Terry Hemmings

Where on-line meets on the streets: experiences with mobile mixed reality games

We describe two games in which online participants collaborated with mobile participants on the city streets. In the first, the players were online and professional performers were on the streets. The second reversed this relationship. Analysis of these experiences yields new insights into the nature of context. We show how context is more socially than technically constructed. We show how players exploited (and resolved conflicts between) multiple indications of context including GPS, GPS error, audio talk, ambient audio, timing, local knowledge and trust. We recommend not overly relying on GPS, extensively using audio, and extending interfaces to represent GPS error.

“Playing with the Bits” User-Configuration of Ubiquitous Domestic Environments

This paper presents the development of a user-oriented framework to support the user reconfiguration of ubiquitous domestic environments. We present a lightweight component model that allows a range of devices to be readily interconnected and an editor to support users in doing this. The editor discovers available ubiquitous components and presents these to users as jigsaw pieces that can be dynamically recombined. The developed editor allows users to assemble lightweight sensors, devices such as displays and larger applications in order to meet their particular needs.

Finding a Place for UbiComp in the Home

The movement of design out of the workplace and into the home brings with it the need to develop new analytic concepts to consider how ubiquitous computing might relate to and support everyday activities in domestic settings. In this paper we present a number of concepts derived from ethnographic studies of routine activities and technology uses implicated in the production and consumption of communication in the home. These concepts sensitise design to the importance of the ecology of the domestic space and distributed arrangements of collaboration to communication. They draw attention to the places where communication is accomplished and the routines whereby communication is articulated, thereby highlighting ‘prime sites’ for situating ubiquitous computing in the domestic environment.

Pattern-based support for interactive design in domestic settings

Designing for future domestic environments offers a challenge for everyone involved in the design of new technologies. The move from the office, and working environments in general, has highlighted the need for new techniques for understanding the home and conveying findings to technology developers. This paper presents a pattern-based approach informing the design of technology for future domestic settings. The approach is based on the original work of Alexander and seeks to support the on-going process of design, rather than the structuring of a corpus of previous work. The paper presents an adapted pattern language framework for structuring and presenting ethnographic fieldwork and considers the broad implications of patterns for the development of new technologies for domestic settings.

The Social Construction of Displays

We employ ethnography to consider the nature of existing non-electronic ‘displays’ in the home. The word display is placed in scare quotes to draw attention to the act of displaying. Seen from the point of view of action it is evident that displays are socially constructed by people in their routine interactions with the material technologies available in the settings where their actions are situated. Through the use of a setting’s material technologies to construct mutually intelligible displays for one another people come to coordinate their actions. Our ethnographic studies show that these ‘coordinate displays’ are distributed across a variety of locations within a setting. Taken together these displays articulate an ecologically distributed network elaborating the unique needs of particular environments and requirements for the development of computer support for cooperative work. We elaborate this point of view through an ethnographic study of the coordinate displays implicated in mail use in the home environment.

Designing assistive technologies for medication regimes in care settings

This paper presents some early design work of the Care in the Digital Community research project begun under the EPSRC IRC Network project Equator. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of user requirements in care settings poses interesting methodological challenges. This paper details some methodological options for working in the domestic domain and documents the translation of research into design recommendations. We report on the importance of medication issues in a hostel for former psychiatric patients and present an early prototype of a medication manager designed to be sensitive to the particular requirements of the setting.

Assembling connected cooperative residential domains

Between the dazzle of a new building and its eventual corpse ...[lies the] unappreciated, undocumented, awkward-seeming time when it was alive to evolution ...those are the best years, the time when the building can engage us at our own level of complexity.

When a Bed is not a Bed

In this chapter we present an instance of how organisational knowledge is constructed, collected and used in the setting of a large hospital trust in the North of England. Our main concern here is to focus upon how representational artefacts of organisational activities and ‘states of play’ are oriented to in the everyday work of hospital staff — mainly a directorate manager and a ward sister. Here we are specifically focusing on the situated character of the representational artefact — a ‘beds board’- and the system of calculability that it affords in the hospital setting. Our view is that such representations must be understood as embedded within the practicalities of the setting, and that any assumed benefits of replacing existing systems must be carefully considered.