Past seminars 2006–2010

The Information Needs of Informal Carers - A systematic approach and framework to support a comprehensive understanding. (PhD Completion Seminar)

There has been little research that explores the nature and various aspects of information needs of informal carers, and that provides a more complete account of these needs as well. This research project sets out to identify all potential aspects of information needs of informal carers that must be used for investigating, understanding and classifying these needs comprehensively. Comprehensive understanding of these needs is important because it is the first step to develop, provide and satisfy these needs effectively. A three-stage study was undertaken. It initially adopted a conceptual study approach to develop a framework of these aspects (stage I). Then, this framework was tested and refined using qualitative (stage II) followed by quantitative (stage III) data.

The conceptual study (stage I) involved analysing critically the existing literature on information needs of informal carers, health informatics, and information needs in general. Following this critical analysis, a conceptual framework that encompasses the potential aspects of information needs of informal carers was developed. This framework is labelled as "Framework of Aspects of Information Needs of Informal Carers". It divides these aspects into two broad types: (i) aspects related to the focus of information needs (four foci) and (ii) aspects related to the state of information needs (four states).

The qualitative study (stage II) involved conducting two separate but related sub-studies (studies A and B) with nine informal carers of diabetic children as an example of a group of informal carers. While the collected data in study A aimed at confirming or disconfirming the existence of the aspects related to the focus of information needs of informal carers, or/and identifying any additional aspects, the collected data in study B aimed at confirming or disconfirming the existence of the aspects related to the state of information needs of informal carers, or/and identifying any additional aspects, as well as developing items of the instrument that was used to measure the aspects related to the state of information needs in stage III.

The quantitative study (stage III) employed a cross-sectional self-reported questionnaire of 198 informal carers (above 18 years old) of all kinds. The collected data aimed at testing the refined aspects related to the state of information needs and examining if they are distinct from each other in the wider community of informal carers, revising the instrument that was developed in stage II, and examining if the state of information needs vary in terms of the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of informal carers.

Thus, the validated framework worked well in portraying a comprehensive picture of information needs of informal carers in this study. The existence of the two broad types of aspects of information needs of informal carers was confirmed empirically. However, informal carers give priority to some foci on other during their caring journey, and the occurrence and frequency of facing the four states may vary among informal carers. By using this framework, it was also possible to identify various outcomes of needed information such as topics, types, formats, mediums, and sources. These aspects of information needs of informal carers are in turn useful to researchers and practitioners: for researchers, these aspects provide a new perspective from which to better investigate and understand the information needs of informal carers and information needs in general; for practitioners, these aspects assist in designing and providing information to informal carers by taking into consideration the focus and state of their information needs.

Digital ink on and in digital documents.

Digital documents have revolutionized the way we do many things. Word processors, CAD and records management systems are ubiquitous - they have many advantages such as easy editing, storing, sharing, etc etc. Yet there are various situations where people still prefer pen and paper. Early design across all disciplines (fine art, architecture, engineering) is one such example. Medical consultation notes is another.

The increasing availability and affordability of devices with stylus sensitive screens has spurred interest in better software support for digital ink. However, the challenges are many: interaction fundamentals, how do you replace 100+ discrete keys and a mouse with a 2 button pen? Digital ink recognition, is it writing, is it drawing, what does it say, what does it mean? Software engineering, how can I display ink over this control? In this talk I will describe some of the opportunities for pen interaction, the current state of research and the problems yet to be satisfactorily solved.

About the presenter

Dr Beryl Plimmer is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland. She is most interested in human computer interaction. The main focus of her research is stylus based interaction, with particular interest in sketched diagrams. This work ranges from investigating the effect of working with different visual fidelities, to developing better recognition engines and designing compelling user experiences. She has also integrated some of these ideas into a multimodal system for teaching handwriting to the visually impaired and multi-touch interfaces for 3D modelling. More information on her research can be found at www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/research/hci/.

Exploring dimensions of sociality in an electronic guide to an historic site

This talk describes a project carried out by the authors to design a mobile guide for 'The Shrine of Remembrance' - Victoria's large and significant war memorial. As with many similar guides for museums and other sites of interest, a practical intention here is to display items from an extensive, but currently unseen, archive of historic materials.

This talk describes a project carried out by the authors to design a mobile guide for 'The Shrine of Remembrance' — Victoria's large and significant war memorial. As with many similar guides for museums and other sites of interest, a practical intention here is to display items from an extensive, but currently unseen, archive of historic materials. These include architectural drawings, iconic postcards, films of past ceremonies of remembrance, images of war, and oral accounts of war experience. A parallel intention is to address the problem, identified in previous research into audio guides, of individual visitors becoming isolated in an electronic 'information bubble' that inhibits the social dimensions of visiting and learning about places. In contrast to the immersive style of many audio guides, we set out to investigate the use of relatively lean and fragmentary visual and audio content intended to provoke new readings of the material site and to exist alongside the social activity of visiting. In this talk, the design for the guide will be presented and we will seek ideas and comments on our proposed evaluation method.

The researchers are currently seeking people to trial the visitors guide.

About the presenter

Wally Smith is the coordinator of the Master of Information Systems and a senior lecturer in the Department of Information Systems, The University of Melbourne.

Networks, Access and Divides: Intermediary Relations in Developing Contexts

This discussion will draw upon issues relating to digital technologies and their usage to facilitate access to other resources and networks in different cultural contexts. I will draw upon recent fieldwork with the Indigenous community in Shepparton, rural Victoria, and with clients of a microfinance institution in Cambodia. This fieldwork contributes to wider research on the implementation of development initiatives in contexts where communities are labelled to have specific needs and reflects on the development discourse as a whole- where technological and infrastructural implementation have a heavily emphasised role. The implications of 'access' and 'divides' will also be critically discussed, drawing from experiences from these field sites.

This discussion will draw upon issues relating to digital technologies and their usage to facilitate access to other resources and networks in different cultural contexts. I will draw upon recent fieldwork with the Indigenous community in Shepparton, rural Victoria, and with clients of a microfinance institution in Cambodia. This fieldwork contributes to wider research on the implementation of development initiatives in contexts where communities are labelled to have specific needs and reflects on the development discourse as a whole- where technological and infrastructural implementation have a heavily emphasised role. The implications of 'access' and 'divides' will also be critically discussed, drawing from experiences from these field sites.

About the presenter

Jolynna is currently a PhD candidate in Development Studies in the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry. She has recently returned from conducting fieldwork in Cambodia to contribute to her research on economic change and social transformation in post-conflict societies.

Introduction Seminar

About the presenter

Joji is a new PhD candidate in the Department of Information Systems. Joji will be supervised by Steve Howard. He will be introducing himself and his research interests. Joji completed a Computer Science Degree with Honours, as well as a Research Masters at the University of NSW. His research to date has focused on HCI, usability, and interaction design. More recently, he has become interested in the broader use of technology in society.

Joji has also worked at MYOB as a design business analyst. However, his most recent position was as a usability consultant at UsabilityOne. Prior to this, Joji was an Australian Youth Ambassador for Development, where he worked in Cambodia as an IT Officer in a Non Government Organisation.

The Extended Bassoon, Playable Instruments and Ambisonics

Joanne will be presenting research into extended musical instruments and live Ambisonics.

About the presenter

Joanne Cannon is one of Australia's leading bassoonists and experimental musicians. She began her musical career as an orchestral musician. Feeling limited in this setting however, she left the orchestra to explore new musical frontiers. Her work is recognized for its combination of improvisation, experimental instruments and computer interaction. Joanne has developed several unique and spectacular digital wind controller instruments including the Serpentine bassoon and the Contra-monster. Over the last ten years she has worked with Stuart Favilla in The Bent Leather Band, playing, building and researching new instruments and technologies. This work has been recognized by a number of International prizes.

Staging Interaction Design for Culture-Related Public Environments

In Computers as Theatre (1991), Brenda Laurel compares the experience of interfaces in general with the experience of theatre and tries to answer the question: "When we look toward what is known about the nature of interaction, why not turn to those who manage it best - to those from the world of drama, of the stage, of the theatre?" (Laurel 1991, p. xii). When looking at the broader field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) this question could apply to more than just interfaces, since the interfaces have pervaded into all sorts of physical environments. This makes the link between theatre and computing even more relevant in the present day, not least due to the emerging experience economy (Pine & Gilmore 1999), which has induced an increased focus on how to design the user experience and accordingly which means to utilise in order to stage these experiences.

Dramaturgy can contribute with a new relevant perspective on Human-Computer Interaction design when analysing and designing for physical interactive environments, as it brings new correlations between elements of the physical environment into focus. Staging is about how the designers intend the users’ experience to be. It is about how to design or stage/orchestrate the physical interactive environment as a scenography to be experienced by the users. In this talk I want to outline some culture-related projects I have been involved with which have taken different approaches to the problem of staging the interaction space. In this process I will report on progress towards a framework for conceptualising the topography of user experience in design.

About the presenter

Karen Johanne Kortbek is a PhD student from the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University in Denmark, who is visiting UTS until June 1st. She has a background in Art History and Multimedia, and has been affiliated with the interdisciplinary research centre "Interactive Spaces" (http://interactivespaces.net) since 2004. Her research investigates the domain of culture-related public environments (such as museums, art galleries and the streets of a city) and how interaction designers can stage interaction design for these environments, in order to create more engaging experiences, where for instance movements of the human body come into play. Her work includes empirical studies and experiments within the application domain. She analyses the user contexts throughout the design and use processes, and has so far developed a conceptual framework consisting of seven parameters that are important to guide the design.

How PhD Candidates Formulate and Make Sense of Their Research Topic – A Semi-Interactive Seminar

The presenter will present and discuss current findings of an ongoing longitudinal study aimed at understanding the role of a computerised concept mapping tool in the context of the Australian PhD candidature. This study is part of the presenter's PhD research project.

The presentation will be semi-interactive as the audience will be invited to share their ideas and commentaries on formulating and making sense of their research topics. The audience will also be invited to feedback on the handling and analysis of the data collected. The presenter is further keen to explore the idea of sensemaking in the context of the study and seeks feedbacks on the best course of action.

About the presenter

Daryl Ku is a PhD candidate with the Interaction Design Group. His research interest is in the area of cognitive tools.

CHI 2010 discussion

Open discussion on the 2010 Computer-Human Interaction conference Christine recently attended.

Social Play in Exertion Games

Exertion Games are computer games that require physical effort from their players, like the Nintendo Wii. Involving the body when playing with others can have physical health, but also social benefits, however, there is still little understanding how computer games can facilitate social play in Exertion Games, as technology is still very limited when it comes to supporting social interactions with our bodies.

Exertion Games are computer games that require physical effort from their players, like the Nintendo Wii. Involving the body when playing with others can have physical health, but also social benefits, however, there is still little understanding how computer games can facilitate social play in Exertion Games, as technology is still very limited when it comes to supporting social interactions with our bodies.

This talk presents a conceptual way of how designers could approach multi-player bodily interactions in games. This work was developed while Floyd was a Microsoft Research Asia Fellow at Microsoft in Beijing, China, in light of recent developments of Project Natal for the Xbox 360.

http://exertioninterfaces.com

PhD Completion Seminar

Autism is a disorder that impacts upon communication, cognition and behaviour. People with autism are users of both digital and non-digital assistive technologies. They are, however, both highly individual and sensitive users making them potentially difficult to design with and for. This presentation will describe a study of autism support and those who deliver that support. A participatory design method, for use by support people, will be presented and comments sought.

Autism is a disorder that impacts upon communication, cognition and behaviour. People with autism are users of both digital and non-digital assistive technologies. They are, however, both highly individual and sensitive users making them potentially difficult to design with and for. This presentation will describe a study of autism support and those who deliver that support. A participatory design method, for use by support people, will be presented and comments sought.

About the presenter

Peter Francis is a PhD candidate with the Interaction Design Group, Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne. He is also a lecturer at the School of Management & Information Systems, Victoria University.

Social Network Sites and Passion-related Careers: From Beginners to Celebrities

Previous research in HCI and CSCW has addressed social network sites in both leisure and work domains, but little is know about social network sites for domains where the boundaries between work and leisure blur. Drawing from a case study of a social network site for bodybuilders, this talk will describe how beginners develop from amateurs to professionals and (in some very rare cases) to celebrities, and show how social network sites support them in their career development. Social network sites help bodybuilders to improve their performance in competitions, extend their support network, and gain recognition for their achievements. The findings show that beginners benefit the most from their online participation, whereas activities shift from social network sites to offline settings as individuals develop further in their professional careers. This shift from online to offline settings constitutes a novel finding, which extends previous work on social network sites that has looked at groups of amateurs and professionals in isolation.

Previous research in HCI and CSCW has addressed social network sites in both leisure and work domains, but little is know about social network sites for domains where the boundaries between work and leisure blur. Drawing from a case study of a social network site for bodybuilders, this talk will describe how beginners develop from amateurs to professionals and (in some very rare cases) to celebrities, and show how social network sites support them in their career development. Social network sites help bodybuilders to improve their performance in competitions, extend their support network, and gain recognition for their achievements. The findings show that beginners benefit the most from their online participation, whereas activities shift from social network sites to offline settings as individuals develop further in their professional careers. This shift from online to offline settings constitutes a novel finding, which extends previous work on social network sites that has looked at groups of amateurs and professionals in isolation.

About the presenter

Bernd Ploderer is a PhD candidate in the Interaction Design Group, Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne. This talk is based on fieldwork in Southern California, the so-called 'Mecca of Bodybuilding', and constitutes the basis for a thesis chapter that he is currently writing.

http://research.berndploderer.com

The Use of Large-Scale Multi-Touch Technology in Educational Contexts

Matt and Michael will present their current work on the use of large-scale multi-touch technology for collaborative activities in educational contexts. The presentation will discuss the details on the construction of the large-scale multi-touch hardware, including details of the underlying technologies as well as practical lessons learned in the construction of two prototypes. The presentation will also look at several software projects being undertaken on the multi-touch platform. This will cover the not only the specific applications being developed, but also importantly the issues that have arisen with regard to HCI and user collaboration.

Matt and Michael will present their current work on the use of large-scale multi-touch technology for collaborative activities in educational contexts. The presentation will discuss the details on the construction of the large-scale multi-touch hardware, including details of the underlying technologies as well as practical lessons learned in the construction of two prototypes. The presentation will also look at several software projects being undertaken on the multi-touch platform. This will cover the not only the specific applications being developed, but also importantly the issues that have arisen with regard to HCI and user collaboration.

Michael is a lecturer in the Berwick School of Information Technology at Monash University. His research interest include the interface between education and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to develop new pedagogies and applications appropriate for learner needs such as using multi-touch surfaces, for educational applications. Project blog: http://bigedumultitouch.wordpress.com.

About the presenter

Matt is a lecturer and researcher within the Berwick School of Information Technology. His research interests lay in the visualisation of information using multimedia technologies, as well as the use of emergent technologies for education, in particular the learning challenges faced by novice programming students. This was the topic of his PhD thesis, submitted in February of 2010. Matt's teaching areas include programming, data communications, as well as coordinating the final year multimedia and games studio project class.

http://berwick.monash.edu.au/Research/campus_research_projects/fit/multitouch.html

Reconnecting distributed families with the use of technology

John C. is an artillery officer of the British Royal Army who was stationed for six months in Afghanistan. He has been deployed in unusual battle settings many times in the past, is a father of three (aged between 10 and 19) and he recently came back to England. BBC news reported his first reaction upon returning to home:

Children have grown, and spouses/partners may have changed as well. They have had to be more independent. Some decisions they've made you are OK with, others not. Maybe there were conflicts that were there before you left, and those are still there. The next big question is how are we going to adapt to the changes, and it goes on for a couple of years after you get back." (BBC, 2010).

In recent decades, families all around the world have become more geographically distributed making it more difficult for family members to support the feeling of connectedness. Communication and connectedness between remote family members has attracted much research interest from the disciplines of HCI and CSCW over the last years. This talk will:
1. Present the current communication technologies that support and enhance the feelings of connectedness in distributed families,
2. Explore potential research gaps that are associated with the reconnection of distributed families and the use of technology,
3. Explain the research questions that fuel this research,
4. Present and analyze the research design, and
5. Discuss the potential contributions

About the presenter

Kostas is a PhD student in the IDG advised by Prof Steve Howard and Dr Frank Vetere. His research interests are on HCI and the design of "humane" technology; technology that is focused on issues of social concern. Find Kostas at: http://kazakos.info

Department of Information Systems Doctoral Consortium 2010

More information is availible at the Doctoral Consortium 2010 page. There will be no regular seminar this week as the consortium will run all day.

Tactile feedback based on acoustic pressure waves

A presentation of a "hands free" musical instrument, utilizing a non-contact tactile feedback method based on airborne ultrasound. The three main components of the interface that will be discussed are:

1. The condensation of the ultrasound energy in one spatial point generating a precise tactile reproduction of the audible sound;
2. Generation of audible sound by self-demodulation of an ultrasound signal during its propagation through air;
3.The feed-forward method enabling a real-time intervention of the musician, by shaping the tactile (ultra)sound directly with his hands.

