Nick Dalton

Collaboration and interference: awareness with mice or touch input

Multi-touch surfaces are becoming increasingly popular. An assumed benefit is that they can facilitate collaborative interactions in co-located groups. In particular, being able to see anothers physical actions can enhance awareness, which in turn can support fluid interaction and coordination. However, there is a paucity of empirical evidence or measures to support these claims. We present an analysis of different aspects of awareness in an empirical study that compared two kinds of input: multi-touch and multiple mice. For our analysis, a set of awareness indices was derived from the CSCW and HCI literatures, which measures both the presence and absence of awareness in co-located settings. Our findings indicate higher levels of awareness for the multi-touch condition accompanied by significantly more actions that interfere with each other. A subsequent qualitative analysis shows that the interactions in this condition were more fluid and that interference was quickly resolved. We suggest that it is more important that resources are available to negotiate interference rather than necessarily to attempt to prevent it.

Fighting for control: children's embodied interactions when using physical and digital representations

Tabletop and tangible interfaces are often described in terms of their support for shared access to digital resources. However, it is not always the case that collaborators want to share and help one another. In this paper we detail a video-analysis of a series of prototyping sessions with children who used both cardboard objects and an interactive tabletop surface. We show how the material qualities of the digital interface and physical objects affect the kinds of bodily strategies adopted by children to stop others from accessing them. We discuss how children fight for and maintain control of physical versus digital objects in terms of embodied interaction and what this means when designing collaborative applications for shareable interfaces.

Display Blindness?: Looking Again at the Visibility of Situated Displays using Eye-tracking

Observational studies of situated displays have suggested that they are rarely looked at, and when they are it is typically only for a short period of time. Using a mobile eye tracker during a realistic shopping task in a shopping center, we show that people look at displays more than would be predicted from these observational studies, but still only short glances and often from quite far away. We characterize the patterns of eye-movements that precede looking at a display and discuss some of the design implications for the design of situated display technologies that are deployed in public space.

Neurodiversity HCI

In this forum we celebrate research that helps to successfully bring the benefits of computing technologies to children, older adults, people with disabilities, and other populations that are often ignored in the design of mass-marketed products. Juan Pablo Hourcade, Editor

The Theory of Natural Movement and its Application to the Simulation of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET)

The theory of natural movement is fundamental to space syntax: a set of theories and methods developed in the late 1970s that seeks, at a general level, to reveal the mutual effects of complex spatial systems on society and vice versa. In particular, over the years, space syntax analyses have been shown to correlate highly with pedestrian movement and hence are regularly used as a predictive tool, to forecast relative levels of people-flow along streets. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are wireless networks that are self- creating, having an unfixed and constantly shifting topology. This paper demonstrates how ad hoc networks based on pedestrians carrying mobile wireless devices can be simulated using the theory of natural movement. It suggests that the application of natural movement simulations to mobile ad hoc networks appears to be a useful contribution to the field and that further work should be conducted in this area.

Questioning the Reflection Paradigm for Diabetes Mobile Apps

Hundreds of diabetes self-management apps are available for smart phones, typically using a diary or logging methodology. This paper investigates how well such approaches help participants to make sense of collected data. We found that, while such systems typically support data and trend review, they are ill suited to helping users understand complex correlations in the data. The cognitively demanding user interfaces (UI’s) of these apps are poorly adapted both to the restricted real estate of smartphone displays and to the daily needs of users. Many participants expressed the desire for intelligent, personalized and contextually aware near-term advice. By contrast, users did not see tools for reflection on prior data and behavior, seen as indispensable by many researchers, as a priority. We argue that while designers of future mobile health (mHealth) systems need to take advantage of automation through connected sensors, and the increasing subtlety of intelligent processing, it is also necessary to evolve current graphs and dashboards UI paradigms to assist users in long-term self-management health practices.

Ar-CHI-Tecture: architecture and interaction

The rise of ubiquitous computing leads to a natural convergence between the areas of architectural design (the design of buildings, spaces and experience of being in and moving through them) and HCI. We suggest that Architecture and CHI have much to learn from each other in terms of research and practice. This workshop will bring together these communities to explore the benefits of architecture envisioned as integral to an expanded CHI community. The workshop organizers aim to create a framework for future collaboration and identify new directions for research in this multidisciplinary field. This promises significant impacts on both interaction research and its real-world applications.

Architecture and Interaction

Ubiquitous computing has a vision of information and interaction being embedded in the world around us; this forms the basis of this book. Built environments are subjects of design and architects have seen digital elements incorporated into the fabric of buildings as a way of creating environments that meet the dynamic challenges of future habitation. Methods for prototyping interactive buildings are discussed and the theoretical overlaps between both domains are explored. Topics like the role of space and technology within the workplace as well as the role of embodiment in understanding how buildings and technology can influence action are discussed, as well as investigating the creation of place with new methodologies to investigate the occupation of buildings and how they can be used to understand spatial technologies. Architecture and Interaction is aimed at researchers and practitioners in the field of computing who want to gain a greater insight into the challenges of creating technologies in the built environment and those from the architectural and urban design disciplines who wish to incorporate digital information technologies in future buildings.

Interaction and architectural space

For many in the field of HCI, location and space are synonymous; yet, as we move from the mobile era to the ubiquitous era, computing becomes entangled with notions of space. This workshop critically examines the role of space in human-computer interfaces. The objective is to bring together diverse perspectives of space, drawing from architecture, philosophy, art, geography, design, dance, spatial-cognition, mathematics, computing, and still other domains, towards foregrounding space in theoretical discussions and explorations within the CHI community. Expected outcomes are the reporting of fresh insights into the impact and role of space in the interaction process.

TapTiles: LED-based floor interaction

This paper reports on the ongoing development of the TapTiles system, a low-cost, floor-interaction technology that overcomes problems found in previous overhead projector-based floor-interaction systems by using Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) embedded into a carpet tile. Despite many advantages compared to projector-based floor interaction systems, LED-based systems could be criticized for lacking the resolution for a worthwhile interactive experience. User studies of both simulated and real hardware are reported on. This includes a comparison of tiles of different resolution that suggests that pixel density, over the range of tests, is less important than visual artifacts introduced by carpet tile edges. Contrary to initial expectations, denser LED spacing did not improve legibility or raise user preferences. Overall our studies suggest that LED-based floor interaction can be legible and effective in a walk-up and use situation.