Hamed S. Alavi

An Ambient Awareness Tool for Supporting Supervised Collaborative Problem Solving

We describe an ambient awareness tool, named Lantern, designed for supporting the learning process in recitation sections, (i.e., when students work in small teams on the exercise sets with the help of tutors). Each team is provided with an interactive lamp that displays their work status: the exercise they are working on, if they have called for help, since when, and on which exercise. Lantern, by providing this information, is meant to facilitate the interaction between tutors and teams, and to encourage collaboration among students. We report on a user study that examines the impact of Lantern on individual and group behavior in recitation sections. The results show how Lantern can improve the efficiency of tutor-teams interaction, increase the intrateam collaboration, and improve the structure of interteam communications. On the other hand, having a minimalist design, and being embedded in the classroom environment, it avoids diverting the focus of students from their main task and fades quickly in the periphery when not used.

Deconstructing human-building interaction

Interaction design is increasingly about embedding interactive technologies in our built environment; architecture is increasingly about the use of interactive technologies to reimagine and dynamically repurpose our built environment. This forum focuses on this intersection of interaction and architecture. --- Mikael Wiberg, Editor

Extensible encoding of type hierarchies

The subtyping test consists of checking whether a type t is a descendant of a type r (Agrawal et al. 1989). We study how to perform such a test efficiently, assuming a dynamic hierarchy when new types are inserted at run-time. The goal is to achieve time and space efficiency, even as new types are inserted. We propose an extensible scheme, named ESE, that ensures (1) efficient insertion of new types, (2) efficient subtyping tests, and (3) small space usage. On the one hand ESE provides comparable test times to the most efficient existing static schemes (e.g.,Zibin et al. (2001)). On the other hand, ESE has comparable insertion times to the most efficient existing dynamic scheme (Baehni et al. 2007), while ESE outperforms it by a factor of 2-3 times in terms of space usage.

Studying Space Use: Bringing HCI Tools to Architectural Projects

Understanding how people use different spaces in a building can inform design interventions aimed at improving the utility of that building, but can also inform the design of future buildings. We studied space use in an office building following a method we have designed to reveal the occupancy rate and navigational patterns. Our method involves two key components: 1) a pervasive sensing system that is scalable for large buildings, and high number of occupants, and 2) participatory data analysis engaging stakeholders including interior architects and building performance engineers, to refine the questions and define the needs for further analyses through multiple iterations. In this paper, we describe our method in detail, and exemplify how HCI methods and approaches can contribute to professional building design projects.

Is Driverless Car Another Weiserian Mistake

We present a structured discussion of the concept of driverless car as a major Ubicomp project, and particularly of its hypothetical integration into the fabric of city. The analytical framework is borrowed from the Transportation and Urban research domains, which provides us with a list of agreed-upon subject matters when accounting for car mobility in urban design. We pose concrete questions about each of these subjects as how self-driven personal vehicles could have a positive or negative impact on them. Out of the six discussed topics, this initial examination showed that driverless car could have a negative impact on five, suggesting smoke detected, and thus the need for broadening such inspections.

Comfort: A Coordinate of User Experience in Interactive Built Environments

Comfort as a technical term in the domain of architecture has been used meticulously to describe, assess, and understand some of the essential qualities of buildings, across four dimensions: visual, thermal, acoustic, and respiratory. This body of knowledge can be drawn upon to shed light on the growing branch of HCI that pursues a shift from “artifact” to “environment” (and from “usability” to “comfort”). We contribute to this conceptual-contextual transition in three consecutive steps: (1) sketch the outline of comfort studies in the scholar field of Architecture and the ones in Human-Computer Interaction, (2) propose a schematic model of comfort that captures its interactive characteristics and, (3) demonstrate an interactive tool, called ComfortBox, that we prototyped to help answer some of the research questions about the perception of comfort in built environments.

Strong Technology-Enhanced Learning Concepts

Although not unheard of, there is a scarcity of intermediate-level concepts (not as generalizable as theories, but with an applicability wider than a single technology or intervention) in technology-enhanced learning (TEL) research. In this paper we propose ‘strong TEL concepts’, as intermediate-level bodies of design knowledge that are both grounded in research evidence from multiple technologies and contexts, and have clear theoretical connections. We describe the main features of this kind of concepts, along with a practical method for developing them as valuable research contributions. We also propose ‘purposeful disengagement’ as an example of strong TEL concept, to ignite the dialogue in our community about the necessity and benefits of this kind of knowledge to support both TEL design and theory advancement.

Looking THROUGH versus Looking AT: A Strong Concept in Technology Enhanced Learning

When watching an educational video, our eyes look for relevant information related to the topic that is being explained at that particular moment. Studying the learners’ gaze behavior and particularly how it correlates with their performance, we have found a series of results, which converge to an understanding about learner behavior that is more abstracted than the use situation or the studied learning contexts. In this contribution we present “Looking Through vs. Looking At” as a generative intermediate-level body of knowledge, and show how it can construct a Strong Concept (as developed by Hook [10]) in technology enhanced learning (TEL). “Looking At”, simply put, refers to missing the relevant information because of either looking at the incorrect place or lagging behind the teacher in time. “Looking Through”, on the other hand, is the success in finding the relevant displayed information at the right moment such that the communication, through verbal and visual channels, becomes synchronous. The visual medium becomes transparent and the learning experience shifts from interacting with the material to interacting with the teacher. We define formally and show how to quantify the proposed strong concept in dyadic interaction scenarios. This concept is applicable to MOOC video interaction, but also to other learning scenarios such as (collaborative) problem solving. We put a particular emphasis on the generative aspect of the concept and demonstrate, with examples, how it can help designing solutions for interactive learning situations.

The Hide and Seek of Workspace: Towards Human-Centric Sustainable Architecture

This contribution exemplifies how the study of space perception and its impact on space-use behavior can inform sustainable architecture. We describe our attempt to integrate the methods of user research in an architectural project that was focused on optimization of space usage. In an office building, two large office rooms were refurbished to provide desk-sharing opportunities through hot-desking. We studied the space-use behavior of 33 office workers over eight weeks in those two rooms as well as their occasional presence in ten other areas (cafeteria, atrium, meeting rooms, etc.). Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed to understand the nature and nuances of space occupancy at the scope of the building and within the refurbished offices. While at the scope of building the patterns of movements between rooms were found to be related to the professional profile of the users, at the scope of office the occupancy patterns were influenced by the spatial design of workspaces. More precisely, certain visual attributes of a workspace, namely Visual Exposure and Visual Openness, could determine whether or not it was regularly used. In this paper, we describe our findings in detail and discuss their implications for sustainable building design.

Rethinking Wearables in the Realm of Architecture

The architectural built environments, which so ubiquitously, act as shelters and shape our daily personal and social experiences, can soon be envisioned as being interacted with and mediated through wearables. This conjecture is becoming salient with the increased interactivity of our built environments, and a sustained drive to render them energy efficient. This entails for the upscaled re-design, appropriation, and assessment of functions that are typically ascribed to wearable technologies, as well as the grounding of users’ socio-technical interactions and experiences within the built environments.