More information at: http://www.ciglar.mur.at/sonicbeams.html

About the presenter

Miha Ciglar is an audio engineer and sound artist, working at the intersection of art and technology. In 2008 he founded IRZU - the Institute for Sonic Arts Research in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The institute is operating as a non governmental organization. It is based on an interdisciplinary concept and is carrying out artistic productions in the field of electronic music, audio technology research as well as educational activities. In 2009 he organized and curated the sonic arts festival EearZoom, one of IRZU's first major projects.

He is exploring a composition approach where pain is introduced as a central reference for selection and temporal arrangement of sonic objects. By connecting the performer's (composer's) body to the electronic circuit of the instrument, or to an electronic instance of the sound that is being generated, he is able to experience the sound in a haptic way, which influences his musical decisions and thus generates rather unconventional results.

His recent artistic work is focused on the design of new interfaces for musical expression, experimenting with interaction concepts based on real-time gesture (motion sequence) recognition. In his research work from the field of Music Information Retrieval, he is exploring the practical implementation of different timbre analysis techniques.

Transmesh: Creating Mobile Technological Urban Spaces

While architects design physical spaces which people inhabit, we are interested in designing a mobile technological urban space where people, space, information, technology and services can freely interact. In such a space, the boundaries between public and private are fuzzy and mobile and only temporarily defined. In this talk, we explain how and why we created such a space, with a small, portable, solar-powered Bluetooth server. Since user acceptance of technologies is important to the success of such installations, we conducted a survey ascertaining perceptions about Bluetooth as a means of sharing media. Our work demonstrates the technosocial possibilities which result from establishing localized mediated spaces or meshworks, using Bluetooth which will be discussed in this talk. However, Bluetooth technology is a double-edged sword. It is a meshwork for sharing media freely between mobile device users in public places such as shopping centres and private spaces such as the home and workplace. It presents opportunities for the design of innovative creative projects, however technical issues, user acceptance and competition for the user's attention provide continuing challenges.

About the presenter

Dr Margaret Hamilton is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Information Technology at RMIT University. She is primarily interested in research in mobile human and technological interaction, engagement and computer science education. Her mobile computing group Transmesh has undertaken studies with Tablet PCs, PDAs, mobile phones and the 'solar-blue' bluetooth server.

Introduction Seminar

Pedro is a new PhD candidate in the Department of Information Systems. Pedro is supervised by Steve Howard and Martin Gibbs. He will be introducing himself and his research interests. His interests include the use of interactive mirrors, social marketing and new technologies for marketing communications.

About the presenter

Pedro completed his bachelor in Mass Media Communication at the Salesian University of Mexico City, as well as a MSc in Interactive Media at the University of Limerick, Ireland. His professional background is in advertisement and marketing at the National Trust Fund for Tourism Development (FONATUR) in Mexico.

Playability: Spatial Motion and Extended Instruments

This research investigates the application of live spatial motion using Ambisonics. The paper was recently presented at the International Conference New Instruments for Musical Expression [NIME] in June this year. The research aims to use spatial motion and Ambisonics as a solution to the problem of mixing large ensembles of digital and extended instruments. Trevor Wishart’s taxonomy provides a reference for systematic investigation of the potential for live spatial motion in live improvisation. Music performance and instrument systems are evaluated and discussed against criteria established for playable instruments.

Joanne Cannon is one of Australia's leading bassoonists and experimental musicians. She began her musical career as an orchestral musician. Feeling limited in this setting however, she left the orchestra to explore new musical frontiers. Her work is recognized for its combination of improvisation, experimental instruments and computer interaction. Joanne has developed several unique and spectacular digital wind controller instruments including the Serpentine bassoon and the Contra-monster. Over the last ten years she has worked with Stuart Favilla in The Bent Leather Band, playing, building and researching new instruments and technologies. This work has been recognized by a number of International prizes.

About the presenter

Joanne’s supervisors are Steve Howard, Martin Gibbs and Wally Smith.

SmartGardenWatering — Engaging the gardener

In this seminar we will review the progress of the SmartGardenWatering project and discuss an extension to this project that explores ideas of sensing conditions within the garden. Jon will describe and demonstrate new aspects of this online software (SGW 2.0) that advises gardeners how to efficiently schedule their garden watering and choose an appropriately sized water tank. The changes from the original project allows gardeners to save their garden models, explore models saved by others, and share their models via Facebook. Varan will introduce himself and his background and describe his involvement in this project. His interests are in understanding gardeners’ needs in relation to providing gardening advice on mobile devices, the role that remote sensing information could have, and issues of motivating gardeners to input garden data to be used in a ‘crowdsourcing’ manner by other gardeners. Varan will use part of this seminar as an idea-generation / brainstorming process.

About the presenter

Rahuvaran Pathmanathan (known as Varan) is studying his Masters in Informatics, at Aalborg University in Denmark. He is a visiting research student in the Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne, in the period from July 20th to November 15th 2010. He will be working on the SmartGardenWatering Project, with Jon Pearce, where his focus will be HCI in mobile applications. Jon is a senior lecturer within the Interaction Design Group.

Co-creation: an exploratory investigation into the construct and its dimensions

Joanna's seminar will center around co-creation specifically in the context of the heritage sector. Whilst the body of work around co-creation has grown, the construct has been viewed from multiple perspectives, with the literature generally bereft of a coherent, holistic theoretical framework. Joanna's research aims to develop a more comprehensive conceptualization of co-creation by exploring it comprehensively to provide a deeper understanding of the underlying dimensions. Case study research using exemplar organizations, utilizing in-depth interviews with key informants, was used to investigate the manifestations of co-creation in the context of the heritage sector. The seminar will present provisional findings from this qualitative phase. The findings illuminate the prevalence of deliberate co-creation strategies in all case study organisations, revealing three facets of co-creation: personalization, engagement and co-production. Joanna's seminar will also consider subsequent methodological steps planned to further investigate co-creation.

About the presenter

Joanna is a current PhD student at Melbourne Business School under the supervision of Dr Jody Evans and is the recipient of the Ian Kirk Scholarship. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and German and her Bachelor of Business in Marketing (Honours) from Monash University. Her areas of interest include service and experience marketing and branding. Joanna has presented her research at a number of academic conferences in Australia, New Zealand and Europe. At the 2008 Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference, Joanna's paper entitled "Building Brand Identity: Does it pay? An investigation into cultural and recreational services" was awarded Best Paper in the Sports, Arts, Heritage Marketing and Tourism Marketing Track.

Characterising distributed support ecologies: A case for young adults with chronic illness

Online [peer support] sites (OPSS) provide important ways for adults and adolescents (AYA) with chronic illnesses to access and develop ongoing and supportive (and sometimes non-supportive) relationships with similar others over temporary or sustained periods of illness, treatment and sequela. With the prolific increase in the use of new social networking technologies and other sociable media the current work provides a timely review of the types of online support spaces available to this cohort of young people. However, tacit to this, is the assumption that a number of OPSS utilize, not only, different types of sociable media, but they afford a unique range of different modalities with varying degrees of interactivity. Whilst this remains uncertain and unaccounted for in studies of OPSS, sociable technologies are often used in combination, with other modes of communication, both simultaneously and or over intermittent periods of time, within specific social contexts and relationships. This might be conceptualized as a distributed support ecology.

Shawn's talk will present findings from a current study of these types of online environments, focusing on their ecological arrangement and interactive properties. This provides a basis to explore ways in which AYAs develop supportive relationships through sociable media and aspects of these environments that affect their success or failure.

About the presenter

Shawn Ashkanasy is a PhD candidate with the Interaction Design Group.

Evaluating an augmented-reality guide to the Parkville Research Precinct

In this seminar we will report on initial findings from a project to investigate the feasibility of using smartphone-based augmented reality (AR) to enable laypeople to discover information about biomedical and health sciences research in the physical and geographical context where it occurs. The project is sited in a major centre of research, Melbourne's "Parkville Precinct". Research institutions generate large numbers of scientific publications, some of which are available online and some of which are accessible in person through library services. Institutions offer visitors insights into their activities on open days and use websites and broadcast media to explain their work to "outsiders". However, for anyone who is in the vicinity of an institution but not formally involved in it, the research can be difficult to comprehend. This situation may lend itself to the use of an AR application to allow people passing through the precinct to gain insights into its research activities via their phones. We used Wikitude, an app that uses the phone’s GPS signal and compass to identify its current location and then overlay information onto the user’s real-time view of the world.

Responding to ARC grant reviewers

Steve, Frank and Jon will, using a current ARC grant application (ie its under consideration at the moment), talk about the trials and tribulations of applying for support through the ARC Discovery process. Rather than a typical seminar, it'll be a round table chat and chance for us to learn a bit from each other.

“When we see it change colour we think, ‘Oh, Lucy’s here’”: using ambient technologies to create a classroom presence for children absent due to health conditions

In this seminar we will present preliminary findings from our proof-of-concept study, creating a classroom presence for hospitalised children using broadband-enabled ambient technologies. Approximately 10,700 school‐aged children (6–18 years) are admitted annually to Royal Children's Hospital and significant barriers exist for these children in terms of continuity of education, risk of disengagement from school, academic failure and compromised social wellbeing. We developed an ‘ambient orb’ prototype to alert teachers and schoolmates to a child’s desire to connect with their classroom and peers, without requiring the need to establish communication. Using a case study design, four hospitalised children controlled an ambient orb in their classrooms via a web-based application and bedside netbooks. Data was collected before, during and after the implementation of the orb, via interviews with, and observations of, the child, parents, hospital teacher, school teacher and classmates. A framework of social presence theory was used to assess the presence, awareness and connectedness of each child to their classroom and vice versa.

This study is funded by The University of Melbourne’s Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society, and is a collaboration between The University of Melbourne’s Department of Information Systems and Department of Paediatrics and the Royal Children’s Hospital Education Institute. The seminar will be presented by Dr Amy Nisselle, Research Fellow at the RCH Education Institute, and Dr Frank Vetere, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information Systems.

"Oh but Miss, it's boring" - The role of interest and engagement in behaviour management and learning for students with challenging behaviour.

This presentation will describe the development and validation of a new form of interest measurement called the My Interest Now for Engagement tool (MINE). MINE is based on iFISH software (Pearce, 2008) and is designed to identify students’ interests and to profile the phase of development of those interests using the Four-Phase model. The Four-Phase model of interest development (Hidi & Renninger, 2006) distinguishes between early phases of interest where interest is triggered by specific situations and later phases where interest involves well-developed personal predispositions to engage with interest content. The differing cognitive and affective states that are implied by this distinction have implications for understanding interest and its application to inform design of engagement strategies for students with challenging behaviour, and uses an interactive and playful environment to facilitate student reporting their interests as well as indicating cognitive and affective dimensions related to their experience when engaging with the interest content. The interactive nature of the tool allows students to explore and select from a large pool of potential interests. It allows for the triggering of new situational interests as well as reporting well-developed individual interests. Validation of the tool is based on responses from 136 first year undergraduate students and approximately 100 secondary students. The development of this tool has the potential to extend understanding of the cognitive and affective structure of the four phases of interest development as well as providing profiles of students’ interests that can be used to facilitate engagement strategies and will be particularly informative in providing for students with challenging behaviour.

About the presenter

Robert is currently a PHD student in the school of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, and has previously been a teacher in ‘difficult’ schools and juvenile detention centres in Victoria, outback NSW and the UK for over ten years. He has also worked in over 80 schools around Victoria, presenting interactive history incursions. His previous research established a relationship between high intrinsic motivation and high achievement in students with challenging behaviour. Robert has a passionate interest in allowing all young people to be treated with respect as they learn.

"Hey Honey I am Home" - Reuniting work-separated families with the use of technology.

Families all around the world face the challenge of continuous separation due to professional reasons. The effects of separation on the family members, especially children, can cause short-term distress as well as jeopardize the family wellness. Domestic communication technologies have extensively been used in order to bridge the gap of separation as well as provide family members with a sentiment of connection. Current research in HCI and related disciplines focuses on identifying opportunities for design of communication technologies that support connectedness, awareness, intimacy or presence to name a few. The purpose of this seminar is to introduce preliminary findings from a study with defense and mining families regarding the use of current communication technologies and their impact on mediating experiences, the notion of reunion and how reunion is perceived by all family members.

About the presenter

Konstantinos (Kostas) Kazakos is an engineer who was introduced in the world of socio digital systems by his supervisors Prof Steve Howard and Dr Frank Vetere. In his thesis he explores the phenomenon of reunion and the use of communication technologies by families who experience continunous separation due to work. Kostas enjoys designing technology to support everyday life as well as to build "things that work". He spends his free time trying to give a new face to mobile phones as early disease detection mechanisms or more secure transactional "machines".

Shared artefacts as participatory Babel fish

We propose an interwoven set of shared artefacts for stakeholder participation for designing domestic technology for intergenerational fun. Our toolkit includes technology probes, associated fieldwork, and conceptual goal models. We used the high-level goal models, derived from Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE), as a template to analyse rich field data collected via three technology probes with grandparents and grandchildren. The goal models combined with technology probes and field data provided a uniquely inclusive set of artefacts for the participation of stakeholders in the design process.

Pre-OZCHI Presentations

This seminar spot will be used for people within the department to talk about their upcoming OzCHI papers.

Understanding Participation in Passion-centric Social Network Sites

Passions imbue our lives with meaning; they provide us with aspirations and help us achieve goals, but they can also be a source of tension, sacrifice and risk. This PhD research explores how this duality is reflected in online participation, in particular in social network sites that are designed to support people’s passions.

Drawing from case studies of passion-centric social network sites for bodybuilders and photographers, Bernd will describe different ways in which people participate in these sites and their influence on passion. The findings show that passion-centric social network sites facilitate the achievement of goals, socialising and self-promotion. However, people rarely express their sacrifices or give critical feedback on social network sites. This varies between different user groups, which extends current understanding of participation in social network sites.

About the presenter

Bernd Ploderer is a PhD candidate with the Interaction Design Group, Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne. Through his fieldwork with photographers Bernd has also developed a passion for analogue photography himself. BerndPloderer.com provides more information on both his research and his photography.

Preliminary Results from an iFish Research Study

In recent years, more and more research in the field of Human Computer Interaction is focused on the user experience. Joy of use, flow and visual aesthetics are concepts getting attention, and are coming together into the concept of engagement. Based on earlier research of Jon Pearce research study was set up on engagement with online interactions. Participants had to perform two tasks with a modification of the iFISH system. iFISH is a research tool for exploring interactivity, engagement and affect. The system presents a ranking of objects based on matching them to a set of values entered by a user. Two different ways of user input were researched, as well as two ways of presenting the output. Engagement was investigated by comparing users' actions and their answers to a post-questionnaire. In the seminar the preliminary results of the study will be presented.

About the presenter

Ruud Knieriem is a final year Information Science student from Utrecht University, The Netherlands, who has worked on his master thesis at the Department of Information Systems, with supervisors Jon Pearce and Gregor Kennedy.

PhD Completion Seminar: Understanding Serendipity as a UX

Tuck will present highlights of his PhD research which establishes an understanding of the User Experience of Serendipity. He also hopes to reflect upon his own PhD journey and more importantly, the PhD experience.

Serendipity is a personally meaningful experience arising from chance encounters. While people do encounter serendipity in their everyday lives (albeit not all the time), serendipity can also arise as a user-experience through people's use of interactive technologies such as when listening to their digital music in the shuffle mode.

So what is this brand of shuffle-led serendipity? How does serendipity arise from not choosing your own songs but instead having it randomly (chosen and) presented to you by a music player? Does the practice of music listening as well as the technology involved in shuffle listening in fact nudge people towards serendipitous encounters? And does it work for other digital content besides music, say, photographs? To find out the answers as well as hear Tuck's (hopefully more interesting) reflections into his (seemingly) long, solitary and occasionally serendipitous PhD journey, he would like to see you at the seminar.

About the presenter

Tuck Leong is a PhD candidate with the Interaction Design Group, Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne.

Sustainable Interactions: Through Design, In Design

Broadly construed, interaction design is the art of facilitating meaningful connections between humans and digital artefacts and systems. While the field of interaction design continues to lead to advances in producing more usable and enjoyable interactive devices, the consequential ecological impact — in terms of resource consumption and accelerated rates of obsolescence contributing to disposal of toxic materials — represents a growing area of concern. In this talk I will discuss approaches to sustainability in the context of interaction design in two broad senses: (i) through design — how interactive products and systems can be used to promote more sustainable behaviors and (ii) in design — how sustainability can be used as a critical lens in the design of interactive products themselves. This talk will largely be based on a paper to be delivered at CHI 2009 in April. Additionally, key examples from past work of the Sustainable Interaction Design Research Group at Indiana University as well as my ongoing research as a Fulbright Scholar at Griffith University will be used to illustrate both approaches with an eye toward future design and research opportunities.

About the presenter

William Odom is currently a visiting Fulbright Scholar in the design department at the Griffith University Queensland College of Art. In 2008, he completed a Masters degree in Interaction Design at Indiana University, where he worked on several projects in the Sustainable Interaction Design Research Group. He has published and presented this research at several international venues related to human-computer interaction design. In September 2009, he will begin doctoral studies in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and School of Design at Carnegie-Melon University. More information on Will Odom is available at http://willodom.com

Designing Spaces For Learning: An Emerging Research Agenda

This talk argues that the design of learning spaces is an area of compelling interest to HCI. The built fabric of Australian universities is ageing; while the technology infrastructure required to meet next-generation teaching and learning needs is frequently under-funded or absent. At a time when the Australian tertiary student population is growing and diversifying, it is essential that HCI develops a research agenda capable of meeting these important challenges.

