Kai Eckoldt

All You Need is Love: Current Strategies of Mediating Intimate Relationships through Technology

A wealth of evidence suggests that love, closeness, and intimacy---in short relatedness---are important for people’s psychological well-being. Nowadays, however, couples are often forced to live apart. Accordingly, there has been a growing and flourishing interest in designing technologies that mediate (and create) a feeling of relatedness when being separated, beyond the explicit verbal communication and simple emoticons available technologies offer. This article provides a review of 143 published artifacts (i.e., design concepts, technologies). Based on this, we present six strategies used by designers/researchers to create a relatedness experience: Awareness, expressivity, physicalness, gift giving, joint action, and memories. We understand those strategies as starting points for the experience-oriented design of technology.

An Experiential Perspective on Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

Abstract The objective of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) is to support drivers in mastering the driving task. Until now, the development of ADAS has mainly focused on technology, safety and comfort. This paper aims to complement this by a more experiential view. A study explored how Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), as an example of ADAS, impacts people´s driving experience. It showed that ACC creates a gap between the driver and her car. This gap can be interpreted in two different ways. It is negative, when the “joy of driving” is in the fore, because it removes the feeling of mastery, control, being in charge and being one with the car. It is potentially positive, when the “joy while driving” is in the fore, because it creates the freedom to engage in pleasurable activities beyond driving. Unfortunately, the current concept of “supervisory control” for ADAS does not allow for the disengagement with driving. Based on our findings, we discuss crucial aspects to consider when designing ADAS from an experiential perspective. Zusammenfassung Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) haben das Ziel, den Fahrer bei seiner Fahraufgabe zu unterstützen. Dabei konzentriert sich die Entwicklung auf technologische Aspekte, Sicherheit und Komfort. Dieser Artikel ergänzt dies um eine erlebnisorientierte Sicht. Eine qualitative Studie zeigt, wie Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) das Fahrerlebnis verändert. ACC erzeugt eine Distanz zwischen Fahrer und Auto. Ist die “Freude am Fahren” im Vordergrund ist diese Distanz negativ, denn sie verringert Gefühle des Meisterns, der Kontrolle, des Verantwortlichseins und des “Einsseins” mit dem Auto. Ist die “Freude beim Fahren” im Vordergrund ist die Distanz potentiell positiv, denn sie erzeugt den Freiraum, sich mit anderen freudvollen Dingen jenseits des Fahrens zu beschäftigen. Leider erlaubt es das Konzept der “supervisory control” nicht, dem Fahrer diesen Freiraum wirklich zu geben. Auf dieser Basis diskutieren wir zentrale Punkte, die es zu berücksichtigen gilt, wenn man ADAS eher erlebnisorientiert gestalten möchte.

Designing for well-being: A case study of keeping small secrets

Abstract To a good part, well-being depends on individual engagement in beneficial activities. The present paper draws attention to the potential of encouraging and shaping well-being-enhancing activities through interaction with everyday objects and technology. Our case study started from the activity of keeping ‘small’ secrets as a way to experience autonomy and privacy. We situated this activity in an office and ‘materialized’ it through a digital picture frame, holding a secret picture. Inspired by seven interviewees’ detailed descriptions of interacting with secrets, we designed an especially secretive interaction to consume the picture and compared it to a more technical interaction. In a first empirical exploration, using video prototypes (N = 276), the secretive interaction was rated as more positive and providing more intense feelings of privacy and autonomy. This hints at the potential of objects and the careful design of interaction with this objects to intensify the positive experiences gained from mundane activities.