Past seminars 2011–2015

Understanding the User Experience of Running with Mixed Reality Stories

Mixed Reality Stories for running (MRS) blend together virtual stories with physical environments to enhance running experience. These kind of MRS are different from mixed reality performances and games that have been studied previously. Firstly, they are designed to be built on top of already existing experience of running. Secondly, they rely on the story itself to affect running, rather than on goals, rules or rewards. The aim of the project is to understand how these differences affect the overall experience. The project consists of three studies. In the first study 11 runners tried an MRS called Zombies, run! for three weeks and then were interviewed on their experience with the app. In the second study I worked together with 7 creative writers to make new stories for a similar kind of MRS. Three writers completed three scripts that were produced and used in the third study. There, 36 runners had 46 runs on campus while listening to different stories and reporting on their experience afterwards.

I will present the main findings from all three studies and also discuss their implications for our understanding of the experience of running with MRS.

About the presenter

Aleksandr started his tertiary education as a programmer, studying Computer Science at Moscow State Institute of Radio-engineering, Electroincs and Automatics (Technical University). While doing the course, he developed a passion for UX and decided to become a designer. In Moscow he worked as an interaction designer at Russian design bureau. He then moved to Australia to do this research project at the University of Melbourne. Aleksandr’s research interests are gathered around UX, narratives, serious games and mixed realities. Aleksandr started the course in March 2012 and expected to submit the thesis in September 2015

Virtual Learning Spaces? A New e-Learning Strategy to Support the Development of Distributed and Context-Aware Education Around the Web

With the integration of web 2.0 and social technologies into educational practices, researchers have been faced with the challenge of providing better online virtual learning environments, which engage students in the learning processes. This challenge entails using the massive amounts of knowledge we generate in our digital footprints to provide personalized learning contents. As a way of encouraging distributed context-sensitive learning in the Web, as well as keeping the students interacting, sharing knowledge and motivated, this seminar presents a different strategy to develop Virtual Learning Spaces. Virtual learning spaces, here, aims to promote the interaction between students and digital learning contents, by supporting interoperability between different Internet resources, by enabling the consolidation of distributed data of students in these different environments, and also customizing learning contents.

About the presenter

During his Masters and later on his PhD, Eduardo researched about complex adaptive systems, intelligent agents, context awareness, social networks and middleware. He is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Department of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne. Parallel to his research, Eduardo worked since 2004 as a Senior System Engineer and Technical Consultant at CESAR (Recife-Pernambuco/Brazil) researching/developing/leading Motorola, Samsung, Compal Electronics and Gemalto international projects.

Encounters: Collective Bodies, Creative Spaces

Encounters was a four-week interactive installation developed by the SocialNUI Centre and the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA). Situated in the courtyard of the VCA’s Southbank campus, Encounters enabled and encouraged participants to interact both with the technology and with one another. Interactions were enabled by the use of an overhead Microsoft Kinect sensor and through visual, sound, and lighting effects, and facilitated through a regular series of dance performances. This seminar will describe the process of developing Encounters and the nature of the collaboration between SocialNUI and the VCA. It will also outline the technical approach used to track participants, and the creative elements developed by the visual artists. Finally, it will present preliminary findings from the research components of the project including the ways in which participants made sense of their interactions with the technology, the role of dance performance in facilitating social interaction and demonstrating the modes of use of the Encounters installation, and the role of interactive performances in public space.

About the presenter

John Downs is a research fellow in the Microsoft Research Centre for Social Natural User Interfaces (SocialNUI) at The University of Melbourne. John’s role involves leading a range of research related to the use of NUI technologies in public spaces. John’s PhD work examined the experience of audience members in social and physical videogaming contexts. John holds degrees in computer science, psychology, and human-computer interaction.