The present reality is that key aspects of the contemporary educational built environment are failing to meet our students' needs. Complex problems are involved, and it is interesting to note that some of the most compelling research in this area is currently emerging, not from architecture and design, but from fields like sports medicine, paediatrics, ergonomics, and engineering. HCI should be a prominent voice in this interdisciplinary discourse and debate. One starting point for this agenda comes from recent work at the University of Cambridge on students' use of spaces and technologies for learning. In the UK context, we found that informal and non-institutional, or "semi-institutional", spaces were increasingly important to students, but that the design of such spaces frequently failed to address students' preferred learning behaviours and work patterns. We now have an opportunity to pursue these questions further in the context of the Spaces for Knowledge Generation Project (http://www.skgproject.com/). SKG is a $220K ALTC partnership project between La Trobe University as lead institution, Charles Sturt University, Apple and Kneeler Design Architects. The project aims to inform, guide and support the development of next-generation learning and teaching spaces and practices, and to provide a model for designing student learning environments that is future-focused and sustainable for the medium term.

About the presenter

Catherine Howell is Educational Designer in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University. She is an experienced user researcher and e-learning evaluator, and has a special interest in qualitative research methods. Catherine is currently involved in several institutional research and development projects relating to teaching and learning, including the Enquiry Based Learning Project, for which she acts as Evaluator. Her PhD at the University of Cambridge (2005) investigated the impact of colonial spaces and places on the European cultural imaginary.

SmartGardenWatering.org.au is a web application developed during 2008 to provide the public with advice about how much water to apply to their gardens. It presents the culmination of two years of horticultural research by Connellan, May and Denman at the University¹s Burnley campus. Our challenge was to present this work in an engaging and interactive manner that would allow gardeners to model their garden, explore the impact of various factors (location, soils, mulches, plant types, watering systems, etc.) and obtain an optimal monthly watering schedule. We have also incorporated a water tank modelling feature that simulates the performance of a water tank over a year.

In this seminar we will present the results of this project. We will also present our plans for extending the project during 2009 to create a vibrant social network of gardeners modelling, sharing and comparing their gardens online. We will use the expertise of this seminar audience to react to ideas of how such a community might be established. For example, in what way might some of the following technologies be utilised to support a gardening community: FaceBook, Twitter, SMS, fora, Google maps, tagging, email, real-time meteorological data, and mobile apps?

Both of these projects are funded by the Smart Water Fund.

We look forward to an engaging discussion!

About the presenter

John Murphy is an HCI consultant who has a long history of research involvement with the Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne. Jon Pearce and Wally Smith are both senior lecturers in the Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne. Jon's research interests are in the areas of engagement and online learning. Wally's interests are in the design of socio-technical systems.

Design Influence on Social Play in Distributed Exertion Games

Exertion games – these are games that require intense physical effort – are believed to facilitate not only physical health, but also more social play than traditional computer games. Floyd has found through a qualitative analysis of "Table Tennis for Three" aspects of design that can facilitate such social play. The aim is to contribute to our understanding of how people play these games and of how we can support exertion and social play in future designs.

Table Tennis for Three is an exertion game for three networked players that is played with a real bat, ball and table. Floyd has used video recordings and interviews of 42 players in order to understand how users experience social play in exertion games, and found aspects of awareness and uncertainty to be important factors that can aid in the design of future games.

This talk will largely be based on a paper to be delivered at CHI 2009 in April, which was short-listed as 'best paper'.

About the presenter

Florian 'Floyd' Mueller is a PhD candidate with the Interaction Design Group, Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne.

Designing Assistive Technologies for Autism Support: Putting the Cart before the Horse

The people who support someone with an autism spectrum disorder collectively possess knowledge and skills that, if harnessed, may enable the design of better and more cost-effective support technologies. The resource and time constraints of traditional design techniques, however, may limit the impact of this contribution. This presentation will describe a study of autism support and those who deliver that support. A participatory design methodology will be proposed and comments sought.

About the presenter

Peter Francis is a PhD candidate with the Interaction Design Group, Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne. He is also a lecturer at the School of Management & Information Systems, Victoria University.

This seminar was cancelled due to the presenter's illness.

The Deakin University Learning Repository

This presentation is based on a paper that will be presented at EDUCAUSE2009 (in Perth). It will highlight the main business requirements and describe Deakin University's solution to support a digital learning resource repository to be shared across faculties. The originality of the Deakin learning repository resides in the suite of learning resource collections supporting its various business objectives including the objective of managing intellectual property across all faculties of a multi-disciplinary educational institution.

About the presenter

Since finishing her PhD in Computer Science in 1994, at the University of Grenoble (France), Sandrine worked as a lecturer for both Bond (Gold Coast) and Melbourne Universities, as a research scientist for CSIRO (Sydney) and as an information architect for Modem Media (London), an online advertising company. She is now a business analyst for Deakin University, within their Knowledge Media Division. Her interests cover requirements gathering, usability engineering and task modelling. Sandrine is actively involved in the HCI community. She is a reviewer for many international conferences; and in Australia, she is the OZCHI liaison of CHISIG (http://chisig.org, the Australian HCI professional society.

Photo Practices and Family Values in Chinese Households

This talk considers studies of photography by five families in Sichuan, China, focusing on sharing and display. I plan to make the argument that practices around photographs in Chinese families reflect deeper values that are worked through in the course of family life. I will present evidence in the form of three examples to support this argument: (1) photo sharing as reflecting moral behaviour; (2) the propensity to focus on subjects such as flowers, and trees and landscapes as reflecting the belief of balance in Nature; (3) the use of photo collections as reflecting notions of ancestral worship and filial piety. At the end of the talk, I argue for: (1) the need to include values in any consideration of photo practices; (2) the importance of considering and tracing how different values are embedded in everyday technologies.

About the presenter

Connor Graham is an Independent Researcher with interests in Studies of Everyday Life, Workplace Studies, Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Supported Cooperative Work. He has just passed his PhD conducted through the Interaction Design Group at the University of Melbourne.

The Cadaver, the Comatose & the Chimera

We are living in an age of excess and indifference, of prosthetic augmentation and extended operational systems. The dead, the near dead, the undead and the yet to be born are existing simultaneously. This is the age of the cadaver, the comatose and the chimera. The cadaver can now be preserved indefinitely with plastination. The comatose body can be sustained on a life-support system. Cryogenically suspended bodies await possible reanimation. Chimera is the body that performs with mixed realities. A biological body, augmented with technology and telematically performing with virtual systems. The chimera is an alternate embodiment.

This is an age of organs without bodies, of organs awaiting bodies. There is now a proliferation of organs. A proliferation of biocompatible components in both substance and scale that allows technology to be attached and implanted into the body. Organs are extracted and exchanged. Organs are engineered and inserted. Blood flowing in my body might tomorrow be circulating in your body. Ova are fertilized in-vitro with sperm that has been unfrozen. The face of the donor becomes a third face on the recipient. The body acts with indifference. Indifference as opposed to expectation. An indifference that allows something to occur, that allows an unfolding - in its own time and with its own rhythm. An indifference that allows suspending a body with hooks, inserting a sculpture inside the body and surgically constructing an ear on an arm. This presentation examines alternate anatomical architectures using mechanical, virtual, biotech and surgical augmentation and exploration of the body. It exposes the obsolescence, the absence and the emptiness of the body.

Note that this seminar will not be held at the IDEA LAB. Instead, it will be held at the Law Building, Lecture Theatre G08, University Square, 185 Pelham Street, Carlton 3053.

About the presenter

Stelarc is a performance artist who has performed with a third hand, a virtual arm, a 6-legged walking robot and is presently surgically constructing and stem cell growing an ear on his arm.

Interactivation: Models, Approaches and Frameworks

Through interactivation we can open up technology. It is about an e-cological approach which support and structure the research and design processes aiming to develop new ways of rich and multimodal interactions. This talk concentrates on the structured and modular approach to the design of physical interfaces, illustrated with recent research projects.

About the presenter

Bert Bongers (The Netherlands, 1964) has a mixed background in technology, human sciences (MSc Erg. UCL London), and the arts, in a mixture of education and practice. In his PhD thesis (VU Amsterdam) he combines insights and experiences gained from musical instrument design, interactive architecture, video performances, and interface development for multimedia systems to establish frameworks and an ecological approach to the design for the interaction between people and technology. He has set up new media labs in Amsterdam, Barcelona and Maastricht, lectured in workshops and newly developed courses on interaction at various universities and schools. He has published two books, several book chapters, papers in academic journals and conferences. He developed an instrument for live audiovisual performance, and creates interactive video installations. Since May 2007 he is an Associate Professor at UTS, where he set up the Interactivation Studio as a laboratory with a flexible infrastructure to support many activities in design and research in interactivating objects and spaces.

A Panel on Building Community

This seminar will feature a panel on 'building community'. The panel will involve speakers from various stages of their research career, and who are presently in different roles. The speakers will share their reflections on the issues surrounding mutual responsibilities in a research group, such as mentoring and maintaining a research community.

The Silent Language of Designing Gesture, Talk and Representation at Work in the Architectural Design Studio (PhD Completion Seminar)

Gesture can be thought of as a knowledge practice that helps to bind professional communities together. This project was concerned with the gesture practice of architects, specifically gestures that occur during collaborative design practice in educational settings. The location of the study was the design studio, where experienced architects work with students on design propositions. What is interesting about the design studio is a heavy reliance on things - drawings, models and computer screens - which need to be understood as an integral part of the gesture work that is being done. This two year field study looked for patterns of gesture behaviour and the knowing manipulation of things when architecture students and teachers engaged in what might be called 'design story telling'. It is hoped that this knowledge will help form the basis for a better accommodation of gesture in online and blended learning contexts for architecture education and, potentially, other design practices.

About the presenter

Inger Mewburn graduated as an architect in the early 1990s and worked in practice for about a decade before becoming an architectural design teacher. She has just completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne and currently works as a research fellow at RMIT University. Her interactive digital art work has appeared in magazines and exhibitions around the world including Melbourne, the UK, France, Greece, Austria, China and the USA.

PhD Completion Seminar: Voice in Virtual Worlds

For his PhD, Greg has conducted four studies of communication in online virtual environments, focusing on voice and text modalities ahd how these interact with three-dimensionality, multiple contexts, and fluid identity. The studies included ethnographies of voice use in MMORPGs and Second Life, and studies of collaboration at large and small scales of virtual distance. Greg's website contains some publications from these studies. This talk will run from 3.00 to 3:45 pm, including time for discussion.

About the presenter

Greg is a PhD candidate in the Interaction Design Group at the University of Melbourne, supervised by Martin Gibbs and Steve Howard. He plans to submit his thesis this year.

Collaborative Building in Second Life

Greg will preview a talk he is giving at ECSCW09 on collaboration around objects in Second Life. This study, conducted at PARC in 2008, re-enacted classic 'quasi-experiments' into problems of reference to objects and places. The detachable camera feature of SL makes it especially hard to deduce a collaborator's focus of attention via their avatar's gaze or gesture; yet users discovered interesting ways to directly refer to locations. This talk will run from 3.50 to 4:15 pm, including time for discussion.

The paper is "The 'out-of-avatar experience': object-focused collaboration in Second Life" by Greg Wadley and Nicolas Ducheneaut.

The Commodification of Location: Dynamics of Power in Location-based Systems

Location-based ubiquitous computing systems are entering mainstream society and becoming familiar parts of everyday life. However, the settings in which they are deployed are already suffused with complex social dynamics. We report on a study of parole officers and parolees whose relationships are being transformed by location-based technologies. While parolees are clearly subjects of state discipline, the parole officers also find themselves subject to new responsibilities. This study highlights the complexities of power in sociotechnical systems and what happens when location becomes a tradable, technological object.

About the presenter

Paul Dourish is professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. His research interest lies at the intersection of computer science and social science, with a particular interest in ubiquitous and mobile computing and the practices surrounding new media.

Ambient Awareness and Situated Displays

Ambient awareness technologies bring information into peripheral attention, allowing people to be aware of the information without necessarily focusing on it or explicitly attending to it. A number of different techniques can be used to provide information in this manner. Situated displays are one such technology. In this talk, I will describe two projects which have attempted to explore the ideas of ambient awareness from different perspectives and in different application areas. In the domestic realm, we explored how a situated display might be useful as an SMS communication device. After developing prototype technology we performed an ethnographic evaluation with four households, including two non-family households, and found some interesting results. In another project, which is ongoing, we are exploring the ways in which software development teams communicate information relating to their day-to-day project status. Having recently completed a qualitative case study with a large software team we are now looking to augment their work practices with technologies drawn from the field of ambient awareness.

About the presenter

John Downs is a student with the Human-Computer Interaction Rearch Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland.

Sex Toys – Design, Technology and the Future for Human/Machine Sexual Interaction

Sex toys and their precursors are not a product genre you will find mentioned in the canons of design history and theory. In fact, as a field of research, they appear infrequently in any field of study. Yet they are manufactured and consumed in their millions year after year and have done so for decades in their modern form. There is evidence they have been manufactured for thousands of years and Victorian England and America supported a thriving vibrator industry treating middle class women for hysteria. As mass produced objects they are embedded with the socio-cultural meanings of constructed gender ideology and sexual control. As technological objects they are as complicated and harmless as an electric toothbrush. So, 30 years after the sexual revolution, why are they still socially taboo? What if they weren’t and what if they were designed using the innovation methods and strategies of industrial, product, multimedia, interface and HCI designers?

About the presenter

Judith Glover is a lecturer in Industrial Design and Product Design Engineering at Swinburne University. Her PhD topic investigates the taboo nature of the sex toy industry and argues industrial design methods are central to bringing this product genre into mainstream commerce through appropriate female-centric design.

Finding the Other 5%: Understanding the Role of Social Networking Technologies in Building Personal Networks for Young Adults with Cancer

In this paper, we explore the ways in which young adults with cancer (aged 17-24) build support networks through computer mediated personal networks. The support networks are influenced by technological affordances and the ongoing experiences of living with the illness and treatment regimes. We report a single, in-depth case study of one young adult with cancer and her use of mobile telephony and web based social networking sites in building support networks. Three important themes emerge from this case. First, in this context, computer mediated communications (CMC) are not exclusive to the maintenance of online relationships, but mediate networks of "core", "significant," and new ties (primarily online) over time. Second, the social engagement between the subject and members of their social networks is dynamic with different modes of communication predominant at different points in time and different relationships significant at different points in time depending on state of illness, treatment and context. Finally, the interplay between CMC and different ties influence the characteristics of the networks, which is characterized by bridging and segmenting networks.

About the presenter

Shawn Ashkanasy is a PhD student of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include the study of computer mediated social support and, in particular, life changing events in late adolescents and young adulthood and the use of social networking media.

"Slippery" Interactions: Exploring Informal Interaction and Co-Presence in Hybrid Spaces for the Support of Student Learning

The aim of this project is to investigate how students informally interact across hybrid learning spaces, with a particular consideration for the qualities of co-presence and proximity. A hybrid learning space describes a convergent physical and virtual environment that can facilitate learning-related events and behaviours. For example, when a student is talking to other individuals or group members in a room (physical), while simultaneously using an instant messaging client or sending a text message (virtual). The informal interactions that occur here may have both social outcomes, such as strengthening social bonds between students, and learning related outcomes, such as unexpected information transfer that contribute towards informal learning. In this presentation, I will outline the background to the project and the proposed research methodology. It is hoped that this research will lead to the design of a prototype or other technology that can build on our understanding of how co-presence impacts on informal interaction in hybrid learning spaces. The ultimate goal would be to have a prototype design that could be adopted for use in higher education to better support student learning experiences.

About the presenter

Kate Goodwin is a first-year Master of Science (Information Systems) student in the Department of Information Systems (DIS), University of Melbourne. Her main research interests are learning technologies, ubiquitous computing and HCI. Her supervisors are Dr Frank Vetere (DIS) and Dr Gregor Kennedy (Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry & Health Sciences). Kate has worked in the education software industry for over 4 years, and prior to this was a freelance multimedia designer focusing on interface design for educational applications.

The Melbourne Punk Scene in Australia’s Independent Music History

The existence of independent music communities and culture within Australia’s major cities today is largely attributed to the introduction of punk in the late 1970s. Among the inner city youth, a tiny subculture emerged around this sprawling, haphazard style of music that was quickly dismissed by the major players in the Australian music industry as bereft of commercial possibilities. Left to its own devices, punk was forced to rely solely on the strength of the independent music network to release some of the most original music of the era and lay the foundations for a celebrated musical culture. This paper examines the factors that contributed to and influenced the early Australian punk scenes, focusing in particular on Melbourne between 1975 and 1981. It shows that the emergence and characteristics of independent music communities within individual cities can be attributed to the existence of certain factors and institutions, both external and internal to the city.

About the presenter

Morgan Langdon completed her Honours degree in Media Studies at La Trobe University in 2008. This paper is an excerpt from her Honours thesis on independent music culture in Melbourne. She plans to commence her PhD in 2010.

