Modestos Stavrakis

Major HCI challenges for open source software adoption and development

The aim of the paper is to identify and discuss major challenges for OSS from an HCI perspective, so as to aid the adoption and development processes for end-users, developers and organizations. The paper focuses on four important HCI concerns: product usability, support for user and development communities, accessibility and software usability and proposes areas for further research on the basis of related work and own experiences.

A descriptive reference framework for the personalisation of e-business applications

Personalisation is widely considered as a critical element of contemporary electronic businesses. However, despite the wealth of scientific work on personalisation, the definition of the term remains blurred with as consequence a lack of clarity as to what to design or evaluate when it comes to this area of an e-business. E-business stakeholders, including designers, managers and customers, need to understand the significance of personalisation features for many reasons including: guidance for design and evaluation, user appeal and implications for e-business functionality. The paper introduces a descriptive framework for personalisation aspects of e-businesses, in business-to-consumer (B2C) situations, that is related to typical e-business functionality. The proposed framework classifies previous research and extends it to provide e-commerce stakeholders with a vocabulary for analysing e-businesses, for comparing personalisation features, and for explaining e-business commerce evaluation results. The framework is applied to the evaluation of the personalisation features of contemporary clothing e-businesses, and conclusions are drawn for the readiness of this sector to adopt personalisation requirements.

Virtual environments for collaborative design: requirements and guidelines from a social action perspective

The paper is concerned with the design of virtual environments for collaborative design (VECD) – a particular class of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) that focus on supporting design activities. VECD are becoming essential collaboration platforms for many designers and their clients, in a wide range of design domains including product, interior, architectural, automotive design, etc. However, the contemporary design considerations of VECD are mainly driven by systematic approaches that do not reflect upon knowledge regarding requirements that stem out of everyday collaborative design activities. A consequence is that they do not yield methodical guidance to designers of VECD applications. This paper takes a social action standpoint for the purposeful identification and organisation of collaborative design activities; proposes guidelines at multiple levels of abstraction for the design of VECD; and, finally, applies these to a case study development of a specific VECD for interior space design. The paper provides practical aids to designers of VECD so that they incorporate requirements about collaborative design early in the development lifecycle.

A pervasive role-playing game for introducing elementary school students to archaeology

This paper presents ongoing work on the design and prototyping of a pervasive, role-playing game for elementary school students. The game takes place in a designated space presented as an excavation site, in which students become acquainted with a number of principal roles and tasks taking place in archaeological fieldwork. The educational goals are to introduce students to fundamental archaeology concepts and to inform them about the historical background of a specific site and the discovered artifacts. The game apparatus consists of a mobile application (android), a number of small wireless sensors (beacons), tangible models of the antiquities and simplified prop tools of the archaeological equipment (3D printed). The paper outlines the main design concepts, technologies used and gameplay and reports on a preliminary evaluation.

Accessible museum collections for the visually impaired: combining tactile exploration, audio descriptions and mobile gestures

This paper describes an affordable approach and prototype system that can enhance the accessibility of museum exhibits to visually impaired users. The approach supports the navigation in exhibition halls and the tactual exploration of exhibit replicas using touch-sensitive audio descriptions and touch gestures on a mobile device. The required technology includes 3D printed exhibits, attached touch sensors, Arduino boards, and a respective mobile app. A preliminary usability evaluation with ten users (blind, visually impaired and blindfolded) revealed a positive user experience with satisfactory and similar performance.

The Loom: Interactive Weaving Through a Tangible Installation with Digital Feedback.

The design of hybrid interactions, which involve both tangible and digital aspects, is a recent trend in interactive systems for cultural heritage because it adds physicality to the interaction and affords sociality of experience. The paper presents the approach for the design, prototyping and evaluation of an interactive loom at an industrial museum with which visitors can experiment and play to gain awareness about the weaving process. The system comprises of a small-scale (shoebox-sized), simplified loom replica made of wood that is connected through appropriate (Arduino) sensors to an interactive application (Unity) that digitally recreates and enhances the outcomes of user interaction onto a multitouch screen. We found that hybrid interaction is important for educational reasons because it supports constructivist learning, which favors exploration, active learning and experimentation over passive consumption of information. Also, the approach is suitable for engaging younger people, who often do not find much interest in museum visits.

