Julien Guibourdenche

Using multiple scores for transcribing the distributed activities of a family

Describing distributed activities in multiple spaces of a home with multiple inhabitants is a methodological challenge which is important for the design of services. Recent works have recorded synchronized multi-video data of space-distributed activities. How could design-oriented researchers now take advantage of these data? We present our multi-score transcript methodology and discuss the types of analysis it allows.

A Contextual Approach to Home Energy Management Systems Automation in Daily Practices

This short paper considers how classical concepts and approaches of cognitive ergonomics/engineering (e.g., automation, trust or control levels) could both enhance Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) design and energy efficiency, while requiring a specific reference to home and daily life practices. We rely on initial results of a research, evaluating different design principles of HEMS in real homes. Our results show that it is necessary to enhance the quality of coupling between monitoring and control possibilities not only with the characteristics of the human operators considered as natural information processing systems, but also with their everyday practices in home settings. This credits the perspectives of articulating and extending cognitive ergonomics/engineering issues to contextual approach of household activities.

Changing Interactions to Reduce Energy Consumption: Specification of a Context-Aware System Centered on the Home Occupants’ Concerns

This paper presents the specification of a context-aware system dedicated to assist home occupants in their everyday life while reducing their energy consumption. The system behavior and the interaction are built upon the definition of “situation spaces” based on a prior definition of the contexts of activity from the point of view of each actor in the home, i.e. taking into account actors’ concerns. The interaction specification appears to be a way to manage the discrepancy between users’ concerns and the system context, which can reduce errors. To develop context-aware systems that can easily be appropriated and thus potentially “invisible,” we believe it is essential to articulate choices about architecture and interaction with models of individual-collective activities built upon real-life observations.

“Bear an e-hand”: Designing a Wearable Assistant for Single-Handed and Small Crew Sail Racing

The objective of this research is to design a set of functionalities that support the activity of a skipper engaged in a competitive offshore single-handed race. This work has a twofold aim: designing new agency for skipper supervision, control and command to contribute to a better overall performance, and, secondly, to ensure onboard safety. The different phases of a human- centred design approach were applied, with special emphasis on the analysis of the skipper’s activity in order to identify the complex articulation between the different components of the system (human, technical, normative, and natural elements). Based on this extended characterization of the coupling between human, technology and the environment, a set of successive digital mock-ups was designed and iteratively tested in a simulated environment. The results from the last testing iteration demonstrated the functional value of the “augmented skipper” and its perceived usability from the user’s point of view. In the next step of the project, the mock-up will be tested in real conditions in order to complete the experimental evaluation.

Situating the music of households and firemen in semi-open spaces: contribution to the analysis of collective activity's spatio-temporal dynamics

Examining different team dynamics and understanding collective activities in home environments are two important challenges for ergonomics and its related fields. This article focuses on collective activities within home/building conceived as semi-open spaces (opening up opportunities whilst at the same time imposing more or less radical limits to collective activity) and discusses how orchestral formats (radically separating conceptual/physical and temporal axes) provide alternative perspectives for qualitative research. To do so, we leverage on the creation and use of MUltI-SCOre Format (for MUSICOF) in two previous in-depth studies of households and firemen. Drawing on a reflective analysis of our research practices, we describe how MUSICOF provides benefits when the researcher/practitioner has to cover a large conceptual/physical space, synchronise each basic unit of the collective activity, analyse activity at different levels (cognitive, social and spatio-temporal), characterise spatio-temporal arrangements and zoom in/out different degrees of abstraction of the analysis. It allows one to articulate multiple data and categories on a unique temporal axis, to formalise any type of arrangement of collective activity within space and time, to access all the required data on a single document where all the basic units are synchronised and to create either detailed empirical or synthetic formative models. After the demonstration of these benefits and some challenges, we discuss the perspectives and limits of this paper in order to equip studies of collective activity’s dynamics more consequentially regarding semi-open spaces, situated/distributed cognition, cognitive work analysis and scenario-based design.