Reality Mash Up: Second Life Teleports into the Contemporary Art World (Artist Talk)

Primarily an installation artist, Georgie Roxby Smith challenges the relationship between analogue and digital systems, questioning materiality and exploring new possibilities of virtual reality software. Her practice is engaged with the themes of digital and global systems and the glitches created when these systems meet with the analogue or the everyday. Through extracting and reinjecting her Second Life avatar into physical space, her work exists on a kaleidoscope of planes - "in world", within a body of physical sculptures, as ephemeral projections in space and as recreated performances by both humans and avatars. Forming a virtual hall of mirrors, these realities bleedthrough and overlap into each other, creating an indeterminate state where audiences are in two, three, four realities at once.

Georgie has recently been accepted into the Watermill Center Residency Program (New York) and the Linden Centre for Contemporary Art Innovators Program. She has also been selected as guest reviewer for Second Life simulator Brooklyn is Watching, presented by Jack the Pelican Presents (New York). As well as exhibiting in local ARI's, Georgie has taken part in the Melbourne International Arts Festival for the past three years including 'Navigators' 2006 (for which she received the Eldon and Anne Foote Trust Travel Grant), 'John Cage's Musicircus' 2007 and, in 2008, contributed to 'Longing Belonging Land' and assisted artist Chris Doyle with his 'Ecstatic City' installation.

About the presenter

Georgie Roxby Smith is an artist and production manager and is currently completing her Master of Visual Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts.

Travelling Without Moving: Greece-USA-Australia

Based on the famous Jamiroquai song, this presentation will introduce and unveil the secret life of a new member of the IDG group. Kostantinos (preferably Kostas even though Kon starts sounding appealing) will introduce himself, his aspirations, beliefs, life journey as well as his PhD research under the tight supervision of Prof Steve Howard. Complimentary Greek delicacies will be offered.

About the presenter

Kostas is a new PhD student in the Department of Information Systems and member of the Interaction Design Group. His main research interests are Ubiquitous Computing, HCI and Software Engineering. His supervisor is Prof Steve Howard. Kostas has over 3 years of hardware and software engineering experience both in industry and academic labs. Having lived for 2 years in USA he is still struggling to get accustomed to the Australian way of life :-)

Blended Interaction Spaces for Distributed Team Collaboration

The Blended Interaction Space (BIS) concept combines video conferencing elements and distributed shared interactive digital screen elements to support distributed hands-on collaboration in the workplace in a way that participants feel as if they are together. This feeling is achieved by a "blending" of the two spaces, which allows participants of a meeting to communicate and interact as they would if they were located face-to-face.

The interaction design for the physical and the digital workspace is an important part of achieving this "blending". Project teams are often created across several physical locations, and we have an expectation to be able to collaborate in such ways with the aid of technology. BIS sets itself apart from previous work in media spaces and telepresence by combining both support for natural person-to-person communication and distributed shared interactive media spaces for data sharing and collaborative manipulation. This work was done as a cross organisational collaboration itself, under the banner of the Braccetto project, as part of the HxI initiative, between CSIRO Sydney, NICTA Sydney and DSTO Adelaide – I will be presenting the design process and the outcomes of this project.

About the presenter

Jeni Paay is a senior research scientist and interaction designer with the User Experience Group, CSIRO.

The Seduction of the New: Balancing Web 2 Cool with Coalface Realities

An array of new Web 2.0 technologies has risen to prominence in the last few years (Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, Del.ici.ous, Twitter). These technologies are characterised by users’ ability to create content and then, with relative ease, publish it to the world or share it with others in their social network. The widespread popularity and potential learning applications of these technologies has not gone unnoticed by educational technology commentators and university administrators alike. As a result there is increasing pressure on teaching staff – implicit and explicit – to incorporate Web 2.0 learning activities into their curriculum. And while there are certainly examples of how this has been done well, there are also significant ‘coalface’ challenges associated with effectively incorporating ‘Web 2 Cool’ into students’ learning experience.

I will argue in this presentation that, in part, the perceived need to use Web 2.0 technologies in learning is based on fundamental assumptions about (i) the technological experiences and preferences of students who are entering higher education, and (ii) perceptions that Web 2.0 technologies offer straightforward opportunities to enhance students’ learning experiences. I will present findings from a number of programs of research that test these assumptions. I will also discuss the lessons learnt from the implementation of a collaborative writing exercise, in which 750 first-year students were asked to use a wiki to create, publish and share material in their psychology studies. I will conclude by reflecting on how key attributes of Web 2.0 technologies can sometimes run counter to traditional practices of learning and teaching within universities.

About the presenter

Gregor Kennedy is a senior research fellow at the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, University of Melbourne.

PhD Confirmation Seminar: The Role Of Visualization For Understanding Complex Systems

Complex systems are systems of interconnected parts where the behaviours at one level can give rise to emergent patterns at another level. Understanding complex systems is difficult due to the number of parts and internal and external factors involved that need to be considered simultaneously. Structure-behaviour-function (SBF) theory has been used to identify differences between expert and novice approaches to complex systems with the greatest disparity in comprehending behaviour and function. The instructional implications of these expert-novice differences have led to the development of various inquiry-based computer simulations and learning-by-design activities. These developments focus primarily on behaviour and function which can be problematic for mechanical and biological complex systems where form dictates function. The aim of this project is to investigate how visual representations of structure, behaviour, and function can be effectively integrated to support understanding of emergence in complex systems.

About the presenter

Ardis Cheng is a PhD student in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry, and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne with interests in visual communication and interaction design in medical education.

Pre-OZCHI Presentations

Long Papers Beyond The User: Use And Non-Use In HCI  Christine Satchell, Paul Dourish You Can Be Too Rich: Mediated Communication In A Virtual World  Greg Wadley, Martin Gibbs, Nicolas Ducheneaut

Short Papers Truce In Online Games  Mitchell Harrop Having Fun At Home: Interleaving Fieldwork And Goal Models  Sonja Pedell, Tim Miller, Frank Vetere, Leon Sterling, Steve Howard, Jeni Paay

The Role of Mood in How We Perceive Interface Agents That Express Emotions

Affective computing originated in the field of Artificial Intelligence. However, in the last decade or so it has found its way into the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Currently, we see emotions being utilised from attempts to create/enhance basic ‘social interaction’ among human and computers, effective teaching and learner engagement, and persuasion. One of the common methods of delivering emotions at an interface level is with a use of an interface agent and is commonly used in teaching, e-commerce and the health domain. Although, technologies such as interface agents that express emotions are said to allow more natural or more enhanced interactions with computers, the opposite is often true. This can be directed to the fact that little work has been conducted to understand the implications of these ‘synthetic’ emotions on users’ perceptions, behaviours and emotions.

Whilst trying to investigate effects of emotions expressed by interface agents on their users, I found that users can ‘catch’ emotions expressed by an interface agent, similar to how humans transmit and catch one another’s emotions. This can be a used to regulate and optimise one’s emotions to best suite the interaction at hand. For example, expressions of positive emotions by an interface agent can lead to reduction in the user’s boredom. However, it seems that we need to pay particular attention to the user’s mood when designing such technology.

In this presentation I will show (i) empirical evidence to support how users’ mood can influence users’ perceptions of the interface agent and (ii) discuss how not addressing users’ mood may lead to failure in technologies such as interface agents that express emotions.

About the presenter

Nilma Perera is a PhD student at the Department of Information Systems (DIS) and the Biomedical Multimedia Unit (BMU). Her research interests are Affective Computing, Emotions and Flow theory. Nilma is supervised by Jon Pearce (DIS) and Gregor Kennedy (BMU).

Community Negotiated Game Rules In Online Multiplayer Games (PhD Confirmation Seminar)

Remember when you were a little kid and you played a game with your friends where you chased each other? Sometimes you'd feel someone wasn't playing fairly (they ran out of bounds, they climbed a tree, they hid, they kicked you in the shins) and a huge debate/riot would ensue about what rules to play by. Sometimes the riot was half the fun.

Well, I'm here to tell you that half of the fun also happens in online multiplayer games today. There are programmed rules, there are rules at a social level and sometimes programmers change which are which through the magic of engineering. The aim of this project is to investigate the nature of these rules and how people bring them into play within computer mediated environments. Of particular interest is the role of rules in the ongoing design process of games. We'll be running through the design of three studies which aim to get this done.

Mitchell also does stuff on iFish.

Comparative Ethnography: An Alternative Approach to the Evaluation of Unruly Technology in the Health Care Sector

In this presentation I talk about current work seeking to introduce insights from ethnography and social studies of medical technology into practices of measuring effects of IT in the health care sector. Presently, there is much frustration among vendors and users of of health care IT around precisely this issue. In the talk I hypothesize that the understanding of IT-effects is largely influenced by an evidence-based medicine approach to effects. I argue that this is problematic for a number of reasons having to do with the unruliness of both IT and disease and propose and alternative approach. The alternative approach comparative ethnography is practice-based and compares the effect of IT in different sociotechnical configurations. It uses contrast and continuous analytical provocation as its working tool.

Unlike other approaches to effect measurement, our approach takes as its point of departure that the specific ways in which IT and care practices connect, are extremely hard to predict. This should acknowledged and not considered something to control or work-around.

About the presenter

Brit Ross Winthereik is an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen.

Older people’s needs and how technology can help

In this talk Andrew will describe the lessons he has learned from the state provision in the UK of technology to support frail older people living independently. He will indicate how this falls short of what older people say that they need. Andrew will contrast this view of “technology to watch over you’ with a view of “technology to connect you”. The latter is exemplified by a design project involving digital jewellery that aims to facilitate intergenerational communication through virtual presence.

About the presenter

Andrew Monk is Director of The Centre for Usable Home Technology (CUHTec) at the University of York. He is professor of Psychology and a Fellow of the British Computing Society. His work has been concerned with taking a user-centred approach to the design many kinds of information and communication technologies. Most recently this has taken the form of research on technological support for older people who wish to live independently.

Please note thats this special seminar will be held at the IDEA Lab, 4th Floor, ICT Building

Measuring fun

How do you measure fun? Most commonly one asks people to reflect on how much they just enjoyed themselves after doing something. Alternatively, one can interrupt them in the middle of doing something and ask the same question. In both cases one can only tap their reconstruction of the experience after the event. In this talk Andrew will describe work at York to devise and validate quantitative measures of user experience abstracted from recordings of group behaviour.

About the presenter

Andrew Monk is Director of The Centre for Usable Home Technology (CUHTec) at the University of York. He is professor of Psychology and a Fellow of the British Computing Society. His work has been concerned with taking a user-centred approach to the design many kinds of information and communication technologies. Most recently this has taken the form of research on technological support for older people who wish to live independently.

Stereotypical modelling and adaptation of the museum visitor experience

Little research exists on the interrelation of task modelling and user modelling. This research project explores the possibilities of using user stereotypes in the creation of task models. Observations were made at the Melbourne Museum to analyse visitors' behaviours. Based on those observations and existing museum visitor classifications, task models were developed for three identifiable stereotypes. To validate these 'stereotypical task models', an experiment was conducted with an interview as a main component.

About the presenter

Arno van Vulpen is a final year Information Science student from Utrecht University, The Netherlands, who has worked on his master thesis at the Department of Information Systems, with supervisors Sandrine Balbo, Shlomo Berkovsky and Fabian Bohnert. His research interests include task modelling, user interfaces, usability, and cognition.

Human-Centered Design Meets Cognitive Load Theory: Designing Interfaces that Help People Think

Historically, the development of computer systems has been primarily a technology-driven phenomenon, with technologists believing that "users can adapt" to whatever they build. Human-centred design advocates that a more promising and enduring approach is to model users' natural behaviour to begin with so that interfaces can be designed that are more intuitive, easier to learn, and freer of performance errors. In this talk, I illustrate different user-centred design principles and specific strategies, as well as their advantages and the manner in which they enhance users' performance. I also summarize recent research findings comparing the performance characteristics of different educational interfaces that were based on user-centred design principles. One theme throughout is human-centred design that minimizes users' cognitive load, which effectively frees up mental resources for performing better while also remaining more attuned to the world around them.

About the presenter

Sharon Oviatt is Director of the Centre for Human-Computer Communication (CHCC) and professor at Department of Computer Science and Engineering Oregon Health & Science University. She has been working in HCI for many years, with interests in: Human-centred design; Mobile & ubiquitous interfaces; Multimodal interfaces; Pen-based and spoken language interfaces; Educational & medical interfaces; Interfaces for universal access, lifespan use, and diverse populations (e.g., seniors, students varying in ability); Adaptive interfaces; Cognitive modelling and low-load interfaces; Collaborative teamwork and CSCW interfaces; Communication models and modality effects; Empirically-based interface design, evaluation and methodology

Rethinking computer mediated social support: An analysis of the social and structural aspects of help exchanges in online cancer communities

I will address current research in the area of computer mediated social support, specifically in the area of cancer communities. Having established the domain of research, I will outline my intended PhD study, whereby introducing Tajfel and Turners theory of “social identity” and how this provides a valuable construct through which to better understand computer mediated social support and the link between social structure, group support and help exchanges. I will conclude with a discussion of my proposed methodological approach, significant interpersonal and intergroup mechanisms and how they influence online help exchanges and their role in building online social support systems.

I will address current research in the area of computer mediated social support, specifically in the area of cancer communities. Having established the domain of research, I will outline my intended PhD study, whereby introducing Tajfel and Turners theory of “social identity” and how this provides a valuable construct through which to better understand computer mediated social support and the link between social structure, group support and help exchanges. I will conclude with a discussion of my proposed methodological approach, significant interpersonal and intergroup mechanisms and how they influence online help exchanges and their role in building online social support systems.

About the presenter

Shawn is PhD student at the Department of Information Systems. He is supervised by Frank Vetere and Graeme Shanks.

Joining the Efforts of Human-Computer Interaction and Instructional Design and Technology

When considering design for educational purposes with the presence of computer technology, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Instructional Design and Technology (IDT) are two disciplines that share more and more common grounds. Mainly residing in two separate umbrellas, science and education (Hewett 1996), the boundaries between the fields of HCI and IDT have fostered focused research, but have also hindered integration of knowledge. As researchers, we sometimes find it hard to position our perspective to fit into the artificial boundaries created by institutional structure and publication categories. As practitioners trained in either field or a designer-by-assignment (Merrill and Wilson 2007), we face many problems derived from the multidisciplinary nature of the knowledge base.

When considering design for educational purposes with the presence of computer technology, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Instructional Design and Technology (IDT) are two disciplines that share more and more common grounds. Mainly residing in two separate umbrellas, science and education (Hewett 1996), the boundaries between the fields of HCI and IDT have fostered focused research, but have also hindered integration of knowledge. As researchers, we sometimes find it hard to position our perspective to fit into the artificial boundaries created by institutional structure and publication categories. As practitioners trained in either field or a designer-by-assignment (Merrill and Wilson 2007), we face many problems derived from the multidisciplinary nature of the knowledge base. I would like to take this opportunity to 1. introduce my research interest and work experience in learning technology; 2. report the path of my first six months part-time PhD candidature; and 3. invite discussion on the relationship between the fields of IDT and HCI and key issues in learning technology as a basis for positioning my research perspective and narrowing down my research direction.

About the presenter

Weiss is six months (part-time) into her PhD candidature. Her supervisors are Dr Sandrine Balbo, Dr Paul Gruba, and Mr. Rod Farmer. Her general area of research interest is in design for educational purposes with the presence of information technology, especially mobile technology.

The Ontology of Digitised Social Forms

This research project aims to reposition our understanding of how people form social bonds and experiential 'worlds' through the pursuit of their interests; this is in the context of a globalised world that is mediated by digital communications technologies. It proposes that how we understand the formation of community experience in place and time requires reframing to encompass all the different modes of communication that we use to reach out to each other and an expanded understanding of how people move through physical and digitised space to organise, interact and cohere with each other.

This research project aims to reposition our understanding of how people form social bonds and experiential 'worlds' through the pursuit of their interests; this is in the context of a globalised world that is mediated by digital communications technologies. It proposes that how we understand the formation of community experience in place and time requires reframing to encompass all the different modes of communication that we use to reach out to each other and an expanded understanding of how people move through physical and digitised space to organise, interact and cohere with each other.

The research context is the experience of a globally distributed interest network of people passionate about herpetology (reptiles and amphibians). Through a mixed methodology approach, it traces the multiple pathways that this group of people use to interact with each other, produce knowledge, organise collaborative spaces and harness market forces in a spatially distributed experience of 'community'. The work aims to reproduce the nature of these social relations in an abstracted modelling context that will provide insight into how people create meaning, social signalling and social density clusters (occupy digitised space) within the parameters of a Network Society.

About the presenter

Alexia is in the fourth year of her PhD candidature at Deakin University (Burwood campus). She generates her work from the discipline perspective of sociology. Her general area of research interest is in communication technologies and social relations. Her research approach is cross-disciplinary and mixed-method.

A principled framework of help options in computer-based listening

Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has much to offer for language learning. Potentially, students who study a second or foreign language can benefit from directed interactions with digital materials, project-based work and online partnerships. As in other areas, second language listening researchers have sought to make computer usage more effective by providing help options in their materials. These include transcripts, dictionaries, and translations. At present, however, little is known about how students make use of help options because learners tend to neglect them.

Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has much to offer for language learning. Potentially, students who study a second or foreign language can benefit from directed interactions with digital materials, project-based work and online partnerships. As in other areas, second language listening researchers have sought to make computer usage more effective by providing help options in their materials. These include transcripts, dictionaries, and translations. At present, however, little is known about how students make use of help options because learners tend to neglect them.

