Stuart Reeves

The Frame of the Game: Blurring the Boundary between Fiction and Reality in Mobile Experiences

Mobile experiences that take place in public settings such as on city streets create new opportunities for interweaving the fictional world of a performance or game with the everyday physical world. A study of a touring performance reveals how designers generated excitement and dramatic tension by implicating bystanders and encouraging the (apparent) crossing of normal boundaries of behaviour. The study also shows how designers dealt with associated risks through a process of careful orchestration. Consequently, we extend an existing framework for designing spectator interfaces with the concept of performance frames, enabling us to distinguish audience from bystanders. We conclude that using ambiguity to blur the frame can be a powerful design tactic, empowering players to willingly suspend disbelief, so long as a safety-net of orchestration ensures that they do not stray into genuine difficulty.Mobile experiences that take place in public settings such as on city streets create new opportunities for interweaving the fictional world of a performance or game with the everyday physical world. A study of a touring performance reveals how designers generated excitement and dramatic tension by implicating bystanders and encouraging the (apparent) crossing of normal boundaries of behaviour. The study also shows how designers dealt with associated risks through a process of careful orchestration. Consequently, we extend an existing framework for designing spectator interfaces with the concept of performance frames, enabling us to distinguish audience from bystanders. We conclude that using ambiguity to blur the frame can be a powerful design tactic, empowering players to willingly suspend disbelief, so long as a safety-net of orchestration ensures that they do not stray into genuine difficulty.

Into the wild: challenges and opportunities for field trial methods

Field trials of experimental systems in the wild have developed into a standard method within HCI - testing new systems with groups of users in relatively unconstrained settings outside of the laboratory. In this paper we discuss methodological challenges in running user trials. Using a trial of trials we examined the practices of investigators and participants - documenting demand characteristics, where users adjust their behaviour to fit the expectations of those running the trial, the interdependence of how trials are run and the result they produce, and how trial results can be dependent on the insights of a subset of trial participants. We develop three strategies that researchers can use to leverage these challenges to run better trials.

Experts at Play Understanding Skilled Expertise

Developing from David Sudnows accounts of expertise, this article examines the gameplay of Counter-Strike, a popular online game. Although Counter-Strike at first may seem an unsophisticated pursuit, players display remarkable dexterity developed through many hours of play. Through participating in the game and analyzing videos of gameplay, we examine Counter-Strike as an example of expert technology use. As players move beyond the mere physical prowess of chaining their movements with the environment, they develop a sense of the terrain of play as a contingent tactically oriented understanding, rather than as static spatial knowledge. Relatedly, we provide the beginnings of an alternative account of both games and expertise which brings out something of what it is to play a specific game, as opposed to games in general. Moreover, rather than presenting a disengaged general model of skill, the article considers how we might access and describe the situated skills of gameplay.

Performing thrill: designing telemetry systems and spectator interfaces for amusement rides

Fairground: Thrill Laboratory was a series of live events that augmented the experience of amusement rides. A wearable telemetry system captured video, audio, heart-rate and acceleration data, streaming them live to spectator interfaces and a watching audience. In this paper, we present a study of this event, which draws on video recordings and post-event interviews, and which highlights the experiences of riders, spectators and ride operators. Our study shows how the telemetry system transformed riders into performers, spectators into an audience, and how the role of ride operator began to include aspects of orchestration, with the relationship between all three roles also transformed. Critically, the introduction of a telemetry system seems to have had the potential to re-connect riders/performers back to operators/orchestrators and spectators/audience, re-introducing a closer relationship that used to be available with smaller rides. Introducing telemetry to a real-world situation also creates significant complexity, which we illustrate by focussing on a moment of perceived crisis.

Designing Mobile Experiences for Collocated Interaction

Many of our everyday social interactions involve mobile devices. Yet, these tend to only provide good support for distributed social interactions. Although much HCI and CSCW research has explored how we might support collocated, face-to-face situations using mobile devices, much of this work exists as isolated exemplars of technical systems or interaction designs. This paper draws on a range of such exemplars to develop a practical design framework intended for guiding the design of new mobile experiences for collocated interaction as well as analysing existing ones. Our framework provides four relational perspectives for designing the complex interplay between: the social situation in which it takes place; the technology used and the mechanics inscribed; the physical environment; and the temporal elements of design. Moreover, each perspective features some core properties, which are highly relevant when designing these systems. As part of presenting the framework we also explain the process of its construction along with practical advice on how to read and apply it.

Remote Collaboration Over Video Data: Towards Real-Time e-Social Science

The design of distributed systems to support collaboration among groups of scientists raises new networking challenges that grid middleware developers are addressing. This field of development work, ‘e-Science’, is increasingly recognising the critical need of understanding the ordinary day-to-day work of doing research to inform design. We have investigated one particular area of collaborative social scientific work – the analysis of video data. Based on interviews and observational studies, we discuss current practices of social scientific work with digital video in three areas: Preparation for collaboration; Control of data and application; and Annotation configurations and techniques. For each, we describe how these requirements feature in our design of a distributed video analysis system as part of the MiMeG project: our security policy and distribution; the design of the control system; and providing freeform annotation over data. Finally, we review our design in light of initial use of the software between project partners; and discuss how we might transform the spatial configuration of the system to support annotation behaviour.

Knowledge Production in Interaction Design

Research in HCI involves a wide variety of knowledge production bringing forth theories, guidelines, methods, practices, design case studies / exemplars, frameworks, concepts, qualities and so on. This workshop is about mapping out the spaces, forms and potentials of such knowledge production in interaction design research.

Understanding Mobile Notification Management in Collocated Groups

We present an observational study of how notifications are handled by collocated groups, in the context of a collaborative mobile photo-taking exercise. Interaction analysis of video recordings is used to uncover the methodical ways in which participants manage notifications, establishing and sustaining co-oriented interaction to coordinate action, such as sharing notification contents and deciding on courses of action. Findings highlight how embodied and technological resources are collectively drawn upon in situationally nuanced ways to achieve the management of notifications delivered to cohorts. The insights can be used to develop an understanding of how interruptions are dealt with in other settings, and to reflect on how to support notification management within collocated groups by design.

Framing IxD knowledge

Interaction design (IxD) research cuts through many domains of HCI yet remains distinctive. There are convincing arguments that Research through Design (RtD) is a valid research method in the conce ...

Graffito: crowd-based performative interaction at festivals

Crowd-based events are generating new forms of crowd-based performative interaction. Nightclubs and festivals are at the cutting edge of crowd-based interaction with ubiquitous computing. The social capital of crowd-based interaction is not well understood and is usually limited to one-off events. Our intention is to explore the possibility for generating a lifelong contextual footprint of crowd-based performative interaction. In this paper, we present and discuss two case studies of designing applications for crowd-based performative interaction at two large-scale festivals and reflect on their implications for design.