Fiona Redhead

Designing Interaction for Local Communications: An Urban Screen Study

This paper discusses the ongoing design and use of a digital community noticeboard situated in a suburban hub. The design intention is to engage residents, collect and display local information and communications, and spark discussion. A key contribution is an understanding of Situated Display navigation that aids retrieval from a long-term collection created by and for suburban community, and engaging qualities of this collection.

Bringing the Farmer Perspective to Agricultural Robots

The research reported in this paper explores autonomous technologies for agricultural farming application and is focused on the development of multiple-cooperative agricultural robots (AgBots). These are highly autonomous, small, lightweight, and unmanned machines that operate cooperatively (as opposed to a traditional single heavy machine) and are suited to work on broadacre land (large-scale crop operations on land parcels greater than 4,000m2). Since this is a new, and potentially disruptive technology, little is yet known about farmer attitudes towards robots, how robots might be incorporated into current farming practice, and how best to marry the capability of the robot with the work of the farmer. This paper reports preliminary insights (with a focus on farmer-robot control) gathered from field visits and contextual interviews with farmers, and contributes knowledge that will enable further work toward the design and application of agricultural robotics.

NNUB: the neighbourhood nub digital noticeboard system

Nnub is a community digital noticeboard situated in a public space within a community where many people pass by in their daily routines. Nnub is also accessible via the web. Locals upload notices and images to the noticeboard via a web/phone interface or by scribbling directly on the touchscreen. In the spirit of Web2.0, anyone can upload. Nnub aims to better support community communications simply and visually through simple interactions that mesh with and build upon existing community practices. It also aims to inspire new forms of sharing and connection. Nnub is short for Neighbourhood nub.

Understanding the fabric of social interactions for ridesharing through mining social networking sites

The design of applications for dynamic ridesharing or carpooling is often formulated as a matching problem of connecting people with an aligned set of transport needs within a reasonable interval of time and space. This problem formulation relegates social connections to being secondary factors. Technology assisted ridesharing applications that put the matching problem first have revealed that they suffer from being unable to address the factor of social comfort, even after adding friend features or piggybacking on social networking sites. This research aims to understand the fabric of social interactions through which ridesharing happens. We take an online observation approach in order to understand the fabric of social interactions for ridesharing that is happening in highly subscribed online groups of local residents. This understanding will help researchers to identify design challenges and opportunities to support ridesharing in local communities. This paper contributes a fundamental understanding of how social interactions and social comfort precede rideshare requests in local communities.

A Situated Display for Local Community Participation: The Design and Use of Nnub

This paper discusses the design and use of a digital community noticeboard (called Nnub) located at a suburban general store. The intention is to design Information and Communication Technology (ICT) such as Situated Displays and Internet Technologies to support local communications. We use a Reflective, Agile, and Iterative Design (RAID) framework to evolve the technology, aiming to engage local residents in creating an evolving collection of images, notices and scribbles by the community and for the community. A key contribution of this work is the understanding of the interaction requirements needed to support and engage the local community that were discovered through the iterative design and deployment method.