This research study aims at constructing a principled framework for the understanding, development, and evaluation of help options in computer-based listening. Data will be gathered from three different sources: 1) previous research on help options in computer-based listening environments, 2) an investigation of second language learners' perceptions of help option use, and 3) an investigation on design features that promote effective help option use from a user-centered design perspective.

In this presentation I will describe the context, the stages of the research project and the proposed methodological approach. I will conclude with a discussion of expected outcomes.

About the presenter

Monica is a PhD candidate in Computer Assisted Language Learning. Her research advisors are Dr Paul Gruba (School of Languages and Linguistics) and Dr Sandrine Balbo (Information Systems).

Child-Centered Design: Broadening the child-designer dyad. (PhD completion seminar)

Child-Centered Design inherits from User-Centered Design the primacy of the end user. However, this literal interpretation has shown to be inadequate in the context of evaluating educational software. In this seminar I will present and challenge designers’ current evaluation practices in regard to the attribute of educational effectiveness. The creation of a new evaluation method, KaTIE, responds to these challenges by broadening the boundaries of the child-designer dyad. The seminar will conclude with some reflections on the PhD journey.

Child-Centered Design inherits from User-Centered Design the primacy of the end user. However, this literal interpretation has shown to be inadequate in the context of evaluating educational software. In this seminar I will present and challenge designers’ current evaluation practices in regard to the attribute of educational effectiveness. The creation of a new evaluation method, KaTIE, responds to these challenges by broadening the boundaries of the child-designer dyad. The seminar will conclude with some reflections on the PhD journey.

About the presenter

Sofia Pardo is currently working on a PhD supervised by Steve Howard and Frank Vetere.

The experience of random encounters with personal digital photos

Many people today have access to vast libraries of personal digital content which they consume often to meet non-instrumental needs. But designing technologies to support such interactions and needs whilst optimizing for user-experience (UX) can be problematic. Having too much to choose from may be unpleasant especially in the absence of strong preferences. Yet studies of people’s experiences with digital music listening have revealed that a shuffle-based approach – whereby people can abdicate choice to a random process not only mitigates the unpleasantness of choosing but also supports their non-instrumental needs while fostering engaging and even rich experiences such as serendipity.

Many people today have access to vast libraries of personal digital content which they consume often to meet non-instrumental needs. But designing technologies to support such interactions and needs whilst optimizing for user-experience (UX) can be problematic. Having too much to choose from may be unpleasant especially in the absence of strong preferences. Yet studies of people’s experiences with digital music listening have revealed that a shuffle-based approach – whereby people can abdicate choice to a random process not only mitigates the unpleasantness of choosing but also supports their non-instrumental needs while fostering engaging and even rich experiences such as serendipity.

It appears that shuffle is a good example of an approach suited to support interactions whereby users’ goals are fuzzy and further goal definition would require too much effort whilst being supportive of user-experiences.

To explore randomness’ utility beyond that of supporting digital music listening experiences, I built a photo display system during my internship with Microsoft Research Cambridge and deployed it in three households, and examined people’s experiences when interacting with digital photos in a random manner. A dice input ‘device’ was given to the participants to heighten their awareness of randomness and to understand their sense-making process when interacting with randomness.

Some findings arising from the study include:
- What kinds of experiences do people encounter?
- To what extent does such a system support people’s non-instrumental needs?
- Are these experiences desirable? If so, what elements are involved and to what extent are they particular to this media type?
- How do these experiences compare to that of shuffle listening?

About the presenter

Tuck Leong is currently working on a PhD supervised by Steve Howard and Frank Vetere.

A New Approach for Evaluating the Mobile and Ubiquitous User Experience in the Wild

Emerging paradigms such as ubiquitous and pervasive computing promise to change the way people think about and use computers. With these paradigms comes a wave of novel applications that build on, e.g., context-awareness and adaptive interfaces. A great challenge for HCI researchers and practitioners is to evaluate the user experience of such applications to ensure that they are and will be both useful and usable.

Emerging paradigms such as ubiquitous and pervasive computing promise to change the way people think about and use computers. With these paradigms comes a wave of novel applications that build on, e.g., context-awareness and adaptive interfaces. A great challenge for HCI researchers and practitioners is to evaluate the user experience of such applications to ensure that they are and will be both useful and usable.

A very important issue with mobile and ubiquitous applications is that the user experience is more complex and context-sensitive and thus arguably more difficult to evaluate. The nature of these applications suggests that they should be evaluated in the wild, i.e., in the context they are supposed to be used. However, this has proven to be very difficult and cumbersome, and it is highly debated whether such evaluations should be performed in the field or in the lab.

The focus of this study is to try to step away from methods inherited from user evaluation in “desktop HCI” such as direct observation, video capture, thinking-out-loud etc. and to make the experiments more autonomous and remote. Specifically this study is focusing on how to utilize automatic capture and analysis of quantitative and objective usage and context data on mobile devices in the field to evaluate the user experience. The aim is to investigate and develop a new framework, which makes large scale user studies in the field more feasible, and to provide a complimentary method to the more qualitatively oriented methods, e.g., interviews and questionnaires.

Two case studies of mobile and ubiquitous applications form the empirical basis for the study:
1. DiasNet Mobile: A mobile diabetes management and advisory service using a server-based expert system
2. Car Rental: A mobile multimodal (stylus/speech/text) car rental application using distributed speech recognition

About the presenter

Kasper is currently visiting DIS as part of his PhD studies. He is supervised by Dr Lars Bo Larsen from Aalborg University and Dr Sandrine Balbo.

"Resistance is Futile": Reading Science Fiction alongside Ubiquitous Computing

Design-oriented research is an act of collective imagining – a way in which we work together to bring about a future that lies slightly out of our grasp. In this talk, based on joint work with Genevieve Bell, I examine the collective imagining of ubiquitous computing by bringing it into alignment with a related phenomenon, science fiction, in particular as imagined by a series of shows that form part of the cultural backdrop for many members of the research community. A comparative reading of these fictional narratives highlights a series of themes that are also implicit in the research literature. I will argue both that these themes are important considerations in the shaping of technological design, and that an attention to the tropes of popular culture holds methodological value for ubiquitous computing.

Picture scenarios for representing dynamic use context in mobile design

My research extends scenario-based methods for the design of mobile technologies. Central to the contribution is the representation of ‘dynamic use context’ via picture scenarios. These scenarios depict real-life use of technology and propose an encoding scheme for explicitly representing important contextual dimensions of people’s use of mobile devices. The research demonstrates that picture scenarios help designers to take greater account of these contextual issues. The results have significant implications for those creating mobile and ubiquitous technologies.

About the presenter

Sonja recently submitted her PhD thesis, supervised by Frank Vetere. In this talk she will give a brief overview of both her PhD research and the rocky journey towards submission.

"All green fingers and no thumbs!": Reflections on multidisciplinary design for a garden watering system

There were these three guys in a pub: a horticulturist, and HCI academic and a consultant... Well – it was a bit like that. We will talk about the development of a software tool to advise Melburnians on how much water to put on their gardens. The story begins at Burnley Horticultural College with an investigation of various facets of how to water gardens efficiently and effectively, and ends (hopefully) with an innovative, engaging design of a decision support tool to facilitate the task. Our interest in this talk is trickiness of this apparently simple design journey and the emergence of a unsuspected minefield of concepts like soils, mulches, crop factors, sprinklers, garden zones, standard drinks, schedules, and plant performance. We will discuss the collaborative design process, the conversion of horticulturists’ model into a Web application, and the research agenda that we hope to leverage from the endeavour.

BYO watering can ;)

About the presenter

Jon Pearce and Wally Smith are both senior lecturers in the Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne. Jon’s research interests are in the areas of engagement and online learning. Wally’s interests are in the design of socio-technical systems. John Murphy is an HCI consultant who has a long history of research involvement with this department.

“Knowing the user” in the world of experience-centred design

In our new book we want to shift the focus slightly to explore the relationship between “designer” and “user” and ask the question, what does it mean to “know the user” in this brave new world of experience-centred design? The aim is to develop some form of critical framework to make sense of the burgeoning number user research methods. I haven’t got one (a framework) yet, but I have had a fascinating time looking for one. In this slightly half-baked talk, I want to share with you some of that journey to see what you make of it. Along the way we might touch on ideas like “coming-to-an-understanding” “women’s ways of knowing”, “the dialogical imagination” and “autoethnography” in an effort to understand what’s going on between designer and user.

About the presenter

Peter Wright is Professor of human-centred design at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. He has 20 years of research experience in HCI and has worked in departments of linguistics, psychology, computer science and now art and design. He has published widely in interaction design and user research and is best known for his work on theory and methods for experience-centred design. His current projects include; the SMART project developing technologies to support rehabilitation, and the Landscapes of intergenerational engagement project, part of the UK’s New Dynamics of Ageing initiative.

Learner-Computer Interaction: An Investigation of Computer-Supported Self-Regulated Learning in an Australian PhD Context

The proposed research seeks to investigate how self-regulated learners use computers to support the enhancement of their learning performance. For pragmatic reasons, this research will be situated in the context of an Australian PhD degree. This approach is distinct from how computers can induce learning. The self-regulated learning literature in the learning sciences sees the learner as a proactive individual capable of strategically directing his/her efforts towards the acquisition of knowledge. In particular, it does not see learning as something that happens to a person. This perspective of learning is especially relevant to learning in non-curriculum-based contexts, such as that of an Australian PhD degree. This context signifies PhD candidates must self-regulate their learning and do so strategically in order to complete in a timely fashion.

As very little is presently known about PhD candidates’ learning endeavours and how they use the computer to support the enhancement of their learning performance, my proposed research will be an exploration of these issues. My investigation will be theoretically informed by the literature on self-regulated learning and this investigation will be in terms of learning intent, use of self-regulated learning strategies and the computer-based support of such strategies.

About the presenter

Daryl Ku is a PhD candidate in the Interaction Design Group at the Department of Information Systems. His research interest is in the area of Human-Computer Interaction in an educational context.

Design and evaluation of ambient displays

Ambient displays are a part of the ubiquitous computing dream, which was first mentioned by Mark Weiser. Weiser believed that computing resources should be distributed throughout our everyday environment, rather than being confined to a desktop workstation. A partial answer can be found in ambient displays, which integrate information into people's everyday environment. The key problem of evaluating just how effectively this is done, however, is still unsolved and will be addressed in this talk.

In my PhD thesis, I systematically divided the evaluation of ambient displays into "intrusive" and "non-intrusive evaluations". Intrusive evaluation is where the user is consciously aware of the evaluation experiment. This is not so in non-intrusive evaluation. For each evaluation style, the evaluation dimensions and their related attributes, evaluation criteria and evaluation techniques are accordingly introduced. Furthermore, I conducted four case studies by applying these two evaluation styles.

About the presenter

Xiaobin Shen completed his PhD in the School of Information Technology, University of Sydney, 2006 (Supervised by Prof Peter Eades). In May 2006 he was appointed as a research fellow at the University of Melbourne. His research interest is in the areas of information visualization, human-computer interaction and biomedical engineering.

Towards a Systematic Evaluation of Virtual Environments Efficacy for Training

Virtual environment (VE) is a computer-generated, 3D spatial environment that enables user to interact with it via multiple human sensorial channels and during recent years VEs has become a promising tool for training and education. Despite its adaptation for training and fast-paced technological advancements, ways in which to evaluate efficacy of these technologies are unclear.

In this talk, I will present a framework for a user-centred evaluation of efficacy in VEs for training and education, mainly focusing on the associated evaluation tools, techniques as well as a study that has led to the enhancement of this evaluation framework.

About the presenter

Dawei Jia is a PhD candidate in the Intelligent System Research Lab at the School of Engineering and IT, Deakin University. Her research interests are virtual reality, human-virtual environment interaction, and evaluation methodology.

Emotional contagion via affective computing: can emotional interface agents change users’ emotions

Emotions play a dominant role in human-human interactions, enriching our experiences as well as acting as a mechanism for environmental responses. An interesting aspect of emotions is that they are contagious facilitating exchange of emotional states between humans. The contagious nature of emotions is not limited to human-human interaction as there are indications that emotional contagions extend to human-computer interaction. Emotive Interface Agents (EIAs) are such a technology. EIAs, a form of affective computing, are interface agents that express emotions and designed to assist us in a range of computer-based activities. However, little is known about how these agents affect our emotions and perceptions. Given the importance of emotions in human computer interaction, it is surprising to see that little research has been conducted in this area.

In this talk I will endeavour to examine the existence of emotional contagion between EIAs and users, including how this phenomenon influences the relationship between users’ emotions and perceptions. This study specifically examined the effects of emotional contagion on boredom induced by computer-based tasks and if this leads to a perceptual change on the overall task. During the talk I will discuss the design and the methodology, with emphasis on the results and the implications of the findings. The talk will conclude with few indications on what the future holds for this research.

About the presenter

Nilma Perera is a PhD student at the Department of Information Systems (DIS) and the Biomedical Multimedia Unit (BMU). Her research interests are Affective computing, Emotions and Flow theory. Nilma is supervised by Jon Pearce (DIS) and Gregor Kennedy (BMU).

Publishing in HCI: how to avoid publish AND perish...and take the next step in a research career

Format: Panel and discussion

What is a 'personal publications strategy'? How should that strategy change across the course of a career (i.e. commencing PhD student, mature PhD student, then post doc to mid to late career researchers? What is the right balance between quality and quantity in publishing? What is 'ERA' and why should we care? Do I really have to worry about impact factors, citation counts and journal/conference tiers?

If you worry about any of these things, or anything to do with publishing in HCI, then this is the seminar for you! Run as a panel, we'll allow plenty of time for you to ask your own questions...so come armed as there's a risk we might actually answer a few of them!

About the presenter

Steve Howard is the Head of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne.

Retrofitting Urban Residential Spaces with a Sense of Suburban Nostalgia: The Community Building Potential of Urban Screens

Urbanely nomadic residents are increasingly forgoing the randomness of locale-based relationships in favour of digitally mediated interactions occurring within the walled garden of their pre-existing social networks. This enhances a sense of community with members of established friendship groups, but what of the interactions with those outside of these networks, such as the inhabitants of residential spaces?

Urbanely nomadic residents are increasingly forgoing the randomness of locale-based relationships in favour of digitally mediated interactions occurring within the walled garden of their pre-existing social networks. This enhances a sense of community with members of established friendship groups, but what of the interactions with those outside of these networks, such as the inhabitants of residential spaces? The mass adoption of mobile phones and Internet based social networking applications has not, as critics feared, brought about 'the death of the city'. Yet within HCI, the focus on meeting the needs of the digitally connected, but geographically dispersed user has eclipsed the design of technologies for centralized users. In order to address this gap we conducted a user study that informed a series of design implications for the collective enhancement of residential environments. A lens of suburban nostalgia was employed to see what types of neighbourhood interactions might be retrofitted in new ways through the use of technology to provide some social glue.

About the presenter

Dr Christine Satchell is a Senior Research Fellow at Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Interaction Design Group at The University of Melbourne.

Being Online, Living Offline: The Influence of Social Ties over the Appropriation of Social Network Sites

Research on social network sites has examined how people integrate offline and online life, but with a particular emphasis on their use by friendship groups. We extend earlier work by examining a case in which offline ties are non-existent, but online ties strong. Our case is a study of bodybuilders, who explore their passion with like-minded offline 'strangers' in tightly integrated online communities. We show that the integration of offline and online life supports passion-centric activities, such as bodybuilding.

In this seminar Bernd will present a paper accepted for the 2008 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2008), to be held November 8-12, 2008 in San Diego, CA, USA. The paper was written together with Steve Howard and Peter Thomas. Bernd would welcome critical questions and feedback about the paper and the presentation.

About the presenter

Bernd Ploderer is a PhD student in the Department of Information Systems. His supervisors are Assoc Prof Steve Howard and Prof Peter Thomas.

The promise and pitfalls of virtual community as an analytical model

Virtual community is a widely used concept to document and design for social clustering in online environments. Grounded literature in this area has proliferated exponentially in the last 10 years with the increasing rate of the technological development of social platforms, but the characteristics and generating features of virtual community remain patchy and unclear. This presentation will discuss the digital social phenomena surrounding virtual community and online sociability. In doing so, it will describe the foundations, features and pitfalls of the variety of approaches to be found in the literature.

About the presenter

Alexia is in the final year of her PhD on modeling a spatially distributed interest network. The presentation is linked to the introductory section of her thesis. Comments and feedback will be most welcome.

Digital Urban Living

This seminar will focus on Civic Communication and Media Facades, presenting and discussing work done at the Center for Digital Urban Living (DUL), a Danish research center. Behind is a consortium of researchers, industry partners, and public institutions, organized around five themes: Civic Communication, Media Facades, Cultural Heritage, Digital Art, and New Urban Areas. Link: www.digitalurbanliving.dk

Martin Brynskov: Ph.D. (computer science) specializing in new interaction technologies. Director of the Civic Communication group within DUL and Assistant professor at the Department for Information and Media Studies at the University of Aarhus. During his doctoral work at the Center for Interactive Spaces, he developed tools for social construction based on mobile and pervasive media. He was the project lead of Aarhus by Light and has been involved in the development of numerous projects and products based on social interaction mediated by technology, working closely with public institutions and industrial partners, including LEGO Company and B&O. He also holds an MA in information studies, cognitive semiotics and classical Greek.

