Stephen Voida

Support for multitasking and background awareness using interactive peripheral displays

In this paper, we describe Kimura, an augmented office environment to support common multitasking practices. Previous systems, such as Rooms, limit users by constraining the interaction to the desktop monitor. In Kimura, we leverage interactive projected peripheral displays to support the perusal, manipulation and awareness of background activities. Furthermore, each activity is represented by a montage comprised of images from current and past interaction on the desktop. These montages help remind the user of past actions, and serve as a springboard for ambient context-aware reminders and notifications.

A pace not dictated by electrons: an empirical study of work without email

We report on an empirical study where we cut off email usage for five workdays for 13 information workers in an organization. We employed both quantitative measures such as computer log data and ethnographic methods to compare a baseline condition (normal email usage) with our experimental manipulation (email cutoff). Our results show that without email, people multitasked less and had a longer task focus, as measured by a lower frequency of shifting between windows and a longer duration of time spent working in each computer window. Further, we directly measured stress using wearable heart rate monitors and found that stress, as measured by heart rate variability, was lower without email. Interview data were consistent with our quantitative measures, as participants reported being able to focus more on their tasks. We discuss the implications for managing email better in organizations.

Integrating virtual and physical context to support knowledge workers

The Kimura system augments and integrates independent tools into a pervasive computing system that monitors a users interactions with the computer, an electronic whiteboard, and a variety of networked peripheral devices and data sources.

Re-framing the desktop interface around the activities of knowledge work

The venerable desktop metaphor is beginning to show signs of strain in supporting modern knowledge work. In this paper, we examine how the desktop metaphor can be re-framed, shifting the focus away from a low-level (and increasingly obsolete) focus on documents and applications to an interface based upon the creation of and interaction with manually declared, semantically meaningful activities. We begin by unpacking some of the foundational assumptions of desktop interface design, describe an activity-based model for organizing the desktop interface based on theories of cognition and observations of real-world practice, and identify a series of high-level system requirements for interfaces that use activity as their primary organizing principle. Based on these requirements, we present the novel interface design of the Giornata system, a prototype activity-based desktop interface, and share initial findings from a longitudinal deployment of the Giornata system in a real-world setting.

Getting practical with interactive tabletop displays: designing for dense data, "fat fingers," diverse interactions, and face-to-face collaboration

Tabletop displays with touch-based input provide many powerful affordances for directly manipulating and collaborating around information visualizations. However, these devices also introduce several challenges for interaction designers, including discrepancies among the resolutions of the visualization, the tabletops display, and its sensing technologies; a need to support diverse types of interactions required by different visualization techniques; and the ability to support face-to-face collaboration. As a result, most interactive tabletop applications for working with information currently demonstrate limited functionality and do not approach the power or versatility of their desktop counterparts. We present a series of design considerations, informed by prior interaction design and focus+context visualization research, for ameliorating the challenges inherent in designing practical interaction techniques for tabletop information visualization applications. We then discuss two specific techniques, i-Loupe and iPodLoupe, which illustrate how different choices among these design considerations enable vastly different experiences in working with complex data on interactive surfaces.

Charitable technologies: opportunities for collaborative computing in nonprofit fundraising

This paper presents research analyzing the role of computational technology in the domain of nonprofit fundraising. Nonprofits are a cornerstone of many societies and are especially prominent in the United States, where

Everybody knows what you're doing: a critical design approach to personal informatics

295 billion, or slightly more than 2% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (i.e. total national revenue), was directed toward charitable causes in 2006. Nonprofits afford many worthwhile endeavors, including crisis relief, basic services to those in need, public education and the arts, and preservation of the natural environment. In this paper, we identify six roles that computational technology plays in support of nonprofit fundraising and present two models characterizing technology use in this domain: (1) a cycle of technology-assisted fundraising and (2) a model of relationships among stakeholders in technology-assisted fundraising. Finally, we identify challenges and research opportunities for collaborative computing in the unique and exciting nonprofit fundraising domain.

Asymmetry in media spaces

We present an alternative approach to the design of personal informatics systems: instead of motivating people to examine their own behaviors, this approach promotes awareness of and reflection on the infrastructures behind personal informatics and the modes of engagement that they promote. Specifically, this paper presents an interface that displays personal web browsing data. The interface aims to reveal underlying infrastructure using several methods: drawing attention to the scope of mined data by displaying deliberately selected sensitive data, using purposeful malfunction as a way to encourage reverse engineering, and challenging normative expectations around data mining by displaying information in unconventional ways. Qualitative results from a two-week deployment show that these strategies can raise peoples awareness about data mining, promote efficacy and control over personal data, and inspire reflection on the goals and assumptions embedded in infrastructures for personal data analytics.

Motivational affordances and personality types in personal informatics

In any collaborative system, there are both symmetries and asymmetries present in the design of the technology and in the ways that technology is appropriated. Yet media space research tends to focus more on supporting and fostering the symmetries than the asymmetries. Throughout more than 20 years of media space research, the pursuit of increased symmetry, whether achieved through technical or social means, has been a recurrent theme. The research literature on the use of contemporary awareness systems, in contrast, displays little if any of this emphasis on symmetrical use; indeed, this body of research occasionally highlights the perceived value of asymmetry. In this paper, we unpack the different forms of asymmetry present in both media spaces and contemporary awareness systems. We argue that just as asymmetry has been demonstrated to have value in contemporary awareness systems, so might asymmetry have value in media spaces and in other CSCW systems, more generally. To illustrate, we present a media space that emphasizes and embodies multiple forms of asymmetry and does so in response to the needs of a particular work context.

Automatic partitioning for prototyping ubiquitous computing applications

Personal informatics applications have been gaining momentum with the introduction of implicit data collection and alert mechanisms on smart phones. A need for customized design of these applications is emerging and studies on tailoring UI design based on the personality traits of users are well established. This poster investigates how various affordances in gamified personal informatics applications affect motivation levels to track and achieve goals for users with different personality types. We conducted a study to examine how user personality traits relate to (1) motivational affordances in behavior tracking applications and (2) the specific behaviors users prefer to track.