James A. Landay

Designing for Healthy Lifestyles: Design Considerations for Mobile Technologies to Encourage Consumer Health and Wellness

As the rates of lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease continue to rise, the development of effective tools that can help people adopt and sustain healthier habits is becoming ever more important. Mobile computing holds great promise for providing effective support for helping people manage their health in everyday life. Yet, for this promise to be realized, mobile wellness systems need to be well designed, not only in terms of how they implement specific behavior-change techniques but also, among other factors, in terms of how much burden they put on the user, how well they integrate into the users daily life, and how they address the users privacy concerns. Designing for all of these constraints is difficult, and it is often not clear what tradeoffs particular design decisions have on how a wellness application is experienced and used. In this monograph, we provide an account of different design approaches to common features of mobile wellness applications and we discuss the tradeoffs inherent in those approaches. We also outline the key challenges that HCI researchers and designers will need to address to move the state of the art for mobile wellness technologies forward.

Balancing design and technology to tackle global grand challenges

There are many urgent problems facing the planet: a degrading environment, a healthcare system in crisis, and educational systems that are failing to produce creative, innovative thinkers to solve tomorrows problems. Technology influences behavior, and I believe when we balance it with revolutionary design, we can reduce a familys energy and water use by 50%, double most peoples daily physical activity, and educate any child anywhere in the world to a level of proficiency on par with the planets best students. My research program tackles these grand challenges by using a new model of interdisciplinary research that takes a long view and encourages risk-taking and creativity. I will illustrate how we are addressing these grand challenges in our research by building systems that balance innovative user interfaces with novel activity inference technology. These systems have helped individuals stay fit, led families to be more sustainable in their everyday lives, and supported learners in acquiring second languages. I will also introduce the World Lab, a cross-cultural institute that embodies my balanced approach to attack the worlds biggest problems today, while preparing the technology and design leaders of tomorrow. James Landay is a Professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech, specializing in human-computer interaction. He will become a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford in August, 2014. Previously, James was a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His current research interests include Technology to Support Behavior Change, Demonstrational Interfaces, Mobile & Ubiquitous Computing, and User Interface Design Tools. He is the founder and co-director of the World Lab, a joint research and educational effort with Tsinghua University in Beijing. Landay received his BS in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1990 and MS and PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993 and 1996, respectively. His PhD dissertation was the first to demonstrate the use of sketching in user interface design tools. He was previously the Laboratory Director of Intel Labs Seattle, a university affiliated research lab that explored the new usage models, applications, and technology for ubiquitous computing. He was also the chief scientist and co-founder of NetRaker, which was acquired by KeyNote Systems in 2004. From 1997 through 2003 he was a tenured professor in EECS at UC Berkeley. He was named to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2011. He currently serves on the NSF CISE Advisory Committee.