Lars Kabel: Journalist, MA (mass communication), assistant professor at the Danish School of Journalism. He has published numerous books and reports on trends and research within journalism, including the role of new media and the consequences for journalism and journalists. He is a founding member of DUL.

About the presenter

Tobias Ebsen: Doctoral student with a project entitled "Perception strategies for understanding media facades and urban screens", member of the Media Facades group within DUL. He has been a key figure in the design and development of Aarhus by Light and was the artist behind the interactive set design for the Running Sculpture dance performance. He holds a BA in Art History.

"Your textmessagesarethetackiest piecesofmotivational crapiveever readIwanna quitbutyourenot helping": Understanding Informational and Social Activity in Mobile Computing

In this seminar, Peter will present some of the ideas he is working with in developing his PhD topic. In particular, he is seeking to gain an understanding on the commonality between the two sets of studies he has been involved in and teasing out some of the commonalities and tensions between the eQuit work and Nokia work. Is the commonality best pulled through an examination of support and social support in particular? Can the notion of ambient social presence be used to understand the role of phatic exchanges in informationally-oriented interactions, as well as the role of informational exchanges in phatic interactions?

About the presenter

Peter Benda is currently research fellow / sessional lecturer in the Department of Information Systems. His main project is "Maximising the effectiveness of interactive automated programs for smoking cessation". He has also worked on a Nokia-funded project on intergenerational play. These two projects form the empirical basis of Peter's proposed PhD work. Prior to joining the department in 2006, Peter worked for Sensis as manager of the HCI team (1999-2004) and then at Telstra as a User-Centred Design Research Leader.

To search or to explore – that is the question: a study in mindful engagement

It’s easy to attract someone’s attention on the web – seductive animations using software such as Flash make this all too easy. But how do you retain their interest and, more importantly, keep their focus on the task at hand? We have approached this question by producing a research tool called iFISH that enables us to quickly construct environments in which users explore a range of outcomes based on their dynamic changes to personal preference settings, together with reflections on the consequences of these changes. I will first describe a study using this tool in the context of students given the task of making a selection from a large range of university subjects, and later introduce other uses of such a system.

This talk will be based on a paper to be delivered at OzCHI in December.

About the presenter

Jon Pearce is a senior lecturer in the Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne and a member of the Interactive Design Group. He has a background in education, physics and multimedia. His current research interests focus on interactive online systems and issues relating to the balance between mindful engagement and affect.

Evaluating quality in online asynchronous interactions on online discussion forums between students and students’ facilitators

The advancement of technology and improvement of computer skills of students has made it possible for online learning to develop quickly. The increasing use of information technology in providing education means that the interaction between teachers and learners are now happening increasingly online. Because of its potential benefit online discussion forums are becoming a common feature even in university courses as it allows students and instructors to interact with each other regardless of time and space.

This presentation will discuss the set of criteria depending on which participation in discussion forums can be evaluated. In doing so it will discuss the findings from a case study carried out for this research and how it matches and differs from the analysis of literatures.

About the presenter

Dip Nandi is doing a Masters in Information Systems in the University of Melbourne. He is doing this research as part of the course requirement of 615-690, Minor Research Project in IS and wants to undertake a PhD in the areas related to interactions in online learning in the future.

Engagement in HCI: An Investigation into the effect of individual factors on Engagement

In this seminar Geoffrey Findlay will present his honours project on Engagement in HCI using a physics learning activity. A physics learning activity was selected because of its amenability to creating a program where individual factors could be isolated, as well as providing a population who would be interested in the program, namely physics students. An experiment was conducted, with the program used specifically created for it by the researcher and corrected after a short pre-test.

The experiment involved 15 participants completing two series of tasks based on projectile motion: one with a written task description; the other series of tasks consisted of targets on the screen to hit. There were three experimental groups with the independent variable being the interface with varying levels of immediacy of feedback: continuous path, discrete path and no path. Analysis consisted of mix of quantitative and qualitative measures, namely on-screen video of participant’s interaction, a brief questionnaire, and semi-structured interview. The findings and their implications will be discussed.

About the presenter

Geoffrey Findlay is an IS Honours Student, whose background includes a Bachelor of Science (Physics major) / Bachelor of Information Systems. He is supervised by Dr Jon Pearce and Assoc Prof Wally Smith.

Towards Social Connection for Young People with Cancer

People with cancer have to contend with a variety of physical, emotional and social difficulties. Young people with cancer are often faced with the additional burden of isolation from their peers and social network. This presentation outlines results from a collaborative project seeking to use emerging technologies to develop and evaluate a peer-based social support system to support social connectivity amongst young people with cancer.

We introduce an integrated service named MyTrac, which combines online social network applications and mobile broadband telephony. Seven young people (18-25yo) participated in the three month study. The study encompassed a range of data which documents participants’ use and experience of the system. In this presentation we highlight specific communications mediated by MyTrac, showing how they are a reflection of both the individual personalities of participants and a reflection of their cancer journey. We illustrate how these individual identities construct a collaborative identity for MyTrac, one which both encompasses and excludes particular types of interaction. We conclude by articulating some design considerations for social connectivity systems which seek to support young people with cancer.

In this seminar Hilary will present a short paper accepted for the OzCHI (2008) conference to be held in Cairns, December 2008. The paper was co-authored with colleagues in the Information Systems department, and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.

About the presenter

Hilary Davis is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Interaction Design Group, Department of Information Systems, at the University of Melbourne.

Taxonomy of Exertion Games

A new set of computationally-augmented games have emerged recently that require the user to move their body. These exertion games are believed to contribute to social, mental and in particular, physical benefits, marking a change in how we perceive computer gaming. However, although these games are a commercial success, research is lacking a theoretical understanding how to analyse existing and guide future designs. We present initial investigations towards a taxonomy of such exertion games with a focus on social aspects, based on work on traditional play and sports. Our contribution lays the foundation for the creation of a theoretical framework on exertion games, expanding our understanding of this exciting new area.

About the presenter

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller is a PhD student in the Interaction Design Group at the University of Melbourne, where he is investigating a theoretical framework on “Exertion Interactions over a Distance”. Such Exertion Interactions over a Distance are interactions with technology that deliberately require intense physical effort, but they are believed to offer social benefits amongst people in distributed locations, as in “Sports over a Distance”. Florian with his supervisor Frank Vetere is presenting a short paper based on this work at OzCHI.

Designing for Mobile

The greatest challenge in developing valued mobile users experiences is the mobile industry itself. The lack of standardisation, proprietary innovations, and difficult partner relationships have led to massive fragmentation amongst the industry's biggest players - handset manufacturers, network operators, software platform providers and chipset suppliers. Despite advances made in better understanding end-user behaviour and needs, designers of mobile user experiences must continually assault an almost insurmountable climb of commercial compromises and technological perils.

This presentation provides a cursory overview of several mobile design issues which limit our ability to move beyond the lowest common denominator in our designs.

About the presenter

Dr Rod Farmer is an Honorary Fellow at the Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne, and is an associate of the Interaction Design Group. He currently works within the Australian Telecommunications industry, specialising in mobile user experience and research-driven product innovation.

Requirements of Touch-Enabled Virtual Reality Simulations for Oral Surgery

The traditional internship model used in surgical training is resource intensive and inefficient. Virtual reality (VR) simulators offer an alternative training model, where trainees have the opportunity to gain competency in surgical tasks before operating on real patients.

The central questions of our research are: "What characterises competence in oral surgery?" and "What are the requirements for a virtual reality simulator to contribute effectively to training outcomes"? One challenge in developing effective VR training simulators is that traditional requirements engineering approaches don't work, due to the fact that domain experts are not always able to articulate the subtle cognitive and psychomotor processes used to perform surgical tasks. Our research explores these processes through the collection of qualitative and quantitative empirical data.

Our experimental work consisted of a group of novice dental surgeons and a group of expert dental surgeons performing a particular drilling task on sheep jaws. Data was collected in the form of video, audio, force measurements in three directions, interviews, and questionnaires. In this talk we report on our findings and how they impact the design, implementation and use of VR simulators for oral surgery training.

Greg and Bernd's Excellent Adventure

Greg and Bernd recently returned from research trips to California. Greg conducted a three month project at PARC, studying collaborative building in Second Life, while Bernd interviewed body builders and visited UC Irvine. Both wound up their trips by presenting at the CSCW conference in San Diego. Greg and Bernd will describe their respective research projects and give a brief conference report.

Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? Investigations into attractive User Interfaces.

In this presentation I will describe a program of research on 'attractive user interfaces' which aims to understand the deeper cognitive mechanisms underpinning users' preferences for, and behaviour with, aesthetic interfaces and nature of 'user experience'. A theoretical framework, based on Payne et al's Adaptive Decision Maker theory will be described for assessing the attractiveness of websites, composed of criteria for content, usability, aesthetics, reputation, and customisation. The framework has been developed into questionnaire inventories and used to evaluate a series of websites which shared the same brand and content but differed in usability and aesthetic design. In three studies (Sutcliffe, Hartmann and De Angeli-Interact 2005, DIS 2006, CHI 2007), we have shown that users' perception and preference for aesthetically design web sites is subject to strong framing, context and halo effects, i.e. their preferences depend on their background and the task, while positive judgement of one attribute (aesthetics) positively influences judgement of others such as usability and content, even when objective measures showed one design to be worse, and the content of both sites was identical. This challenges Norman's and Tractinsky's view that 'what is beautiful is usable'. The implications of framing and halo effects on users' judgement of aesthetics will be discussed, followed by some more speculative thoughts on our current research which is expanding the framework to include presence, interaction and engagement.

About the presenter

Alistair Sutcliffe is Professor of Systems Engineering, in Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. He has been principle investigator on 15 EPSRC and European Union projects on requirements engineering, multimedia user interfaces, safety critical systems and cognitive modelling for information retrieval. His research interests span a wide area within Human Computer Interaction and Software Engineering. In HCI particular interests are interaction theory, and user interface design methods for the web, multimedia, virtual reality, safety critical systems and methods for usability evaluation. His research also covers application of cognitive theory to design, and design of complex socio-technical systems.

The Era of Human Computing (Joint Seminar with CSSE, in Theatre 3/Room 2.05)

As computing technology has become more powerful, more connected, and more ubiquitous, we've seen an acceleration of research - and progress - on "human scale computing," using computing to assist and augment how people naturally work, play and go about their daily lives. Computers can help us see, remember, find information, communicate, and interact with the world around us. Computing can also be our guardian angel, watching over our shoulder and keeping us safe. While we still have a long way to go before computers can do everything that people can do, today they increasingly play a complementary role to our own abilities and are truly capable of changing people's lives for the better.

About the presenter

Kevin Schofield is General Manager for Strategy and Communications at Microsoft Research. His organization drives consensus on technical strategy and priorities for Microsoft's research efforts. He is also responsible for developing Microsoft Research's relationships with academia, customers, press, analysts, and Microsoft's own product groups. Mr. Schofield joined Microsoft in 1988, and has worked in Microsoft Research since 1997. Over the course of his tenure at Microsoft, he worked in both development and program management for a number of Microsoft product efforts, including networking, operating systems, MSN, and multimedia authoring tools. He is a Magna cum Laude graduate of Dartmouth College with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science.

New PhD Students Introduction

As several new PhD students have joined IDG this semester, this seminar will be devoted to the introduction of these students who will briefly introduce themselves and their research topics to the group. There will be wine and nibbles to accompany the occasion.

Knowing Me, Knowing You: End User Perceptions Of Identity Management Systems

Federated identity management systems synthesise complex and fragmented user information into a single entity. Literature from the identity management system providers note this integration extends many benefits to the end user and the privileges provided by digital identity authentication schemes have been well documented from this perspective. Less explored however, are the perceptions of federation from the user's perspective. This paper attempts to address this gap by reporting on independent research conducted by Novell, The University of Melbourne and Monash University that examines the relationship between identity and technology. It emerges that while current federated systems satisfy user needs by allowing the construction of multiple digital data sets, the fragments of which are moored to a central identifier, they fail to provide the user with control over the capability to act in the 'hatch', 'match' and 'dispatch' phases of the digital identity lifecycle. Ultimately, this reduces the user's trust in providers and results in reluctance to disclose personal details.

Of Portable Couches and Transportable Confessionals

This talk will focus on the potential impacts of mobile technology with respect to therapeutic interventions--with focus on work being conducted in the realm of addiction. I will also attempt to relate the data and thinking emerging from this work to therapeutic 'techniques' such as mindfulness and narrative therapy. What does it mean to disperse a therapeutic intervention across time, place, and even social setting? Such situations present interesting design opportunities and challenges.

HCI in the year 2020

Steve will report on his attendance at HCI 2020, a Microsoft sponsored forum that will bring together "computing, design, philosophy of science, sociology, anthropology and psychology to debate, contribute to, and help formulate the agenda for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in the next decade and beyond." For more details on this forum visit: http://research.microsoft.com/hci2020/

Sandrine's 2006 sabbatical

Sandrine is going to present what she did during her sabbatical in Melbourne, Paris, London and Montreal.

Sonic Blocks: Digital Artefacts for the exploration and creation of spatial sound narratives

In this presentation I will demonstrate the Sonic Blocks. A Tangible User Interface consisting of 5 electronically augmented timber blocks that enable exploration and creation of spatial sound narratives. The second half of the presentation will discuss the design, prototype development, initial user findings and challenges when designing physical artefacts to represent and control digital sound files for narrative creation and exploration.

Trials in the Trenches- Can IS rescue archaeologists?

Archaeological data generally range from artefacts to architecture. The data provide unique challenges to Designing IS that can both represent and analyse them in accordance with "Archaeological Theory". An overview of some of these challenges and current applications will be discussed.

Investigating Changes during the Introduction of Technology

Implementation of a technology in organizations is often seen as a simple fit model between organization's business processes and the features of the new software. This research attempts to move away from this variance model and instead, examine in depth the process of adaptation as a negotiation between different structures: temporal, organizational, and tecnological.

Intelligent Learning Objects

Richard Jones will demonstrate and discuss his work leading a large UM ARC Linkages grant with The Learning Federation (TLF), Australia's largest producer of online educational content. This project, developed in close collaboration with schools, content experts and multimedia developers, has produced a range of rich task Learning Objects particularly focused on engaging 'at risk' boys in their middle years of school. Underlying longitudinal research in schools is a unique user tracking and data reporting program described by CSIRO Publishing's Multimedia Division Manager Mr Nick Pitsas as: "fantastic...[it] has enormous potential...all of this can only help in taking the standard of LOs to another level of usability and effectiveness." Additionally, TLF subject matter expert Mr Graham Coghill has identified the program's potential as a classroom based diagnostic tool: "I can see it would be a very useful tool for teachers in schools...it would be great for diagnosing problems for particular students who are having difficulties." Richard will discuss this work in the light of ongoing developments in user-centred design and action-based research at VCA. Professor Richard Jones is an accomplished filmmaker and a national leader in research driven new media production, particularly in the fields of social justice, health and education

Honours Presentation: How Can 'Web 2.0' Be Used To Support Phatic Interactions For The Elderly"

Due to various reasons, elderly members of society often have trouble maintaining their existing social relationships and forging new ones. This is particularly important as the quality and quantity of social relationships has been closely associated with many health outcomes such as depressive mood, stress, and overall morbidity risk. An important feature of social relationships is the concept of phatic interaction. This is the theory that communication is not always solely intended to convey information, but sometimes more concerned with the maintenance of communication channels through the exchange of seemingly redundant information. An emerging trend commonly associated with online socialisation is the notion of Web 2.0. This is a term crudely used to encompass the current online technological and cultural shift to a more interactive, social and user directed environment. However, the idea of phatic interaction, a key aspect of socialisation, is yet to be applied to this area and will therefore offer some interesting and novel possibilities, especially in the support of the elderly. It is the aim of this research to closely examine the potential Web 2.0 offers in the support of phatic interactions for the elderly.

Honours Presentation: Twitter Quitters: Micro-blogging and its effect on perceived social support

A great number of people are turning to online communities for social support, for anything from solving technical problems, dealing with depression or assisting in smoking cessation. Many studies of these existing communities have demonstrated the benefits of online social support. More recent studies have explored facilitating social support away from home or office computers using pervasive technologies such as mobile phones. Quitting smokers in particular, due to the highly situated nature of their problem, have a need for support 'in the real world' and have the potential to benefit from such pervasive social support solutions. Micro-blogging is the practice of sending a short 'blog' post to a centralised server. The posts, which can be sent via a web form, IM client or SMS, typically describe what an individual is doing or thinking and users are able to subscribe to each other's feeds and message each other directly. Micro-blogging services such as twitter and jaiku have the potential to offer much in the area of pervasive social support. They may address the issue of temporality (individuals getting support when they need it), allow users to reflect on their progress and keep sources of social support aware of their state, an awareness which may be used to provide direct support. Accordingly, it is the aim of this research to determine if micro-blogging can be used to increase levels of perceived social support.

