Lin-Lin Chen

Transdisciplinary Interaction Design in Design Education

Transdisciplinary design which is the idea of design that transcends disciplinary boundaries has been proposed as a fourth design paradigm of interaction design education, scholarship, and practice alongside the technical, cognitive, and ethnographic paradigms. As an educational concern in particular, its aim is to teach students how to bring a values orientation to interaction design. Its focuses are design frameworks, values and ethics, design for important themes such as sustainability, equity, adaptation, justice, and social responsibility. This panel maps the state of the art in transdisciplinary interaction design education, considering also design scholarship and practice in relation to design education. The panel collects together a group of educators from chosen to provide a global perspective, with panelists from Canada, Denmark, Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan.

Designing the Expressive Point Lights to Enhance User's Situated Awareness of Smart Systems

Digital devices and intelligent systems are becoming popular in the world. However, they seldom provide sufficient communications to help users have situated awareness of the surrounding status. In this study, we explored the expressiveness designs with the point lights embedded on ubiquitous devices. Extending from related works, we demonstrated how could designers develop different light patterns and compose them with performative arrangements to convey informative clues about what is happening within the system. This could increase the users situated awareness and guide them to decide how to respond without overburdening.

Design Vocabulary for Human--IoT Systems Communication

Digital devices and intelligent systems are becoming popular and ubiquitous all around us. However, they seldom provide sufficient feed-forwards and feedbacks to reassure users as to their current status and indicate what actions they are about to perform. In this study, we selected and analyzed nine concept videos on future IoT products/systems. Through systematic analysis of the interactions and communications of users with the machines and systems demonstrated in the films, we extracted 38 design vocabulary items and clustered them into 12 groups: Active, Request, Trigger functions, Approve, Reject, Notify, Recommend, Guide, Show problems, Express emotions, Exchange info, and Socialize. This framework can not only inspire designers to create self-explanatory intelligence, but also support developers to provide a language structure at different levels of the periphery of human attention. Through the enhancement of situated awareness, human IoT system interaction can become more seamless and graceful.

Explorations on Reciprocal Interplay in Things Ecology

There is growing interest in designing smart things that are both connected (IoT) and also acting local. Yet, the explorative behaviors of such smart things in the context of a connected ecology are not much explored. This study explores perceptive qualities of reciprocal interplay from a perspective of systemic relations. We conducted the HiddenLocal workshop with the outcome of four designed IoT systems which emphasize the complexity of things-to-things interaction in different scenarios. This paper reports on one of the four systems and investigates how reciprocal interplay can be designed in the things community of our designed system.

Finding the expectations of smart home and designing the meaningful technology for delivering customers’ satisfaction

Smart home is becoming a focus in both literature and product development practices. The current study employed a human-centered design approach to understand users desires and expectations from their living context. Six critical themes were developed via in-deep interview, field observation, and data analysis. They are house as a supportive friend, atmosphere generator, theme songs for every moment, coordinator and reminder, life memory collector, and routine builder for young generations. Those concepts were partially integrated to define the value proposition for the target user group of parents with young children. This guides the design ideation and video prototyping to illustrator the user experiences. Through a focus group discussion, the design concepts were validated with six potential customers. The results also show that the design concept has the potential to motivate children’s behaviors, help to build their routine, and has the flexibility to fulfill different needs toward the changes of the family’s life cycle.

Challenges and opportunities for designing new technology to reveal early warning signs in acute psychiatric units

This paper describes the challenges and lessons learned in the design of a patient monitoring and early warning system for patients in acute psychiatric centers. We began by conducting contextual inquiries and a focus group to identify the challenges and opportunities for the application of new technologies. The resulting themes were then used in the development of wearable sensing and environment monitoring devices that can be configured for individual patients and the specifics of the facility.

Balancing between conflicting values for designing subjective well-being for the digital home

This paper highlights three pairs of implicit but important human values that are sometimes overlooked or taken for granted in the design of mainstream products for the home. They are private and shared, present and past, control and abdicate. We argue that these values are worth preserving and balancing in interactions with Internet-of-things (IoT) products at future digital home if subjective well-being is under consideration. We conducted a qualitative field study with 11 families and present these values in pairs in order to inform designers of the tradeoffs that should be considered in their practices.