Karl-Petter Åkesson

Designing storytelling technologies to encouraging collaboration between young children

We describe the iterative design of two collaborative storytelling technologies for young children, KidPad and the Klump. We focus on the idea of designing interfaces to subtly encourage collaboration so that children are invited to discover the added benefits of working together. This idea has been motivated by our experiences of using early versions of our technologies in schools in Sweden and the UK. We compare the approach of encouraging collaboration with other approaches to synchronizing shared interfaces. We describe how we have revised the technologies to encourage collaboration and to reflect design suggestions made by the children themselves.

“Playing with the Bits” User-Configuration of Ubiquitous Domestic Environments

This paper presents the development of a user-oriented framework to support the user reconfiguration of ubiquitous domestic environments. We present a lightweight component model that allows a range of devices to be readily interconnected and an editor to support users in doing this. The editor discovers available ubiquitous components and presents these to users as jigsaw pieces that can be dynamically recombined. The developed editor allows users to assemble lightweight sensors, devices such as displays and larger applications in order to meet their particular needs.

Designing Ubiquitous Computing Games – A Report from a Workshop Exploring Ubiquitous Computing Entertainment

Abstract: We report from a Research Atelier that explored how ubiquitous computing could be applied to fun and entertainment. The Atelier lasted for five days, starting with two days of scenario development and brainstorming activities. This led to three fairly concrete – though very different – game ideas. The background and motivation for the Atelier is described, as well as the method used and the games developed.

Socially intelligent interfaces for increased energy awareness in the home

This paper describes how home appliances might be enhanced to improve user awareness of energy usage. Households wish to lead comfortable and manageable lives. Balancing this reasonable desire with the environmental and political goal of reducing electricity usage is a challenge that we claim is best met through the design of interfaces that allows users better control of their usage and unobtrusively informs them of the actions of their peers. A set of design principles along these lines is formulated in this paper. We have built a fully functional prototype home appliance with a socially aware interface to signal the aggregate usage of the users peer group according to these principles, and present the prototype in the paper.

Reality portals

Through interactive augmented virtuality we provide the ability to interactively explore a remote space inside a virtual environment. This paper presents a tool and technique that can be used to create such virtual worlds that are augmented by video textures taken of real world objects. The system constructs and updates, in near real-time, a representation of the user-defined salient and relevant features of the real world. This technique has the advantage of constructing a virtual world that contains the relevant video-data of the real world, while maintaining the flexibility of a virtual world. The virtual-real world representation is not dependent on physical location and can be manipulated in a way not subject to the temporal, spatial, and physical constraints found in the real world. Another advantage is that spatializing the video-data may afford more intuitive examination.

Tangible handimation real-time animation with a sequencer-based tangible interface

In this paper, we present the development of Tangible Handimation, a sequencer-inspired animation system for recording and playback of whole or individual parts of animations through direct manipulation and tangible interfaces. The development of the system from a keyboard and mouse set-up, Handimation, is described including a workshop with professionals. Users reported the system as enabling real-time performances and making the animation process more democratic, and based upon their input support for imminent feed-forward information was added to the design.

Designing interactive collaborative environments

We describe our experiences of creating and using a wide variety of techniques and applications to support collaboration in virtual environments for different activities and user groups. Our aim is to offer plentiful and rich possibilities for interaction across and between both real and virtual environments.

Assembling connected cooperative residential domains

Between the dazzle of a new building and its eventual corpse ...[lies the] unappreciated, undocumented, awkward-seeming time when it was alive to evolution ...those are the best years, the time when the building can engage us at our own level of complexity.