Exploring Intergenerational Play Across a Distance: Playgroups, Magic Boxes and Collages

This talk explores the nature of intergenerational play and opportunities for technologies to mediate playful activities; especially when grandparents and grandchildren are separated by time or distance or familial arrangements. We report on a three phase investigation. We start with field observations of playgroups, then report on a cultural probe study using a 'Magic Box' and finally present the results of intergenerational use of a shared domestic display.

One Take on Narrative

The American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner identifies narrative as a key feature in how humans relate to and even construct the world: 'Narrative imitates life, life imitates narrative'. This talk will discuss theories, functions and elements of narrative as used in formal and informal domains.

About the presenter

Earl Livings is a former mathematician who now lives as a poet, fiction writer, editor, and teacher of creative and professional writing. He will detail how narrative operates within his activities and suggest parallels for possible application in design methodologies for emerging Information and Communication Technologies.

Ethnographic Design: Future Ethnography in the Suburban Communities Project

Suburban Communities is a project within the Smart Living program of the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID), aiming to design new information and communication technologies with and for place-based communities. The project focuses on residents, households and communities in suburbia and specifically seeks to understand and facilitate the activities of suburban households and communities in relation to new communication interfaces, especially with respect to interactive design and digital tools. In this presentation we discuss how our research brings together a diverse range of technical and social perspectives, and we introduce 'future ethnography', combining what might be termed 'social context' approaches with participatory and scenario-based design.

Ian MacColl works in the Information Environments Program of the School of Information Technology & Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland, and is Program Manager for ACID Smart Living. He has a previous life as a theatre lighting designer and production manager, and his research focuses on physical and social computing, with an emphasis on lightweight design, agile development and underlying infrastructures and platforms.

About the presenter

Ingrid Richardson works in the School of Media Communication and Culture at Murdoch University, Western Australia, and is Project Manager of ACID Suburban Communities. Her research interests include philosophy of science and technology, new and interactive media theory, phenomenology, embodied interaction and feminist theory.

People with autism, carers and experts – participatory design accommodating diverse viewpoints.

Autism is a disorder that impacts upon communication, cognition and behaviour. People with autism are users of both digital and non-digital assistive technologies. They are, however, both highly individual and sensitive users making them potentially difficult to design with and for. This seminar reports on a project that explores the current state of support for autism as a guide to the development of new digital assistive technologies.

I will present the results of interviews conducted with people who directly support a person with autism or Aspergers syndrome. The aim of the interviews was to gain an understanding of:
- the ways that people with autism spectrum disorders are supported in order to understand the context for potential digital assistive technologies; and
- the people and processes involved in designing and implementing current supports; to inform potential technology design methodologies.

I will then describe upcoming participatory design activities that are expected to provide further insights into the potential for direct involvement of people with autism spectrum disorders and those who support them in the design of digital assistive technologies.

About the presenter

Peter Francis is a PhD student in the department. His supervisors are Dr Martin Gibbs, Dr Lucy Firth and Assoc Prof Steve Howard.

The Antiusability Manifesto: A Director's Cut

A unexpurgated version of an OZCHI'06 short presentation is staged. In the style of a polemic editorial, the philosophy of antiusability is playfully introduced as a radical design paradigm to reclaim conscious dominion of the user interface, with gaming machines being one example of its possible application.

About the presenter

John Lenarcic is a physicist and applied mathematician by training, an IT academic by fortunate accident and an armchair philosopher by conscious choice. He currently plies his trade as a Lecturer in the RMIT School of Business Information Technology. John's extra-curricular activities include being the host of "University in the Pub" at the Stork Hotel, a monthly ideas festival exploring the trenchant issues of the day through the lens of information systems.

Modeling the Information Needs of Informal Carers

Informal carers are unpaid persons who provide care services on a practical and /or emotional level for their parents, children, relatives and friends who are unable to care for themselves for different reasons; i.e. frail elderly, or significant disability, or chronic diseases. Information needs of informal carers are evident as they not only need information to support the persons needing care but also information to support themselves. This information helps them to carry out their roles more effective as carers without overwhelming their own lives.

A key model that addresses the information needs of informal carers from the perspective of information systems in the health care system does not seem to exist. This shortage of systematic and comprehensive research on information needs of informal carers often prohibits the information providers and developers to know what types of information informal carers need to support their roles and tasks as carers and to evaluate how well they are fulfilling the information needs of informal carers.

Drawing upon the previous available research on information needs in general and information needs of informal carers in particular, this study proposes a conceptual model of the information needs of informal carers. The conceptual model introduces a new definition of the information needs and illustrates four abstraction groups of information needs of informal carers i.e. recognised demanded, unrecognised demanded, recognised undemanded, and unrecognised undemanded.

About the presenter

Basil Alzougool is a PhD student in the department. His supervisors are:
Dr Shanton Chang - Department of Information Systems
Dr Kathleen Gray - Biomedical Multimedia Unit - Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences

Research reflections: 1) Usability or Learnability: What are we testing? 2) A Journey in Research in Healthcare

In the first talk Sylvie will present an innovative approach to evaluate the learnability of an application using three different ways of task modelling. She will focus on describing the process of evaluation including the user testing. The application in question is an Online Information Management System from Aconex.

About the presenter

Sylvie is third year students in digital media at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern, Germany. She is here in our the Department of Information Systems, the University of Melbourne, until the end of August on their occupational traineeship, a required component of their studies.

What does usability evaluation mean in the hospital environment?

Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been introduced in health care for many years, in hospitals as well as in the patient’s homes. In the nursing world, little attention to usability has been spent, and software systems are not yet widely adopted by nurses or patients. This project concentrates on usability engineering of ICTs for the nurses and patients.

Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been introduced in health care for many years, in hospitals as well as in the patient’s homes. In the nursing world, little attention to usability has been spent, and software systems are not yet widely adopted by nurses or patients. This project concentrates on usability engineering of ICTs for the nurses and patients.

The aim of this study is to compare the effectiveness of several evaluation methods using as test bed one specific ICT in nursing: a Patient Monitoring System (PMS).

Participants to our study are nurses and adults patients, using a mobile PMS. The PMS usability has been evaluated using some adapted expert-based and user-based evaluation methods.

About the presenter

Severine is a third year student in digital media at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern, Germany. She is here in our the Department of Information Systems, the University of Melbourne, until the end of August on their occupational traineeship, a required component of their studies.

Changing emotions to enhance learning: an affective computing challenge

It’s been over a decade since Rosalind Picard hypothesized affective computing – the potential of giving emotional abilities to computers. Since then, numerous technologies have emerged that exhibit some emotional capabilities. Emotive Interface Agents (EIAs) are one such technology.

Empirical findings indicate that EIAs are capable of influencing user perception, behaviour, and emotions. These findings are of special interest to the educational domain. It is well accepted that efficient teaching involves much more than presenting study material to students; teachers are often involved in regulating and optimizing emotions. The research proposed here suggests that EIAs can be a useful technology to support teachers in regulating and optimizing emotions in computer-based settings.

This research will draw on the concept of ‘flow’ in the exploration of using EIAs to regulate and optimize user emotions. Flow theory describes an optimal state that is enjoyable, engaging, and totally immersing. This optimal state occurs through a balance between one’s perceived challenge and one’s perceived skill. Research in psychology suggests that perceptions can be influenced by emotions. Therefore, it can be argued that the optimal state addressed in flow theory can be influenced by emotions.

In this talk Nilma will discuss how EIAs can be used to influence perceptions in challenge and skill. She intends to provide theoretical and empirical evidence to support the hypothesis and also discuss how the investigation will be carried out.

About the presenter

Nilma Perera is a PhD student in the department. Her supervisors are Dr Jon Pearce (Department of Information Systems) and Dr Gregor Kennedy (Biomedical Multimedia Unit - Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences).

PhD Confirmation

Greg will describe his PhD research, completed and planned, in the runup to his confirmation. He is interested in how people interact within online communities. His research focusses on the use of voice-over-IP within online synthetic worlds. This project arose from a 2003 study which identified usability and sociability problems in the voice-only Xbox Live game network. Research carried out since then include a usability study of a 3d voice system for team games, and a study of voice use within larger, more complex massively multiplayer games. For his final study Greg plans to observe use of the recently-implemented - and controversial - 'Second Life' voice channel. Greg is still figuring out how to conduct the study and will appreciate your feedback.

About the presenter

Greg Wadley has taught and researched in the Information Systems department since 2001 and is currently working on a PhD supervised by Martin Gibbs and Steve Howard. He holds a BSc in computer science (Queensland) and an MSc in cognitive science (Melbourne). Off-campus he runs a music studio and performs with Melbourne band the Hi God People.

KaTIE goes to the field – Half a story

The involvement of children in the evaluation of educational software poses particular challenges designers need to take into consideration when following a Child-Centered Design approach. As users of technology and learners in the digital age, children have particular characteristics that require the modification of current evaluation practices.

In this seminar, Sofia will present a method by which teachers and software designers can collaborate in the evaluation of educational software for primary school children. The origins of the method, its characteristics and findings from its empirical evaluation will also be presented.

About the presenter

Sofia Pardo is currently working on a PhD supervised by Steve Howard and Frank Vetere.

Studying creative engagement with interactive environments

There is a growing body of work which draws together Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Art. We have conducted extensive studies of digital art practice, developing new HCI methods that have opened up a significant research focus in interactive art practice [1, 3, 5]. Beta Space (of Power House Museum, Sydney) is a living laboratory [4] with this research focus, where we study the audience experience of interactive artworks in a public exhibition context. Our concern is to capture the real, situated experience of audiences in cultural institutions, rather than in a controlled laboratory environment. We aim
1. To identify the common strategies for encouraging and enabling engagement with interactive artwork systems.
2. To identify the types of engagement and factors affecting the duration of engagement within the interactive artwork systems.
3. To investigate audience behaviour during their experience of artworks and to identify cognitive modes of interactive experience [1, 2].

This presentation will focus on
1. How we frame interactive experience: defining experiential situation, culture, context, audience issues and interactivity dimensions.
2. How we select appropriate methodology for investigating creative engagement and audience experience.
3. How evaluation of audience experience contributes to our understanding of creative engagement
4. and how evaluation of audience experience provides recommendations for the creative designers on how to achieve more engaging interactive experiences.

REFERENCES

[1] Bilda, Z., Evaluating Audience Experience. in Engage: Interaction, Art and Audience Experience, (Australia, 2006), Creativity and Cognition Studios Press, 248 – 260
[2] Bilda, Z., Candy, L. and Edmonds, E.A. An Embodied Cognition Framework for Interactive Experience. CoDesign, published online 22 March 2007.
[3] Costello, B., Muller, L., Amitani, S. and Edmonds, E.A., Understanding the Experience of Interactive Art: Iamascope in Beta_Space. in Interactive Entertainment, (Sydney, Australia, 2005), Creativity & Cognition Studios Press, 49-56.
[4] Edmonds, E.A., Weakley, A.J., Candy, L., Fell, M.J., Knott, R.P. and Pauletto, S. The Studio as Laboratory: Combining Creative Practice and Digital Technology Research. Int. Journal of Human Computer Studies, 63 (4-5). 452-481.
[5] Muller, L., Turner, G., Khut, G.P. and Edmonds, E.A., Creating affective visualisations for a physiologically interactive artwork. in Tenth International Conference on Information Visualisation, IV06, (UK, 2006), ACM, 63-71.

About the presenter

Dr Zafer Bilda is currently a research associate at Creativity and Cognition Studios. His research is on cognitive studies of designers and of interactive experiences which involves observation, analysis and evaluation of human creative behavior. He has published on design studies, computer aided design, cognitive science, and recently on interactive art experiences.

He completed his PhD. in Design Computing and Cognition at University of Sydney. He has an MFA from Bilkent University and a Bachelor of Science degree from Middle East Technical University in Turkey. He was awarded an International Postgraduate Research Award (IPRS) by Department of Education Australia to undertake his PhD and he is a holder of a Fulbright scholarship awarded by American - Turkish Association.

Family Carer’s Information Needs in a Cultural Context

While the important role of family as a carer has been increasingly recognised in healthcare service provision, particularly for patients with acute or chronic illnesses, the carer's information needs have not been well understood and adequately supported by current health information systems. In order to effectively provide continuous and home-based care for the patient, a family relative as the primary carer needs sufficient access to medical knowledge and patient's health information. There are two challenges. First, being a family relative, the primary carer is often a non-medical practitioner. Second, their roles and responsibilities as an on-going care giver are not well understood and supported in consumer health informatics. Adapting health education materials and the patient's healthcare information to their needs, especially when caring for a patient with acute and chronic conditions, can improve healthcare provision outcome. Lemai Nguyen and Graeme Shanks have recently conducted a case study which examines an on-line diary of a husband-carer who provided support and care for his wife, who at the time of care was a lung cancer patient. Their finding extends a current model of the user’s information needs in the literature and suggests implications for further research into developing health information systems to meet information needs by the family carer.

Lemai Nguyen and Graeme Shanks have recently conducted a case study which examines an on-line diary of a husband-carer who provided support and care for his wife, who at the time of care was a lung cancer patient. Their finding extends a current model of the user’s information needs in the literature and suggests implications for further research into developing health information systems to meet information needs by the family carer.

About the presenter

Lemai Nguyen is a Senior Lecturer at School of Information Systems, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. She was a visiting researcher at Centre HCI Design, City University, London, from July until November 2006. Her primary and on-going research interests include creativity and problem solving activities in Requirements Engineering. Recently, Lemai has been conducting research into consumer health care informatics. Her other research interests include service-oriented development and management, and socio-technical aspects of virtual communities, online learning and information systems generally.

Lemai’s research has been published widely at an international level in various journals as well as at conferences. She has supervised research students and participated in various conference program committees. She was program co-chair for Australian Workshop on Requirements Engineering (AWRE) in 2002, 2004, 2006 and is a member of the steering committee of AWRE since 2002. Lemai is also a member of Technical Committee on Requirements Engineering (Australian Computer Society).

More about Lemai’s research, teaching and professional activities can be found at: https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/lemai-nguyen

Applying HCI to Experimental Design

HCI techniques and user-centered design have been applied to design of on-line systems: but has anyone considered using these techniques in the context of experimental design? In the course of designing a series of quantitative experiments on the use of data quality information (i.e. DQ tags) in decision-making, questions were raised both with respect to (1) the specific types of DQ tags that should be considered in the experiments and (2) how best to represent and display DQ tags in the experimental interface. The first question is motivated by concerns regarding the difficulty of finding sufficient numbers of participants and the need to concentrate resources on those types of DQ tags most likely to be relevant to users, especially since previous field work suggested that some tag types are much more meaningful to users than others. The second question is motivated by the need to support experimental validity by ensuring that the experimental design is relevant and understandable to participants. In this presentation, I will describe an on-going exploratory study with Professor Graeme Shanks (DIS, University of Melbourne) that uses HCI techniques to address these questions and ask for your feedback on the design, implications, and reporting of the study.

About the presenter

Rosanne J. Price is an Australian Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Information Systems in the University of Melbourne. Her research interests and publications are in the area of data quality, databases, information systems (spatiotemporal and multimedia), and object-oriented and conceptual modelling. She received her PhD from Monash University. She has had over fourteen years of academic and professional experience, including a senior research fellow position at Monash University and research/lecturing positions at University of Melbourne, RMIT, and European divisions of Boston University and the University of Maryland.

From Aristotle to Philip Morris to Schwarzenegger: A PhD Thesis on Persuasive Technology & Social Network Sites

The aim of this PhD project is to investigate the phenomena of persuasion in online social network sites and also in related real life contexts of a special group of athletes - bodybuilders. Persuasion is an umbrella term for behaviour change and motivation. HCI research has adopted principles of persuasion to design technology with the purpose to motivate or persuade. One research stream in persuasive technology is concerned with how online communities help to motivate people to give up smoking or to lose weight. However little is known about how a new category of online communities - social network sites (e.g., Facebook, MySpace) - works as persuasive technologies.

In this seminar Bernd will discuss the background for his PhD project and outline his first study. He hopes to apply a variety of ethnographic techniques to study bodybuilders’ interactions online and in the field, specifically trying to understand how technology helps to motivate them to adhere to their ascetic lifestyles of strict training, nutrition and rest. Bernd is still figuring out how to conduct the study and will welcome your feedback.

About the presenter

Bernd Ploderer is a PhD student in the department. His supervisors are Assoc Prof Steve Howard and Prof Peter Thomas.

Sports over a Distance at Distance Lab, UK

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller spent the last three months at Distance Lab, Scotland, as part of his PhD studies in the Interaction Design group on Exertion Interfaces.

Distance Lab is a new non-profit research organization that melds technology, design and the arts to transform communication, creativity and connectedness over a distance, inspired by the MIT Media Lab. Floyd will report on this work at Distance Lab which includes a new Jogging over a Distance prototype that uses heart rate data and spatialized sound to allow geographically separate jogging partners to have a “jogging together” experience although being apart and having different fitness levels, as well as a novel shadowboxing game called “Remote Impact” that supports brute force in a full-body contact activity between remote participants, inspired by the popularity of contact sports such as rugby, wrestling or boxing.

About the presenter

Florian 'Floyd' Mueller researches novel interfaces that gap the bridge between human bodies and technology. His latest research interest is the concept of Exertion Interfaces: interfaces that deliberately require intense physical effort to facilitate social connectedness, to enable what he calls Sports over a Distance. He applies networking technology to activities that lie outside the realm of work-related tasks to contribute to people’s well-being despite them being geographically apart.

