Mark Lochrie

Rethinking plan A for sustainable HCI

This paper challenges the sustainable HCI community to move away from a focus on demand and instead address climate change as a supply problem. We identify a new route to impact, namely addressing the psychological barriers that interfere with political mobilization toward limiting the use of fossil fuels. Five barriers are explored as a means of re-focusing research objectives for the community.

BARTER: promoting local spending behavior

In the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, there is renewed interest in strategies for ensuring the future economic success of nations in a globalized marketplace. One of the main ideas being championed by governments is to promote growth by encouraging local spending, although it is not clear how to motivate this behavioral shift. Local currency initiatives are increasingly popular, though due to certain practicalities are rarely successful in fostering long term and widespread change in spending behaviors. We report on the development of a persuasive system (BARTER) that leverages mobile and ubiquitous technology to overcome some of the limitations of local currencies, while also providing users with the insight needed to determine for themselves how local spending may benefit their community.

Enabling emergent behaviour in location based games

In general location based games have failed to achieve wide scale adoption and the only location based service that can truly claim such adoption is Geocaching. Arguably this is due to fact that the majority of these games draw their inspiration from video games rather than the way users engage with public spaces such as in Geocaching. The game presented in this paper utilises the motivations demonstrated amongst geocachers, such as exploration and discovery, alongside competitive game play in an attempt to enable a longitudinal study of such a gaming community. In this paper we present the design rational and results of initial users beta testing which indicate that user creativity could well be the key to unlocking the potential of location based games.

Designing Seamless Mobile Augmented Reality Location Based Game Interfaces

The majority of mobile devices nowadays harness location and orientation-sensing capabilities, permitting for sensor based Mixed Reality (MR) gaming experiences such as Augmented Reality (AR) games. Nonetheless, only few entertainment implementations of sensor based AR systems emerged, predominantly due to low precision of sensory information causing crude and jerky augmentation, significantly impacting meaningful augmentation that inevitably affects gameplay experience. In this paper, we present a novel pervasive mobile AR Location Based Game (LBG) named Time-wARpXplorer (TARX) where a seamless design approach is used in order to address the quality of augmentation. TARX comprises of a mobile client and an online authoring tool, created to encourage visitors and locals to explore the city of Lancaster by travelling back in time and space to discover their immediate and distant surroundings. Within the game, time travel is linked to present day through the implementation of Foursquares checkin platform to further raise awareness of historic sites. This paper focuses on the design considerations implemented through an iterative design process and prototyping of the mobile client, of which a novel interface emerged.

Barter: A Technology Strategy for Local Wealth Generation

Encouraging people to spend locally can revive languishing economies, but circulating alternative local currencies often fails. Mobile social networking might offer a way to circumvent that approachs problems by augmenting existing currencies with information on how the money flows.

CheckinDJ using check-ins to crowdsource music preferences

The paper introduces a novel approach for crowd curation of ambient music played in venues using physical Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled check-ins. The CheckinDJ jukebox system uses NFC enabled objects that are linked to individuals social network accounts. CheckinDJ can thus be regarded as a crowdsourced DJ that curates an evolving music playlist based on the musical preferences of those present at a location at any given time. In this paper we present the design and operation of the currently deployed system along with highlights of the promising potential of this novel concept.

UKKO: Enriching Persuasive Location based Games with Environmental Sensor Data

The number of children walking to school is at an all-time low and car use on the rise. The walk to school is seen as an opportunity to promote exercise and tackle the effects of an increasingly sedentary lifestyle amongst young people. At the same time we have a growing understanding of the harmful effects of air pollution on our health. Walking to school would not only make for healthier kids, it would reduce traffic and create a healthier, safer environment but we still drive our kids to school. This paper describes the initial design and development of UKKO, a novel persuasive game to encourage walking to school and engagement with local data. UKKO uses real time environmental data captured by the player to create a virtual environment for a digital pet. The more the student walks and avoids areas of high pollution the more healthy their pet.

Designing a Mobile Service as a Facilitator for Capturing Local Trade Data

In this paper we will highlight the potential for creating alternative economic models based on ethical trading to encourage communities to embrace the benefits of connecting, sharing and trading more locally. In particular the research presented considers whether mobile and ubiquitous computing can be used to effectively to support such an initiative as an alternative to local currency schemes. The current prototype known as BARTER encourages transparency in the dissemination of local trade information to all members of the community, including the customers, rather than adopting current approaches whereby the trader records such information without revealing anything to the customers. This transparency also allows us to illustrate to customers that the more money is spent locally the healthier the local economy becomes bringing benefits to all.

Social media and collaborative learning: hello Scholr

Building on their experiences with social media and collaborative learning, the authors have proposed the development of an Integrated Learning Ecosytem called Scholr. Scholr is a comprehensive, integrated software environment that supports the development, delivery, assessment, and administration of educational courses, in addition to providing a modifiable toolset that can be used to foster collaborative forms of blended learning within the classroom and online delivery of course content. Scholr allows technology to play a more active role in supporting learning, both inside and outside of the classroom. This paper discusses the collaborative learning projects that inspired the proposal, setting the context for and outlining the key features.

Designing Scalable Location Based Games that Encourage Emergent Behaviour

In general location based games have failed to achieve wide scale adoption that many predicted and the only such game that can truly claim wide scale success is Geocaching. Arguably this is partially due to fact that the majority of these games draw their inspiration directly from video games rather than the way users engage with public spaces. The authors present the design rationale behind the development of a Location Based Game, Big Game Huntr that was created specifically with player engagement with space at its heart. Presented are the lessons learnt from transitioning this game from being event based to one in which global participation could be facilitated.