Exploring the Influence of Medium and Culture on Language Use in an Online Support Group

Online forums provides huge repositories of well-structured natural language and metadata, allowing researchers novel kinds of insight into language use. My in-progress PhD thesis research uses natural language processing tools to locate ways in which language typically changes throughout the duration of membership in a community for bipolar disorder. In this talk, the methodology and findings of my PhD research are sketched via an IPython Notebook. Discussion centres on the issue of disinterring whether language changes are the result of social influence (e.g. conventions used by other speakers, novice/expert role relationships), or medium influence (e.g. hardware, software and site architecture).

About the presenter

Daniel McDonald is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne. His thesis research combines computational and systemic-functional linguistics to investigate linguistic change over the course of membership in an online support group for bipolar disorder. He is also a Research Fellow on an interdisciplinary research project centred on tracking change in the discourse-semantics of risk in the New York Times between 1963 and 2014.

Media Architecture: From Technological Gadget to Place-making Medium

In recent years, various digital media have been introduced in public space to facilitate communication with and among citizens. Typical examples include rectangular electronic displays, but extends to more abstract forms such as media facades that form part of architecture. This phenomenon is typically referred to as ""media architecture"". Most examples typically serve commercial, cultural or economic interests, while the social, societal and architectural values are often undervalued. This seminar will highlight some of the challenges media architecture is currently confronted with in contemporary public space (e.g. vandalism, short lifespan, absence of architectural integration). With these challenges in mind, the seminar will then focus on opportunities for social integration of media architecture, by discussing two recent in-the-wild case studies that aimed to involve citizens in the conceptualisation, design and maintenance of situated media.

About the presenter

Niels has a background in computer science and architecture, and is currently pursuing a PhD that investigates the social and architectural qualities of media architecture (Research[x]Design, University of Leuven, Belgium). His research is characterised by a critical, explorative approach to the various aspects that are involved in design, integration, usage and continuity of media architecture projects.

SEMINAR RECORDING

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrhOdxqLN6U

Use the Difficulty through Schwierigkeit: Antiusability as Value-driven Design

This presentation is based on the author’s ICIS 2014 short paper, with the abstract being: "In the style of a polemic discursive essay, Antiusability (also known as Schwierigkeit) is introduced as a radical design paradigm to reawaken dedicated awareness of the user-system interface through challenge. A philosophical work in flux, it is described as a kind of science (or logic) of difficulty with an underpinning that promotes the generic greater good in usability per se."

About the presenter

Dr John Lenarcic is a physicist and applied mathematician by training, an IT academic by fortunate accident and an armchair philosopher by conscious choice. His research interests include the philosophy of information systems, human-computer interaction and the cyber-anthropology of social networking. Dr Lenarcic is a frequent media commentator on issues dealing with social and ethical aspects of information technology with a particular emphasis on social media.

Ethical Encounters in HCI: Research in Sensitive Settings

This seminar will present examples of ethical encounters in human-computer interaction research and discuss themes that will be explored in an upcoming CHI workshop. With HCI researchers conducting studies in increasingly sensitive and difficult settings, ethics is emerging as a key concern for the HCI community. New technologies are now being designed and evaluated in settings that involve vulnerable or marginalized participants and that can be emotionally challenging for researchers. Research in these settings can produce complex ethical dilemmas that are often emergent, diverse, and highly contextualized. In addition, there may be discrepancies between the realities of HCI fieldwork and the formal and often rigid processes of obtaining ethics approval in research institutions. Given these issues, it is important for researchers to reflect on ethical encounters in HCI research. The CHI workshop will provide a forum for researchers to share experiences about ethical challenges they have faced. As a precursor to the workshop, this seminar will be an interactive discussion of the key issues.

About the presenter

Dr Jenny Waycott is a Research Fellow in the Department of Computing and Information Systems working on the ARC Linkage project "Growing Older and Staying Connected: Touch-Screen Technologies for Ameliorating Older People’s Experience of Social Isolation" Her research aims to understand the role technologies play in people’s learning, work, and social activities and explores how new technologies can be used to enhance those activities. Her recent research has focused on supporting people who are isolated or marginalised to build social inclusion through creative uses of new technologies.