Floyd earned his first degree in Digital Media from Furtwangen, Germany. He received his second degree in Multimedia from Griffith University in Brisbane and a Masters degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, USA. He received two scholarships to study in the USA and Australia, and was also offered a Fulbright scholarship and a Media Lab Europe Fellowship. He also has extensive work experience from the USA, Australia, Ireland and Germany, where he worked for industry and academic research organizations such as Virtual Artists, Springer Verlag, Xerox PARC, FX Palo Alto Laboratory, MIT, Media Lab Europe and the University of Melbourne. His last appointment was Principal Scientist at CSIRO – Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia, where he led the “Connecting People“ group, consisting of 12 staff, researching the future of human connectedness.

Floyd received several awards, published for the major human-computer interaction conferences (CHI etc), and exhibited his work at Wired’s NextFest and other international festivals. He was also a semi-finalist of MIT’s 50K entrepreneurship competition.

Floyd’s research is centered on the challenge of creating interfaces that are engaging and fun, not simply functional.

Connected Quitters: Temporality and computer-mediated social support for smoking cessation

Social support has been identified critical to smoking cessation. Increasing numbers of people are now exchanging this support online, in dedicated quit communities like Quitnet (quitnet.meyouhealth.com) and support groups within larger social networks like MySpace.

Smoking cessation is a temporally sensitive process, with the timing and intensity of support being crucial, especially in the early stages post-quit. There is a limited literature on the temporal aspects of usability (TAU) which has mainly been applied to work-related contexts. Through qualitative interviews with individuals seeking support online in their quit attempt, this research explores the role of the interface and the relationship between the temporal aspects of the quit process and their use of the community.

About the presenter

Matthew Daniel is an Honours student in the department. His supervisors are Steve Howard and Peter Benda.

A Poke is Worth a Thousand Words: Social Networking and Phatic Interactions

This thesis examines the increasingly popular world of online social networking and a component of communication responsible for relationship development and maintenance, over and above the exchange of information. This is often referred to as phatic communication. Recent studies have demonstrated that technologies can play a part in mediating this component of communication, however there has been no investigation into the presence or the nature of this in the highly social world of online social networking websites.

The present study examines the use of the popular social networking website Facebook for the nature and existence of phatic communication. It was found that phatic communication is very prevalent and appears to fall within several distinct categories, and is manifested in a wide, varied and often unique way.

About the presenter

Jeremy Smith begun studying at Melbourne University in 2002 completing a Bachelor of Science, majoring in Psychology. In mid 2004 he converted to a Science (psych.)/Information Systems double-degree and is currently completing his Honours year in Information Systems. He is supervised by Frank Vetere, Peter Benda, Christine Satchell & Steve Howard.

Happy coincidences in designing for social connectedness and play through opportunistic image capture

We explore the opportunities and constraints for sharing personal and ‘social group’ communications through the use of multi-location interactive image displays and mobile image capture devices. Accordingly, we seek to provide a better understanding of the use of such technologies in supporting close tie relationships through the implementation of Collage, an interactive image display.

Collage has been designed for immediate and lightweight modes of sharing though synchronous and asynchronous interaction between users and digital images/text. We report on the results of a technology probe with three related families over a ten-week period. Through interviews and participant data we provide a rich account of their use with the system, emergent practices and usability issues that enabled and limited their experience of sharing digital family images. We also show evidence for user driven resolution of ambiguities in the system as an enabler of new experiences -what might be called “happy coincidences”.

About the presenter

Shawn Ashkanasy is a PhD student in the department supervised by Frank Vetere. Peter Benda is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Information Systems.

Evaluating a Distributed Physical Leisure Game for Three Players

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller will present the results of the evaluation of “Table Tennis for Three”, a system that allows three players in three geographically separate locations to play a table tennis-like game together. Unlike the Wii and other console games, it uses a real table tennis table, bat and ball to provide an experience focused on fast reflexes, hand-eye coordination and social interaction. The evaluation showed that such an approach can scale to three locations, but needs to consider certain aspects characteristic to a distributed environment.

A video of the game in action is at: http://exertioninterfaces.com/table_tennis_for_three

The results will be presented at OzCHI in November as a long paper. The work was done with Martin Gibbs and used the system that was based on an initial grant by the University of Melbourne-CSIRO collaborative research grant.

About the presenter

Florian 'Floyd' Mueller researches novel interfaces that bridge the gap between human bodies and technology. His latest research interest is the concept of Exertion Interfaces: interfaces that deliberately require intense physical effort to facilitate social connectedness, to enable what he calls Sports over a Distance. He applies networking technology to activities that lie outside the realm of work-related tasks to contribute to people’s well-being despite them being geographically apart.

Floyd earned his first degree in Digital Media from Furtwangen, Germany. He received his second degree in Multimedia from Griffith University in Brisbane and a Masters degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, USA. He received two scholarships to study in the USA and Australia, and was also offered a Fulbright scholarship and a Media Lab Europe Fellowship. He also has extensive work experience from the USA, Australia, Ireland and Germany, where he worked for industry and academic research organizations such as Virtual Artists, Springer Verlag, Xerox PARC, FX Palo Alto Laboratory, MIT, Media Lab Europe and the University of Melbourne. His last appointment was Principal Scientist at CSIRO – Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia, where he led the "Connecting People" group, consisting of 12 staff, researching the future of human connectedness.

Floyd received several awards, published for the major human-computer interaction conferences (CHI etc), and exhibited his work at Wired’s NextFest and other international festivals. He was also a semi-finalist of MIT’s 50K entrepreneurship competition.

Floyd’s research is centered on the challenge of creating interfaces that are engaging and fun, not simply functional.

HCI and Teaching

This talk will overview a set of projects where the personalisation research of the CHAI lab has been integrated into teaching contexts. One of the key ideas underlying these is that a learner model can usefully be created from large scale electronic traces of learner activity. This can be used to personalisation teaching. It also has value in its own right since it has the potential to enable a learner to see how they are doing. Some key technical challenges in creating learner models include the representation of the model and reasoning from the evidence available, defining the learning objectives effectively so they can be modelled and a system can use ontological reasoning across granularity levels. The talk will explain these broad ideas in terms of several systems: Reflect is a tool to support learning areas like programming and interface design; Mirrors and Narcissus and our Educational Data Mining support group work; SIV-UI operates in conjunction with a mixed-delivery UI course with online lectures and on-campus labs. For much more information about these projects and CHAI, please see our web site http://chai.it.usyd.edu.au/index.cgi?Context=Home

About the presenter

Judy Kay's research aims to create personalised computing that is embedded throughout the environment to support people in the broad range of activities that are important to their lives, ranging from learning to maintaining personal relationships. The core of her research is in personalisation which ensures the user can maintain control and the associated work on applications of personalisation and novel interfaces. She is a principal of the CHAI (Computer Human Adapted Interaction) research group. The testbed areas are in ubiquitous, pervasive computing as well as intelligent teaching systems. The latter reflect the research group's work in teaching computer science and in building teaching systems that help develop reflective, deep learners. Major initiatives include the Assess self-assessment system, SIMPRAC a simulation environment that supports reflective learning of medical management, VLUM and SIV novel interfaces to support reflection based on large user models, the Tutor scrutably adaptive hypertext framework, the SATS scrutably adaptive teaching system and the JITT (Just-in-time Training) support for workplace learning.

She has over 200 publications in the areas of personalisation and teaching and learning. She has presented invited keynote addresses at major conferences, such as UM'94 User Modeling Conference, Boston, USA; IJCAI'95 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Montreal, Canada; ICCE'97, International Conference on Computers in Education, Kuching, Malaysia; ITS'2000, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Montreal, Canada; AH2006 Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems, Dublin, Ireland.

eKISS: Sharing Experiences in Families through a Picture Blog

Contemporary family life can be very stressful and many families are often busy and separated by time or distance. Physical separation makes it difficult to maintain an awareness of each other and the feeling of intimacy. But lack of such intimacy can result in insecure and troubled children. This paper outlines eKISS a picture weblog for mediating intimacy between children and parents. eKISS supports asynchronous sharing of experiences from the children to their parents while being physically separated. Communication is based on pictures and text sent through mobile technology and shared on a weblog available to the family. A longitudinal field evaluation revealed that eKISS was able to support acts of intimacy by providing insight, new communication channel, and the possibility to easily share experiences. It also revealed that eKISS was most useful when the family was separated for longer periods of time.

About the presenter

Mikael Skov is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Aalborg University.

Computer-Based Support for Self-Regulated Learning

The emphasis of dominant educational perspectives has always been on the design of learning contents and the process of learning. Ironically, the most important factor in learning – the learner, is generally given scant attention. Given this tripartite relationship and the notion of an empowered learner, design and process begin to play a supplementary but subservient role. During the seminar, Daryl will introduce his research interests in learning, with a focus on the empowered learner. His research direction will involve him investigating how the learning needs of the empowered learner can be supported by computer-based tools.

About the presenter

Daryl is presently 3 months into his PhD candidature. His supervisors are Dr Jon Pearce and Assoc Prof Wally Smith.

HCI and Online Museums

In this presentation, Asmidah will share her work within the context of online museums, to illustrate the variety of potential research directions for her PhD.

About the presenter

Asmidah is a PhD student in the Department of Information System. She started her PhD three months ago. Her supervisors are Dr Jon Pearce and Dr Sandrine Balbo.

Multimodal interaction and haptics research in the University of Tampere

In this talk Roope will present the research on multimodal interfaces in TAUCHI (Tampere Unit for Computer-Human Interaction) where haptics is used as one of the interaction modalities. He will introduce their projects studying collaboration and learning for visually impaired children, their basic research and applied research on haptics, and the lastest developments focusing on haptics and multimodality in mobile contexts.

About the presenter

Roope Raisamo received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1999 at the University of Tampere. He has been doing research on human-computer interaction since 1995 specializing in multimodal interaction and constructive user interface research. Since 1998 he has worked as a full professor at the University of Tampere, appointed in a permanent position in 2003. Prof Raisamo has been the supervisor, examiner or reviewer of 7 Ph.D. theses. He is the author for more than 70 articles in scientific journals and conferences. His research interests are in the fields of haptic interaction, bimanual interaction, multimodal information presentation, proactive and intelligent environments and multimodal interfaces for the visually impaired children. Since September 2004 he has been coordinating the MICOLE project (Multimodal Collaboration Environment for Inclusion of Visually Impaired Children), funded by the European Union. Presently he coordinates a joint research project with Prof Mark Cutkosky from Stanford, having active collaboration with Nokia and other Finnish companies studying mobile haptics.

Supporting Work Activities in Healthcare by Mobile Electronic Patient Records

Supporting work activities in healthcare is highly complex and challenging. This presentation outlines the findings from a usability study of a commercial PC based electronic patient record (EPR) system at a large Danish hospital and presents our experiences with the design of a mobile counterpart. First, a number of challenges in relation to the use of traditional desktop-based EPR systems in healthcare were identified. Secondly, a mobile context-aware prototype was designed and implemented, which automatically keeps track of contextual factors such as the physical location of patients and staff, upcoming appointments etc. The usability of the mobile EPR prototype was evaluated in a laboratory as well as in relation to carrying out real work activities at the hospital. Our results indicate that mobile EPR systems can support work activities in health-care, but that interaction design of such systems must be carefully thought out and evaluated. Specifically, our findings challenge the view of context-awareness being a universally useful paradigm for mobile HCI.

Report on visit to Lancaster University

This presentation will describe a visit to Lancaster University's Computing Department. Specifically, this presentation will describe PhD work conducted in conjunction with Keith Cheverst and Mark Rouncefield examining the possible additional role of technology in a residential health care setting for ex-psychiatric patients. The presentation will describe how a framework drawn from CSCW is used to analyse health care workers' practice and to understand the potential role of technology in the setting.

Towards 100 actions for the 100 languages of Children

The use of Naturalistic Enquiry and Participatory Design to enable an investigation into children's learning using tangible media and digital technologies.

How to Handle Childrens Wants in a Development Process

The talk will be about how to handle childrens wants in a development process. This by examining how to involve them in requirement specification and evaluation activities.

We investigated the problem through the development of a painting program. The children were involved in a preanalysis through observations of them painting and constructive interactions with existing painting software. This lead to several concepts and one of these formed the core of the design for the program. The program was realized through two releases using the development method Extreme Programming. Every release was evaluated by the children through constructive interactions.

We concluded that it was possible to involve the children in the requirements specification by using the preanalysis to develop concepts and construct user stories. The children were also involved in the evaluation of the program through constructive interactions which each release.

Throughout we have been forced to interpret the childrens' statements and actions. Thus there is no guarantee that the program really reflects the childrens' wants, despite the seemingly appropriate methods.

Towards more usable Enterprise Content Management System

The explosion of digital content has driven the emergence of Content Management System (CMS). Started as Document or Web Site Management Applications, the system has grown into a complex system with many ambitious goals in several dimensions: to manage various types of content, to serve a large number of core and extended functionalities, and to cater a wide range context of use. The increase in complexity gives rise to steep interaction design challenges.

Initial research results from the first 5 months of PhD will be presented. It includes motivation, challenges, opportunity and pain of PhD experience.

Reflections on a (nearly complete) PhD

This presentation will reflect on the twists and turns of a PhD studying flow and interactivity in online learning. The nature of the experiments will be briefly described, as well as some outcomes and conclusions. Some thoughts about the process and problems encountered will be discussed.

Application of Grounded Theory to Pattern Mining

This research proposes application of grounded theory to pattern mining. The presented approach aims at inducing expert development knowledge and its subsequent packaging into domain-specific pattern languages, which could subsequently be used by both experienced and novice developers in the field. The method is being evaluated empirically in the domain of multimedia design.

The Involvement of Children in the Design of Technology

The emergence of children as users of technology presents us with the challenge of designing to meet their needs in a useful and meaningful way. Traditionally adults have been charged with the design of children's products, under the assumption that children have too many limitations to do it themselves. Involving children brings complexity to the design process; however it can be an enriching experience for designers and children and it could be seen as an important predictor of a products success.

Managing Fragmented Work

Our daily working lives are made up of various concurrent and overlapping tasks. Several studies have been conducted to understand the process of task switching, the use of artifacts as reminders, the implications of interruptions on tasks, and the way that people maintain context in fragmented work. The results of these studies have produced design recommendations for possible virtual and physical artifacts for reminding, switching, and resumption of pending/suspended tasks. However, the majority of research has only concentrated on observing the surface behaviour of task management in various work contexts. My planned research attempts to look deeper into the problem by examining how people internally represent and structure their tasks in regards to task planning, control, and execution. The presentation will provide an overview of the first 6 months of my PhD research.

The translation of information between Human-Computer Interaction specialist and Software Engineering specialists in model-driven development

The aim of this project is to gather data about the collaboration between Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) specialist and Software Engineering (SE) specialists through their shared boundary objects. Results will be knowledge to better understand the translation and sharing of information in software development. The first experiment will simulate a standard model-driven development process. 15 students with knowledge in HCI and 15 students with knowledge in SE will participate and collaborate in pairs. They will produce a set of UML models and a paper-prototype. These results will be analysed to detect changes and translations in interface design and in UML models.

Greenfield User interfaces for Navigating Hierarchical Information (Honours Presentation)

Throughout the years there have been many new interfaces developed to present information in different ways. The FUN interface is one of these interfaces. Two important features of the FUN interface were seen to be its speed as well as its ability to help users in prompted recall of the structure. These features are assessed and compared with Windows Explorer.

Picture Scenarios: An Extended Scenario-based Method for Mobile Appliance Design (OZCHI 2004)

This paper presents an extended scenario-based design method for the design of mobile appliances. This method builds on the results of two studies with designers in industry. Central to the method is the representation of dynamic use context, a core characteristic of mobile appliance use, with the use of picture scenarios. The initial use of this method in three design workshops is reported here, along with the feedback of the participants.

Designing with people who have a cognitive disability (Honours Presentation)

A case can be made for the direct involvement of people with a cognitive disorder, such as autism or Asperger's syndrome in the development of technologies to support them. There is doubt, however, that some of the very traits that these technologies are designed to support may also impact the effectiveness of appropriateness of available participatory design techniques. I will report on my experiences conducting a Delphi study that explored the problems associated with engaging this group directly in the design process.

Trust in mobile guide design: exploiting interaction paradigms (OZCHI 2004)

Trust is an important issue in the design of context-aware mobile guides. Here we draw on the field evaluations of two different mobile guides to explore trust related incidents. Important factors in trust relationships are user expectations and managing the user's sense of vulnerability. However, uncertainty is currently unavoidable with mobile guide systems. Consequently, given the user's expectations, evidence of the system providing incorrect information (e.g. caused by uncertainty in location due to limited network coverage) is likely to adversely affect the user's trust in the system. We argue here that the interaction paradigm supported by the system can play a crucial role in managing the user's trust. Furthermore, we argue that personified interaction paradigms (Local, Guide, Chaperone, Buddy, Captain) can act as a useful tool for designers developing mobile guides. (Paper by Connor Graham, Keith Cheverst, Steve Howard, Jesper Kjeldskov, Frank Vetere)

Special Presentation: Visit to SINTEF and NordiCHI

Frank's Report from SINTEF and NordiCHI.