Soojin Jun

Using kinetic typography to convey emotion in text-based interpersonal communication

Text-based interpersonal communication tools such as instant messenger are widely used today. These tools often feature emoticons that people use to express emotion to some degree. However, emoticons still lack the ability to communicate the details of an emotional response, such as the speakers tone of voice or intensity of emotion. In this paper, we hypothesize that kinetic typography - text that moves or changes over time - can address some of this problem by enhancing emotional qualities of text communication using its dynamic and expressive properties.This paper presents a study showing that a small sample of designers can create kinetic effects that end-users could employ to consistently convey emotion. In the study, three designers prepared 24 kinetic examples expressing four different emotions. We found that the examples were rated quite consistently by 66 participants. These findings provide a preliminary indication that designers can create predefined kinetic effects which can be applied to a variety of textual messages, and that these effects will reliably convey a particular emotional intent. The findings from this study inform design guidelines for designing an instant messaging client that uses kinetic typography presentation.

A Framework for Assessment of Student Project Groups On-Line and Off-Line

Assessment of difficulties within group processes, especially through automatic means, is a problem of great interest to the broader CSCL community. Group difficulties can be revealed through interaction processes that occur during group work. Whether these patterns are encoded in speech recorded from face-to-face interactions or in text from on-line interactions, the language communication that flows between group members is an important key to understanding how better to support group functions and therefore be in a better position to design effective group learning environments. With the capability of monitoring and then influencing group processes when problems are detected, it is possible to intervene in order to facilitate the accomplishment of a higher quality product. In this chapter we address this research problem of monitoring group work processes in a context where project course instructors are making assessments of student group work. Thus, our purpose is to support those instructors in their task. We describe the mixed methods approach that we took, which combines both an interview study and a classroom study. Three research questions are answered: (1) What do instructors want to know about their student groups? (2) Is the desired information observable, and can it be reliably tracked by human annotators? (3) Can the desired information be automatically tracked using machine learning techniques to produce a summary report that instructors can use? Based on interviews with nine instructors, we identified five process assessment categories with subcategories at the group and individual level: namely, goal setting, group and individual progress, knowledge contribution, participation, and teamwork. We verified that these assessment categories can be reliably coded during group meetings with a reliability of r = 0.80 at the group level and r = 0.64 at the individual level using carefully constructed human assessment instruments. We present work in progress towards automation of this assessment framework.

The System Diagrams: Shifting Perspectives

As society becomes increasingly saturated with information, the design of that information becomes ever more important. However, rather than reinforcing the agency of the user, many information design products limit one’s possibilities for action. Take bus route maps (Figure 1), for instance. No problems emerge when looking at each bus route separately, but when users try to compare them to one another, it is difficult to understand their relationship. Only scattered information is made available, so that users are unable to form a clear, holistic understanding of how the bus service operates. Consequently, if an unexpected delay in a bus service were to occur, passengers might not be able to find and take an alternate route. Although a variety of approaches are available to resolve this problem, using system diagrams is a method that allows information designers to consider the holistic context. It is necessary not only to understand the system itself but also to study diagrams as a means of effectively describing the system, which is abstract in nature. The use of diagrams is a key component in communicating the holistic structure of an information system; however, a lack of rigorous discussion in the field means that designers often have difficulty examining systems as an integral part of their work. The purpose of this article is to provide a theoretical framework that broadens designers’ conception of system diagrams and enables them to design diagrams that can be effectively applied to various situations, needs, and design problems. In the first half of the article, we introduce four kinds of system diagrams and analyze different examples; the second half of the article focuses on how different modes of thinking are used to address varied needs and goals in the design process.

Appropriate or Remix? The Effects of Social Recognition and Psychological Ownership on Intention to Share in Online Communities