URL FOR THE PROJECT

https://ethicalencountershci.wordpress.com/

Lost for a good book: Understanding book browsing and supporting it online

Browsing is a core part of human information seeking, and—if we listen to some readers—a key element of the book seeking experience. The library shelves provide an ideal site for browsing. Readers respond to this by borrowing more books at a time than they do in ebook collections, and by complaining that ebook collections do not facilitate browsing. While a number of online book browsing systems have emerged recently, none of them stem from a detailed and principled understanding of the mechanics or interaction patterns underpinning browsing. This project aims to build a data driven model of what readers actually do when they browse academic library shelves and why, and in so doing generate insight for the creation of online browsing interfaces. These insights will then be tested against an online system or systems.

About the presenter

Dana has been an HCI researcher practitioner at Swinburne Library for the past eight years, where she has done extensive work on how library users search, get lost, find and publish. Before that she worked at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. She started her PhD at the University of Melbourne part time in March 2014.

Transnationalism, Indigenous Knowledge and Technology: Insights from the Kenyan Diaspora

This is the presentation that accompanies the paper accepted at Seoul for the CHI 2015 conference. The paper investigates how current digital technologies are sufficient, or insufficient, in supporting Kenyan transnationals in practising indigenous knowledge. We first outline a view of indigenous knowledge, and then apply it to a study of Kenyan diasporans living in Australia. The findings are framed as nine techniques for sustaining displaced practising of indigenous knowledge. These appropriations suggest directions for technology innovation, providing design considerations for technologies that translate, formulate and support indigenous knowledge in transnational contexts.

About the presenter

Kagonya Awori is a PhD student in the Microsoft Social NUI research centre. She joined in November, 2013 from Nairobi, Kenya. Kagonya has a background in Human-Computer Interaction with a dual Masters from Carnegie Mellon University, USA and University of Madeira,Portugal. She has also worked on various UX research and design projects in Kenya, the States and Portugal. Kagonya is being supervised by Assoc. Prof.Frank Vetere and Dr. Wally Smith. She is keen on understanding how situated technologies can support indigenous communities in Australia and Africa.

Tensions in digitising boardgames

This seminar will discuss the different ways in which modern European boardgames ("Eurogames") are converted for digital play, using case studies of three popular tabletop boardgames: Puerto Rico, Agricola and Ascension. The case studies suggest three sources of tension in digitising boardgames. Firstly, there is tension between the interaction metaphor of the original analogue medium and the metaphor of a digital game. Secondly, there are mixed views about the importance of housekeeping chores to gameplay. These represent a form of articulation work, which is typically hidden by digital implementations but which may contribute to players’ understanding of the game. Lastly, the types of information that are created through digital play influence gameplay of both digital and physical boardgames even for players who do not engage in overt analysis of informated statistics from digital implementations.

About the presenter

Melissa is a PhD student in the Microsoft Research Centre for Social NUI with a professional background in HCI and deep involvement in the international boardgame community. Her research seeks to understand how digitising modern European boardgames transforms the experience of play. Melissa started her PhD research in July 2014; her supervisors are Assoc. Prof Martin Gibbs and Assoc Prof Wally Smith.

Towards Community Led Health Management Platforms in Rural India

In recent years, there has been significant interest within the HCI community on the role of technology in supporting the management of chronic illnesses. In this presentation I will reflect on my current work in rural India that investigates the ways with which digital technologies can support individuals in managing their type 2 diabetes or depression. I will highlight the move from self-management to ‘collective’ management as a resource for design. Furthermore, I will present initial insights from a preliminary pilot study of RadioHealthDialogues – a platform aimed to support communities of individuals in sharing their experiences around the management of their illness in resource constrained environments. As part of this talk, I aim to situate these understandings to the socialNUI sphere in an effort to map potential avenues of exploration.

