Florian Güldenpfennig

Think globally, act locally: a case study of a free food sharing community and social networking

Social networking has a long history of supporting communities online. In this paper we are concerned with a specific community that has formed around free food sharing to save food from being wasted. Specifically, Foodsharing.de is a platform that enables consumers, farmers, organizations and retailers to offer and collect food. Associated with this is the Foodsharing Facebook group where broader community discussions take place. We report on a qualitative analysis of the Foodsharing Facebook group to understand its role in emerging and sustaining the community. The Facebook group is a place where the individual values and motives, socio-political discussions and mass media interrelate and create new social patterns through narratives and local community building. We present our findings as interplay between individual, community, organisational levels, public relations and media, the operational platform Foodsharing.de that enables local communities and the Facebook group where global ideological framing of the community takes place.

Why and what did we throw out?: Probing on Reflection through the Food Waste Diary

Issues of consumer food waste in industrialised countries are becoming an increasing concern and this is paralleled by a growing interest in HCI to support more sustainable consumption practices. In this paper we report on a mobile food waste diary application that was made available on app stores, with the aim of enabling motivated people to reflect on their moments of food waste and to explore rationales. Through analysis of the entries submitted by users of the diary application, we identify instances of reflection located on different levels. The intention of supporting reflection was visible in instances of submitted diary entries where deeper in- sights about the relationships between food waste, previous experiences, habits, knowledge, occurrences and intentions to change were offered.

Persuasive technology considered harmful? an exploration of design concerns through the TV companion

Persuasive Technology has great potential to positively influence users in a wide variety of areas such as health, well-being and environmental sustainability. However, concerns have been raised regarding issues such as surveillance, lack of autonomy and coercion that might be involved with the application of such technologies. This paper articulates a set of design concerns around these themes and presents a study of the TV Companion, an instance of a behavior change system that takes into account these concerns. The TV Companion is an application aimed to address the societal issue of prolonged TV consumption with its related potential negative effects and aims to foster more reflective TV viewing among children and their parents. To explore the application of these design approaches in a real world setting we report the findings of a field study of the TV companion in three families with pre-school children and reflect on how the design concerns shaped the experience and use of the TV companion.

Of unkempt hair, dirty shirts and smiling faces: capturing behind the mobile camera

What would it be like, if every photo could be turned around to reveal its photographer in the moment of image capture? In this paper we report on a new camera phone application BehindTheCamera (BTC). In contrast to traditional photography, BTC employs both front and rear cameras to capture not only the target of interest, but also the photographer or scene behind the camera. We conducted an exploratory study with 8 participants over 10 months to reveal usage patterns and possible benefits for the user. A thematic analysis of the BTC images suggested seven salient categories of use. Our findings were substantiated by in-depth interviews and later review of images with the participants to capture their experience with BTC. The findings point to the value of BTC for supporting creativity, play, and capturing the interplay of photographer and motif for later rich reflection.

A monitoring device as assistive lifestyle technology: combining functional needs with pleasure

Assistive Technologies can be of enormous help for people with disabilities. Still, such supportive devices are often considered to be poor in aesthetics, leaving the person feeling stigmatised by the technology and resulting in a reduced usage and compliance. In this paper we report on a case study of a young person suffering from cerebral palsy and describe a wearable device, RemoteLogCam, that was designed to help him self-manage his hand spasms and at the same time provide his first opportunity to take his own photos. We call this an example of assistive lifestyle technologies (ALT), designed not only to assist people with special needs in a functional sense, but that also enhance the experience of such a device in a pleasing way. In this case, over the course of 6 months use to date, RemoteLogCam augmented our participants own self-management of spasms and his creative and practical documentation needs.

Towards Rapid Technology Probes for Senior People

In HCI, there is much interest in exploring novel technology-mediated communication that can empower older users who don’t have easy access to regular computers. In this paper we exploit the potential of smart phones and tablet computers to create a series of technology probes that we deploy long-term making use of close family members. By this means participants can gain experiences with robust and fully implemented devices at a very early stage of design. We lay out four prototypes of communication technologies with different forms and functions for older adults. We describe the features of these devices including some indicative feedback from our informal deployment study. We thereby suggest that mobile phones are a suitable means for the rapid prototyping of communication technologies for senior people and can possibly provide useful input to later participatory or co-design activities. The overall work is still ongoing hence the main contribution of the paper is about the potential of rapid technology probes as a design technique and in less detail about the potential of the prototypes as AAL communication devices.

Interactive and Open-Ended Sensory Toys: Designing with Therapists and Children for Tangible and Visual Interaction

Treating neurological conditions like cerebral visual impairment (CVI) and related disabilities is a complex challenge where the needs of the affected persons have to be considered individually. It is also commonly agreed that stimulating the bodys senses, as part of early intervention programs, is a crucial activity in therapy. With this paper, we add to the literature on how tangible and embodied interaction can facilitate such stimulation of the body and provide engaging experiences for children with (multiple) disabilities. Our report entails a detailed description of a co-design process involving early intervention specialists and affected children over the course of six months and multiple prototype iterations. According to our participants, the strengths of the resulting products or therapeutic toys are their open-endedness and versatile applicability, meeting individual needs and making therapeutic sessions both enriching and fun for the children.

Tangible Audio Game Development Kit: Prototyping Audio Games with a Tangible Editor

Audio games are a genre of computer games that waive visual output and solely rely on audio. The majority of audio games (as well as video games) lack publicly available editors that allow the creation of new games or maps within the framework of the respective game. Additionally, no existing game or map editors make use of tangible interaction to facilitate embodied interaction during the creation of games. However, many elements in audio games can be mapped in a profitable way to a tangible editor. We therefore propose the Tangible Audio Game Development Kit that allows fast, iterative and collaborative audio game prototyping by combining physical objects. In this paper, we introduce a first prototype of this concept and present a user study featuring three game design experts. We discuss the results and explain the next steps in advancing the audio game editor based on the feedback.

Handle the Way: Enhancing Web Accessibility for People with Disability

The web has become the primary mechanism for information delivery. However, for people with an intellectual disability there can be significant barriers in accessing the web. This research aims to design a novel solution to help people with a disability, especially people who cannot type easily or correctly, to access the web independently. We propose to utilize Near Field Communication tokens to store and materialize website addresses into tangible handles for web access. Most importantly, we use tokens to store frequently used key words and serve as visual aids to enable query through combination of different search tokens. This solution has the potential to improve the quality of life yet is still relatively simple and affordable. Furthermore, together with other advanced technologies such as 3D printing for personalized tokens, it opens up the opportunities for co-design between people with disability and caregivers, customized services and collaborative support for diverse users via online volunteers.

Towards fast and interactive prototypes of mobile apps

With the advent of modern mobile phones and tablet devices unprecedented opportunities arise to create rich user experiences that incorporate the context in which the interaction is situated. Sensors and other built-in technologies provide designers with a variety of possibilities for new and exciting applications. Since building such applications requires specialists there is an increasing demand for tools supporting people without programming skills to access, explore and design for the opportunities of mobile devices. In this paper we present a novel prototyping system named FamOz that combines the ease of paper prototyping with the efficiency of Wizard of Oz while exploiting the interactivity offered by new mobile devices. FamOz allows designers and researchers to evaluate mobile prototypes in situated real-world settings in an early stage of development.