Jaime Snyder

MoodLight: Exploring Personal and Social Implications of Ambient Display of Biosensor Data

MoodLight is an interactive ambient lighting system that responds to biosensor input related to an individuals current level of arousal. Changes in levels of arousal correspond to fluctuations in the color of light provided by the system, altering the immediate environment in ways intimately related to the users private internal state. We use this intervention to explore personal and social implications of the ambient display of biosensor data. A design probe study conducted with university students provided the opportunity to observe MoodLight being used by individuals and dyads. Discussion of findings highlights key tensions associated with the dialectics of technology-mediated self-awareness and automated disclosure of personal information, addressing issues of agency, skepticism and uncertainty. This study provides greater understanding of the ways in which the representations of personal informatics, with a focus on ambient feedback, influence our perceptions of ourselves and those around us.

Visual Representation of Information as Communicative Practice

Anyone who has clarified a thought or prompted a response during a conversation by drawing a picture has exploited the potential of image making to convey information. Images are increasingly ubiquitous in daily communication due to advances in visually enabled information and communication technologies (ICT), such as information visualization applications, image retrieval systems, and virtual collaborative work tools. Although images are often used in social contexts, information science research concerned with the visual representation of information typically focuses on the image artifact and system building. To learn more about image making as a form of social interaction and as a form of information practice, a qualitative study examined face‐to‐face conversations involving the creation of ad hoc visualizations (i.e., “napkin drawings”). Interactional sociolinguistic concepts of conversational involvement and coordination guided multimodal analysis of video‐recorded interactions that included spontaneous drawing. Findings show patterns in communicative activities associated with the visual representation of information. Furthermore, the activity of mark making contributes to the maintenance of conversational involvement in ways that are not always evident in the drawn artifact. This research has implications for the design and evaluation of visually enabled virtual collaboration environments, visual information extraction and retrieval systems, and data visualization tools.

Information studios: Integrating arts-based learning into the education of information professionals

An ink jet printing apparatus responsive to an input digital image for producing a halftone image on a receiver, such as a lithographic plate, having halftone dots with each halftone dot being formed by one or more microdots in a screen dot of selectable areas, including an adjustable printhead for delivering different volumes of ink droplets which, when they contact the receiver, forming microdots of different areas according to the selected screen dot size. The apparatus delivers ink to the printhead and is responsive to a selected screen dot size and the digital image to control the printhead to form ink droplets of different volumes to produce a halftone image on the receiver.This article is focused on the changes needed in design to create positive solutions for all involved in design processes. It draws upon the rich discussion and discourse from a conference focused on positive design involving managers, designers, and IT specialists, all focused on overcoming the problem-based focus and decision paradigms to enhance all phases of the design processes to develop sustainable solutions for real issues in a changing world. Therefore, all fields using design, consciously or not, including management, Information Communication Technology (ICT), and designers as well, need to redesign their processes and first rethink their design paradigms on a meta level.

Real-Time Representation Versus Response Elicitation in Biosensor Data

Recognized stress management techniques include cultivating mindfulness, breathing exercises, and meditation. While these approaches have been shown to mitigate the negative effects of stress, they can be difficult to learn or consistently apply. To support these techniques, we developed MoodLight, a playful system that uses ambient colored light to provide feedback regarding an individuals current arousal levels. Like many affective computing systems, MoodLight was designed to help users observe their internal state and learn to relax. However, our findings indicate that prompting or leading feedback can be more effective than real time feedback in helping users relax. This work contributes to affective computing by suggesting alternative approaches to designing biofeedback systems for stress management.

Drawing practices in image-enabled collaboration

Advances in image-making tools have greatly increased our opportunities to use images to collaborate. Much current research in the area of visualization focuses on building systems to generate visual representations of large data sets. A small but growing subset of this research focuses on collaborative aspects of information and data visualization. In order to expand the scope of collaborative visualization research, a qualitative study examined the role that spontaneous drawing practices play in face-to-face conversations. Empirical examples describe the creation and use of drawing as a form of social interaction. This study provides a methodological and theoretical basis for viewing the process of generating a visual artifact in a collaborative context from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective. Findings identify affordances of drawing related to both material object (artifact) and communicative performance (activity). Implications for design are discussed in terms of both refined heuristics and enhanced features for image-enabled collaborative tools.

