Julián Esteban Gutiérrez Posada

Exploring new formats of the Self-Assessment Manikin in the design with children

Lang and Bradleys Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) is an assessment tool that has been successfully used in different areas to elicit the affective responses in the three levels of valence, excitement and dominance. The pictographic format of this instrument makes it accessible for those with low literacy skills, including children and the elderly. In this article, we report and discuss our experiences using SAM and we present the adaptations made to SAM along a process that originated new formats of SAM, used in design practices with children.

A socio-constructionist environment to create stories using tangible interfaces

Contemporary technologies such as Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) have not been explored in its full potential in educational contexts, to take advantage of the innate ability of children to tell stories. This activity has proven to be authentic and personally relevant for children with benefits to their personal and social development. This paper presents the design and construction of a TUI environment to be used in inclusive educational contexts, allowing children to create, share and participate in the process of constructing narratives. The environment was conceived under the Semio-Participatory Design Model, and was experimented with the active participation of teachers and children in a real educational context. The design rationale of CPES, a Collaborative Programmable Environment for Storytelling, is presented and results of the final product and its use are discussed in the paper.

On Feelings of Comfort, Motivation and Joy that GUI and TUI Evoke

New ways to interact with technology are gaining ground over the familiar Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). The Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) are one example of this. However, while it may seem intuitive that such interfaces should evoke rather positive responses from users – e.g. feelings associated with pleasure – little has been studied in this sense. In this challenge of understanding the feelings that GUI and TUI have the potential to evoke, we present our findings from a research that involved more than a hundred people. The research question that guided our endeavors was: What are the relations between the feelings of joy, motivation and comfort when using TUI and GUI? We analyze the results and discuss some hypotheses to explain the behavior observed.

Universal access to interaction as revealed by UAHCI words

The analysis of publications created over time as journal articles and other media is important to emphasize the interests, identity and culture in a certain research area. This paper proposes an analysis on the content of the Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction (UAHCI) conferences since 2007, based on information from the article titles. We were especially interested in knowing about changes in recent years related to user categories, the technologies used, and the processes associated with the systems engineering or with the human-computer interaction practices. Discussions are situated from the creation and observation of tagclouds formed with the data. As a contribution, we found what the words reveal about main trends of the area, the profile and the differences between the various editions of the conference, and also the gaps and potential for future research work toward accessibility and design for all.

A TUI-Based Storytelling for Promoting Inclusion in the Preschool Classroom

Technologies such as Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) take advantage of the natural ability of children to tell stories, play and explain their personal and social behavior. TUI technologies can be designed to constitute scenarios of technology use for all and thus benefit inclusive schools. Challenges of designing such scenarios in the classroom include distraction of students, acceptance by teachers, and inclusion of students with disabilities. In this paper we focus on investigating the acceptance of a TUI environment, designed for the educational context of creating, sharing and telling stories collaboratively. We present a system as background for an evaluation of acceptance based on the Self Assess- ment Manikin model. Two groups of subjects participated in the evaluation: a group of HCI specialists, and a group of teachers working in an inclusive educa- tional context. The pilot study with HCI specialists established a baseline showing that the system potentially has a high acceptance rate. The teachers reported in a subsequent study high levels of Pleasure and Arousal while we detected greater variance in the Dominance dimension. Although we do not see this variance as critical, it requires attention for the more complex modes of the system.

Exploring principles for affectibility in the design of mobile applications

The objective of the design principles for Affectibility is to help designers to reason about and consider affect in the design process. The principles were proposed thinking about the context of childrens education. Previous studies suggest that the use of the principles results in software that children have rather positive responses when interacting with them. In this paper we explored the principles for Affectibility in a context outside childrens education. The principles were introduced to a group of prospective designers (undergraduate students), who had to create mobile applications for the World Cup. Students elicited the main concepts (using participatory techniques) for the new applications; and then developed and evaluated each others applications. The objective of this work is to evaluate the viability of the use of the principles outside educational contexts and to understand the use designers make of the principles.

A Study on the Last 11 Years of ICEIS Conference

The analysis of scientific knowledge documented as journal articles, conference papers or book chapters is important for the research community to build an understanding of their field of interest. The International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS) is currently in its 16th edition, and it has built the state of the art in the field through scientific contributions coming from different focuses, authors and respective institutions. This work investigates the content of the Enterprise Information Systems Conference (ICEIS) by analysing data coming from two sources: the Springer Books series of selected papers from the 2003-2011 conferences, and the last three editions of the Conference Proceedings. For a visual glimpse of the themes present in the contributions, and a starter for further analysis, we used the expressive power of tagclouds on the paper titles. Results enabled to build a roadmap into the field, which may inform researchers, and practitioners who are starting work in related areas, and even experts who want to build on it.