Interface Modeling

Query languages are usually small, powerful and easy to learn, and that motivated us to investigate their role in modeling user interfaces. We explore annotation of template user interface with queries, especially embedded queries, to achieve partial generation of user interface with the ability to generate user interface with interaction styles such as form fillin and direct manipulation. Our model-driven development approach targets especially highly interactive data intensive applications. While our query-oriented user interface modeling principles have already been applied in an agile development environment, the role of this paper is to present a generalization of query-oriented modeling towards more interaction styles. Our modeling approach is annotation-based, thereby lightweight, and although it operates at a lower level than most current UI modeling approaches, its shows promising potential.

EVERT: energy representations for probing electric vehicle practice

Energy and design of energy-feedback are becoming increasingly important in the HCI community. Our application area concerns electric vehicles, we thus depart from home and workplace appliances and address range and energy anxiety caused by short driving distance capabilities and long charging times in mobile settings. We explore this topic by letting conventional fuel car drivers reflect on their current driving habits through an exploration tool that we use as a technology probe. Our preliminary results demonstrate the educational values of the energy representations in the tool, and we also identify a design tension for map-related energy representations.

YouPower: An open source platform for community-oriented smart grid user engagement

This paper presents YouPower, an open source platform designed to make people more aware of their energy consumption and encourage sustainable consumption with local communities. The platform is designed iteratively in collaboration with users in the Swedish and Italian test sites of the project to improve the design and increase active user participation. The community-oriented design is composed of parts that link energy data to energy actions, provide comparisons at different levels, generate dynamic time-of-use signals, offer energy conservation suggestions, and support social sharing. The goal is to bridge peoples attitude-behavior gap in energy consumption and to facilitate the behavior change process towards sustainable energy consumption that is implementable in peoples daily life. Preliminary results show that community-oriented energy intervention has the potential to improve user engagement significantly.

Declarative setup-free web application prototyping combining local and cloud datastores

The trend of “open data” coupled with the recent advancement in web development technologies and the proliferation of JavaScript frameworks has helped popularize programming of interactive web applications. Still, some of the common features of todays web applications that access data from own data stores or from web services require a complex setup or a significant amount of programming knowledge, and thus make it hard for developers to quickly prototype applications and iterate on solutions. Therefore, we propose Endev, a declarative framework for prototyping applications that use cloud data storage or web service data. By not needing to write any JavaScript code or set up any servers, Endev provides a low learning threshold. We show that Endev is perceived useful and easy to use through a study with 15 developers.

Generating Interactive Prototypes from Query Annotated Discourse Models

Abstract Model Based User Interface Development offers the possibility to design User Interfaces without being concerned about the underlying implementation. This is achieved by devising models at a high level of abstraction, thus creating the potential for involving users or domain experts to achieve a user-centered design process. Obtaining a running interactive application from such models usually requires several model transformations. One of the current problems is that while a user interface is generated after these transformations, other parts of the interactive system such as the application logic need to pre-exist or they must be written manually before the interface can be tested in a realistic scenario. This leaves the domain experts dependent on programmers and increases the time between iterations. In this paper we work with Query Annotations, which were previously used only for modeling at low levels and for generating fully functional interfaces, and we aim to generalize them for the high-level modeling approach called Discourse Modeling. The direct expected benefit of this generalization is the possibility to generate complete, readily testable interactive prototypes, rather than just their user interfaces. In addition, Query Annotations can serve as the mapping between the various levels of abstraction and bring to the domain experts a better understanding of the transformation process, as well as the possibility to modify the interfaces and models directly.

Towards Fully Declarative High-Level Interaction Models: An Approach Facilitating Automated GUI Generation

Models of high-level interaction design are usually based on procedural representation. For knowledge representation and reasoning, however, declarative representations are preferred. In this paper, we define purely declarative high-level interaction models based on theories of human communication. In contrast, earlier attempts to define purely declarative models resulted for pragmatic reasons in a mixed representation including procedural constructs within the overall declarative model structure. We show how the declarative models can be operationalized into behavioral (abstract) UI models corresponding to those generated from the mixed representation. Based on an implementation integrated with an existing framework for GUI generation, we show that and how it is possible to automatically generate GUIs from purely declarative models as well.

Endev: Declarative Prototyping with Data

The trend of Open Data and Internet-of-Things initiatives contribute to the ever growing amount of data available through web APIs. While building web applications has become easier with recent advancement in web development technologies and proliferation of JavaScript frameworks, the access to data from various APIs and data stores still poses certain challenges. It often requires complex setup and advanced programming skills that hinder the rapid prototyping efforts. Therefore, we propose Endev, a declarative framework for prototyping applications that is built on modern web technologies and supports building modern web applications, that utilize the vast amount of available data, without the need for setup or write complex JavaScript code.