Quantifying the Changeable Self: The Role of Self-Tracking in Coming to Terms With and Managing Bipolar Disorder

There has been a recent increase in the development of digital self-tracking tools for managing mental illness. Most of these tools originate from clinical practice and are, as a result, largely clinician oriented. As a consequence, little is known about the self-tracking practices and needs of individuals living with mental illness. This understanding is important to guide the design of future tools to enable people to play a greater role in managing their health. In this article, we present a qualitative study focusing on the self-tracking practices of 10 people with bipolar disorder. We seek to understand the role self-tracking has played as they have come to grips with their diagnosis and attempted to self-manage their health. A central motivation for these participants is to identify risky patterns that may be harbingers of mood episodes, as well as positive trends that support recovery. What emerges is a fragmented picture of self-tracking, with no clear delineation between clinician-initiated and self-initiated practices, as well as considerable challenges participants face in making observations of themselves when their sense of self and emotional state is in flux, uncertain, and unreliable. Informed by these observations, we discuss the merits of a new form of self-tracking that combines manual and automated methods, addresses both clinician and individual needs, helps engage people with bipolar disorder in treatment, and seeks to overcome the significant challenges they face in self-monitoring.

Social media futures: why iSchools should care

Social Media Futures was a 3 day charrette at a major university that brought together students with various backgrounds to consider the future impact of social media on business, and to think about what opportunities that might create. However, topics that arose touched on a variety of themes that included social media communities, ownership, privacy and governance of user-generated content on social networks, and how social media may impact education and learning at all ages. This paper provides our observations from this multi-disciplinary charrette, and articulates why iSchools need to be concerned with social media.

Technology-Mediated Sight: A Case Study of Early Adopters of a Low Vision Assistive Technology

A case study of early adopters of a head-mounted assistive device for low vision provides the basis for a sociotechnical analysis of technology-mediated sight. Our research complements recent work in HCI focused on designing, building, and evaluating the performance of assistive devices for low vision by highlighting psychosocial and adaptive aspects of digitally enhanced vision. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with users of the eSight 2.0 device and customer-facing employees of the eSight company, we sought to better understand the social and emotional impacts associated with adoption of this type of low-vision assistive technology. Four analytic themes emerged from our interviews: 1) assessing the value of assistive technology in real life, 2) negotiating social engagement, 3) boundaries of sight, and 4) attitudes toward and expectations of technology. We introduce the concept of multiplicities of vision to describe technology-mediated sight as being a form of skilled vision and neither fully-human nor fully-digital, but rather, assembled through a combination of social and technical affordances. We propose that instead of seeing low-vision users through a deficit model of sight, HCI designers have more to gain by viewing people with low vision as individuals with a distinct type of skilled vision that is both socially and technologically mediated.

Social Dimensions of Technology-Mediated Sight

Users of wearable vision technology, such as eSight assistive eyewear, have a distinct relationship with sight influenced by personal, social, and cultural perceptions and practices. In order to better understand the ways in which vision is socially constructed through technology-mediated sight, we conducted qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 13 users of eSight glasses. Our interviews focused on eliciting narratives about eSight use from initial introduction of the technology to current daily practices. Emerging findings describe ways in which technology-mediated vision is experienced in relation to (1) adaptive practices, (2) social participation, (3) experiences of space, and (4) opportunities for choice and self-determination.

Activities & artifacts: the dual nature of image-making in communicative practice

Selected findings are presented from a preliminary qualitative investigation of image-making as information-driven communicative practice. Ad hoc visualizations are images spontaneously created during the natural flow of a conversation (e.g., napkin drawings). The activity of drawing in these situations is an informal information sharing practice occurring within an interactive, dynamic context. A discourse-oriented methodology is described for the direct observation and analysis of drawing during face-to-face conversations. Analysis of fifteen video-recorded conversations used an iterative, grounded theory approach to multimodal social interactional analysis. The dual nature of drawing as both information artifact and communicative activity is discussed in terms of contrasting affordances exploited during specific drawing episodes in the data. These findings have implications for image representation and the development of visually enabled information and communication technologies.