Ingi Helgason

Tangible possibilities—envisioning interactions in public space.

This article explores approaches to envisionment in the field of interaction design. Design fictions are introduced as a method to articulate future possibilities. Three case studies are described which explore interaction in public space. The fictions create imaginative projections with the intention of generating reaction and responses in the public that will lead to a greater understanding of the physical and conceptual design space. The first case study explored how citizens could anonymously comment on their relationship with a city. The second study encouraged participants to reflect on their habits and rituals and to view these through fresh eyes. The final case study sought to surprise and engage gallery visitors through an interactive piece that raised issues concerning the surreptitious capture of data. The paper concludes by reflecting on the utility of design fictions and the role they can play in concept envisionment.

UrbanixD: designing human interactions in the networked city

Interaction Design, in an urban context, is an increasingly important field of research. City populations are currently in a state of rapid flux. Conurbations are fast becoming a hybrid of the physical environment and the digital datasphere. How we, as physical beings, will connect with, interpret and adapt this increasing dataflow residing in our cities is already becoming a significant research question. The SIG organisers will frame the discussion through a human-centred view of the concerns, experiences and behaviours that may occur in cities of the future. By adopting an approach of Thinking and Doing it is hoped that the SIG will act as a catalyst for community building.

Maker Movements, Do-It-Yourself Cultures and Participatory Design: Implications for HCI Research

Falling costs and the wider availability of computational components, platforms and ecosystems have enabled the expansion of maker movements and DIY cultures. This can be considered as a form of democratization of technology systems design, in alignment with the aims of Participatory Design approaches. However, this landscape is constantly evolving, and long-term implications for the HCI community are far from clear. The organizers of this one-day workshop invite participants to present their case studies, experiences and perspectives on the topic with the goal of increasing understanding within this area of research. The outcomes of the workshop will include the articulation of future research directions with the purpose of informing a research agenda, as well as the establishment of new collaborations and networks.

Making and Unfinishedness: Designing Toolkits for Negotiation

Abstract The diffusion and democratisation of computing technologies and physical prototyping systems has supported the rise of Do-It-Yourself culture. In the context of design innovation, this shift has undoubtedly blurred the lines between the roles of amateur and professional. Crowdsourcing platforms providing easily accessible, lightweight services to promote and fund ideas for new products can potentially radically compress the timescale from new concept generation to market. However, questions are emerging around these adjustments in the roles of amateur and professional, and to what extend individual makers and their communities can participate in, and benefit from, this new landscape. This paper will examine this situation using the framing of a “toolkit design and development” approach. We discuss the toolkit approach by drawing on the work of a current cross-European, interdisciplinary, collaborative project that is developing a technology toolkit to enable creation of locally based DIY networking systems.

The City in Cinema: How Popular Culture can Influence Research Agendas

Abstract This session at FET11 explored how the cinematic city could inspire researchers who are working on the transformative applications, concepts and infrastructures that will characterise the next decade. A series of film clips were shown under three broad categories: City as a System; Individual and the System; and Artefacts of the System. After each session a discussion took place among the participants and the emergent themes were recorded on notecards. These were photographed and displayed in a slideshow format for the remainder of the discussions. At the conclusion of the session it was agreed that the portrayal of future cities and the lives of their inhabitants in the cinema can reveal many enduring personal, societal and cultural concerns. These concerns must form the basis of requirements if technologies are to successfully integrate into our private and public lives.

Informing the design of the future urban landscape

This workshop will identify emerging themes that will impact on the design of the urban environment, through exploration of the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds. Participants in the workshop will collaborate in a practical exercise designed to act as a stimulus for thought concerning the nature of the products and services that will populate the urban landscape in the near future. The outcome of the workshop will be the identification and description of a series of issues that designers and technologists will have to address as they shape the interactions within the media-rich urban landscape. This will form the basis of new collaborative networks with the aim of taking this technological design research agenda further.

Making places: visualization, interaction and experience in urban space

The increase in information gathered and processed by large-scale urban sensors networks has generated a corresponding rise in interest in information visualization and interaction design. Creative initiatives in urban space explore how to translate complex data streams into engaging and meaningful outputs for experiencing and interacting with information. This one-day workshop will bring together practitioners and researchers who are interested in the organisation of human activities in urban space, and how these can be supported by technology in a positive way. This event is intended to share and stimulate an interdisciplinary discussion on the topic, with a view to contributing towards more consistent and creative forms of experiencing urban information.

Heaven and Hell: Visions for Pervasive Adaptation

With everyday objects becoming increasingly smart and the “info-sphere” being enriched with nano-sensors and networked to computationally-enabled devices and services, the way we interact with our environment has changed significantly, and will continue to change rapidly in the next few years. Being user-centric, novel systems will tune their behaviour to individuals, taking into account users’ personal characteristics and preferences. But having a pervasive adaptive environment that understands and supports us “behaving naturally” with all its tempting charm and usability, may also bring latent risks, as we seamlessly give up our privacy (and also personal control) to a pervasive world of business-oriented goals of which we simply may be unaware.

This Pervasive Day: Creative, Interactive Methods for Encouraging Public Engagement with FET Research

This paper describes a case study of a programme of interactive public engagement activities presented by the PerAda Co-ordination Action project (FET Proactive Initiative on Pervasive Adaptation) [1] in 2011. The intention behind these events was to inform an interested public audience about the technology and design of pervasive and adaptive computing systems in general, and PerAda research in particular. Additional explicit aims were to widen debate about the socio-technical implications of this research, and to assess public attitudes to its potential applications in an accessible, engaging and creative manner.