Even though negative aspects of making use of others’ work, such as illegal appropriation, have been found in online communities, remixing is considered a type of constructive creation for generating and recreating creative works. To make constructive creation via remixing sustainable, it is critical for users to share their own creations and allow others to use them in these online communities. We propose psychological ownership and social recognition as key antecedents for original creators to increase their intention to share their works in an online remix context. In this study, we aim to examine the relationships between intention to share, psychological ownership, and social recognition. To investigate the effects of psychological ownership and social recognition on intention to share, we proposed research hypotheses based on the theories of social recognition and psychological ownership. Prior to testing the hypotheses, we conducted a preliminary study including user interviews and community log analysis within an online remix community. Specific patterns of psychological ownership and social recognition in the online remix context were found in accordance with the theoretical background. The results from the preliminary study were applied to forms of apparatus and stimuli in the following experiment. A quasi-experiment was designed to test hypotheses of causal relationships between the key factors. A prototype of an online remix community for smartphone themes was developed based on the detailed findings of the preliminary study and utilized as an experimental apparatus. Sixty-nine participants carried out our experimental procedure of creating, sharing their own work, checking responses from others, and reporting their intention to share their future creations. The results of the quasi-experiment supported all our research hypotheses. Social recognition was found to increase the intention to share. Moreover, psychological ownership was found to increase the intention to share, an observation that may seem at odds with the exclusive aspects of ownership found in prior studies. More interesting, the positive effect of social recognition on intention to share becomes stronger with a higher perception of psychological ownership. This article ends with theoretical and practical implications of the study results.

An Imperfectly Perfect Robot: Discovering Interaction Design Strategy for Learning Companion

Human-likeness plays one of the most important roles in the long-term relationship between a robot and human. However, most of the existing studies have not designed human-like imperfection that is frequently observed by humans towards robots or agents. In our research, through questionnaires and interviews, we confirmed that when designing a robot or agent that plays a learning companion role, the imperfect elements of the robot or agent act positively on the long-term relationship with the user, and we will verify this with future experiments.

Use of the Backseat Driving Technique in Evaluation of a Perceptually Optimized In-Car Navigation Display

Recently drivers have greatly benefited from new vehicular technologies such as in-car navigation systems, but at the same time they can be easily distracted from those technologies. Consequently, creating displays that balance the communication of information with the attentional demand imposed on the driver is of increasing importance. A set of research has been conducted to minimize the driver’s attentional cost toward the navigational displays while driving. However, accurate evaluation methods to assess the effects of these displays in realistic environments are not yet available. This article introduces the backseat driving technique for high-fidelity, safe, and inexpensive evaluation of interaction with in-car displays. This technique makes use of a real vehicle driving on a real road. As a result it allows for the exploration of some types of research questions using audio, visual, and kinesthetic stimulus at least equal in fidelity to very high-end driving simulators, without requiring such a specialized and expensive facility. Further, it allows for the employment of detailed and fine-grained measures of attentional demand, which cannot be safely used with subjects who are actually driving. Although the backseat driving technique can address only some types of questions and so is not a full replacement for high-realism driving simulators, it may offer a new approach, which augments laboratory, simulator, and real driving for many studies. As a part of the work presented here, the backseat driving technique is used to evaluate a previously developed in-car navigation display—the MOVE system. The technique allowed for new questions to be asked, which were not able to be considered in previous laboratory studies, and for the use of study measures that were only previously able to be used in the laboratory due to driving safety concerns. Specifically, the display was shown to work well when real-world stimulus are used to navigate along a real route, reducing the navigation error rate nearly threefold, and up to sixfold when compared to displays providing more or less contextual information. In addition the display was shown to cut total display fixation time (which is time spent looking away from the road) almost in half in both cases.

The Use of Voice Input to Induce Human Communication with Banking Chatbots

The use of chatbots is more common in our everyday lives than ever before. However, few studies have been conducted comparing the differences between text- and voice-input modalities of chatbots in the banking industry. In this study, through empirical and survey-based research, users were shown to rate their relationships with the banking chatbot as more helpful and self-validating when they communicate with it by a voice-input modality than by a text-input modality.

Logue: Unitizing Interactive Fictions for Co-creation

This paper examines the shift in interactive fictions (IF) from traditional hypertext narrative contexts to the recent trend of adapting social media to deliver highly multilinear narratives. While various story creation and distribution tools have been developed over the past 30 years that range in levels of interactivity and sophistication, these advancements have failed to address the aspect of co-creation. In this paper, we present the Logue system, which breaks down fiction into small episodes and tags them with metadata, making actionable units to empower co-creators. Based on the need assessments from a focus group, two prototypes were implemented to test if sorting by metadata complements what is lacking in conventional node and link approach in IF. Findings demonstrate that Logue can help creators not only structure the intricate storylines of co-created content but also provide diverse ways of understanding the story differently by viewing it from different perspectives of metadata.