Design of an Interactive Experience Journey in a Renovated Industrial Heritage Site

In this paper we present the design of an interactive experience journey at an ex-industrial textile factory. The aim is to enhance the visitors’ experience by engaging them in the work processes and flows that were taking place in the actual industrial environment and introduce them to the role of the artifacts and tools involved in real life work scenarios. The development is of the form of a room escaping experience developed on the basis of riddle solving. We used a number of technologies related to interactive systems design such as near field communication, physical computing, sensors, actuators and tangible artifacts.

THREADS: A Digital Storytelling Multi-stage Installation on Industrial Heritage

Storytelling enables us to connect through narratives that create reflections on our experiences. When storytelling concerns cultural heritage, it brings forth tangible and intangible assets that characterize activities and events of the past, which may sensitize visitors of a cultural site. In this paper, we present our cultural storytelling project THREADS, a four-station installation that narrates a story of a worker in a textile factory. The system comprises: (a) a welcome station (an animation on public display) that explains the main story and challenges to visitors, (b) the fabric design station (multi-touch display) where the visitor can create a simple fabric for production, (c) the punched cards station (Arduino mechanism), where the visitor codes their initials to binary form and receives a punched card, (d) the Jacquard production station (gesture-based interface with Leap Motion and Unity), where the visitor uses the card to repair a mechanical loom. THREADS has been installed in an abandoned building of a textile industry, which operated between 1914–1986, and it is now renewed and open to visitors. A preliminary empirical evaluation of THREADS revealed that it is not the variety of technologies that engages users, but a storyline flow that retains their attention and interest.

i-Wall: A Low-Cost Interactive Wall for Enhancing Visitor Experience and Promoting Industrial Heritage in Museums

Interactive walls have been employed in many museums with the aim to enhance the visitor experience. These are usually large in size and expensive, while their typical use is to present generic content about the museum. As a result, they may not be easily set-up at multiple locations inside a museum and serve the purpose of presenting narratives about particular exhibits. This paper presents i-Wall, an affordable interactive wall system built from off-the-shelf components and technologies. i-Wall has been designed for the Syros Industrial Museum (Greece) and presents a narrative about a particular exhibit, the Enfield E8000, which is the first electric car that reached small-scale production (in 1973). i-Wall provides information to visitors about the concept, the design, the problems, the creators and the socio-political context related to the exhibit, in an interactive way. It also allows visitors to appreciate the interior of the car as well as its functions via augmented reality (AR) technology. The design of i-Wall combines interactive storytelling, animations, projection mapping, conductive paint, touchboard and AR.

Design and evaluation of a digital wearable ring and a smartphone application to help monitor and manage the effects of Raynaud’s phenomenon

This paper presents the iterative research, design and evaluation phases of a digital wearable health system for monitoring, managing and possibly assisting in preventing the effects of a chronic disease called Raynaud’s Phenomenon (RP). The wearable health system is composed of three main parts, a physical product of a smart ring, the digital infrastructure of the physical computing subsystem (hardware and software) and an accompanying smartphone application. A set of design requirements that best describe the functionality and the characteristics of wearable health systems have been selected to derive a thorough study and evaluate the design prototype. We present these along with a set of guidelines for designing wearable health systems (device products and software at the application level) with focus on usability and user experience. The purpose is to evaluate, the prototype which is based on multiple sensor inputs that acquire simultaneously several biomedical and environmental signals, the interaction techniques used and the feedback mechanisms of the smart ring and the accompanying smartphone application for logging and monitoring the progress of RP.