Stefan Kreitmayer

Rethinking 'multi-user': an in-the-wild study of how groups approach a walk-up-and-use tabletop interface

Multi-touch tabletops have been much heralded as an innovative technology that can facilitate new ways of group working. However, there is little evidence of these materialising outside of research lab settings. We present the findings of a 5-week in-the-wild study examining how a shared planning application - designed to run on a walk-up-and-use tabletop - was used when placed in a tourist information centre. We describe how groups approached, congregated and interacted with it and the social interactions that took place - noting how they were quite different from research findings describing the ways groups work around a tabletop in lab settings. We discuss the implications of such situated group work for designing collaborative tabletop applications for use in public settings.

How to nudge in Situ: designing lambent devices to deliver salient information in supermarkets

There are a number of mobile shopping aids and recommender systems available, but none can be easily used for a weekly shop at a local supermarket. We present a minimal, mobile and fully functional lambent display that clips onto any shopping trolley handle, intended to nudge people when choosing what to buy. It provides salient information about the food miles for various scanned food items represented by varying lengths of lit LEDs on the handle and a changing emoticon comparing the average miles of all the products in the trolley against a social norm. When evaluated in situ, the lambent handle display nudged people to choose products with fewer food miles than the items they selected using their ordinary shopping strategies. People also felt guilty when the average mileage of the contents of their entire shopping trolley was above the social norm. The findings are discussed in terms of how to provide different kinds of product information that people care about, using simple lambent displays.

From participatory to contributory simulations: changing the game in the classroom

There is much potential for supporting collaborative learning with interactive computer simulations in formal education and professional training. A number have been developed for single user and remote interaction. In contrast, our research is concerned with how such learning activities can be designed to fit into co-located large group settings, such as whole classrooms. This paper reports on the iterative design process and two in-the-wild evaluations of the 4Decades game, which was developed for a whole classroom of students to engage with a climate simulation. The system allows students to play and change the rules of the simulation, thereby enabling them to be actively engaged at different levels. The notion of Contributory Simulations is proposed as an instructional model that empowers groups to make informed, critical changes to the underlying scientific model. We discuss how large-group collaboration was supported through constraining an ecology of shared devices and public displays.

Fast and frugal shopping challenge

There are a number of mobile shopping aids and recommender systems available, but none can be easily used for a weekly shop at a local supermarket. We present a minimal, mobile and fully functional lambent display that clips onto any shopping trolley handle, intended to nudge people when choosing what to buy. It provides salient information about the food miles for various scanned food items represented by varying lengths of lit LEDs on the handle and a changing emoticon comparing the average miles of all the products in the trolley against a social norm. A fast and frugal shopping challenge is presented, in the style of a humorous reality TV show, where the pros and cons of using various devices to help make purchase decisions are demonstrated by shoppers in a grocery store.