About the presenter

Kostas is a research associate in Culture Lab, Newcastle, UK. His research interests focus on digital public health and education where he investigates the role of transformative digital technologies in supporting cross-cultural citizen interaction in resource constrained environments. He calls himself a 'humanistic engineer' and sometimes an HCI researcher. His previous work includes the design of Rendezvous, an artefact aimed at fostering parent child reunion.

Supporting Teleconsultation through Tangible Interfaces

Teleconsultation refers to the electronic communication that happens between a clinician and patient for the purpose of diagnostic and therapeutic advice. Current approaches to teleconsultation are mostly limited to audio and video based communication that may not fully capture the multi-sensory aspects of therapeutic advice and diagnosis as observed in a face-to-face medical consultation. In response, this research proposes investigation into tangible mediums to support the communication between a clinician and patient during teleconsultation. This research takes ethnographic approach to first understand the current teleconsultation practices and then uses this understanding to design tangible interfaces for teleconsultation. In this confirmation seminar, Deepti will present her research motivation, research objectives and plans to achieve them. She will conclude with early findings from her observational study on teleconsultation practices.

About the presenter

Deepti Aggarwal is a PhD candidate, working with Prof. Frank Vetere and Dr. Bernd Ploderer in Microsoft Centre for SocialNUI at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses on understanding teleconsultation practices. In particular, she investigates how doctors and patients engage, perceive, and interact with technology during video mediated teleconsultation through ethnographic studies in collaboration with Royal Children’s Hospital and IEMML. She further aims to enhance the communication between the doctors and patients through exploring tangible mediums and alternate design strategies. Deepti has completed her Masters from International Institute of Information Technology, India. Her Master’s thesis explores collective intelligence (Friendsourcing) techniques to extract and make sense of the data over web. During her internship at Carnegie Mellon University, she also looked at ways to make Crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) more engaging and effective. Deepti enjoys working on humans in the loop systems and greatly values the role of human agency in technology-dominated world.

Design Inquiry into Material Representations of Physical Activity

In this talk, I present my PhD research that questions instrumental quantification-centric view on representing physical activity information in the form of numbers and graphs that appear on screen. In response, I present three systems and a framework that unites three design areas: personal informatics, physical visualization and human food interaction (HFI).

About the presenter

Rohit Ashok Khot is a doctoral candidate and an IBM PhD fellow in the Exertion Games Lab at RMIT University, Australia. Rohit has been active in the HCI community from past 5 years, which has led to many first authored publications in reputed tier-1 conferences like CHI, including a best paper and a honourable mention award. Rohit is passionate about designing for specific and social circumstances in which users interact and appropriate technology.

URL FOR THE PRESENTER AND PROJECT

physicalactivitymatters.org

From Head to Toe: Full Body Human-Computer Interaction

At Lancaster, we are interested in exploring the novel user experiences that arise from using the whole body in HCI. During my PhD, I’ve investigated novel interaction modalities ranging from the feet to the eyes. In this talk, I will present some of this work, which includes supporting the performance of weight lifting activities; extracting nonverbal cues from affective body expressions; using foot movements for desktop interaction; combining gaze and mid-air gestures for 3D user interfaces; incorporating the physical world into virtual reality; and enabling gaze-based interaction for smart watches.

About the presenter

Eduardo Velloso is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Lancaster University, UK, under the supervision of Prof. Hans Gellersen, Dr. Jason Alexander, and Dr. Andreas Bulling. He will be in Melbourne for the next three months working at the Social NUI centre as a MERIT Scholar. His background is in Computer Engineering and his research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Affective Computing, Eye Tracking, and Novel Input Devices for Gaming.

Sleep with Technology: Challenges and Opportunities for Sleep Tracking

Prior work has examined how single system can support sleep and how potential users view sleep technologies. With the emergence of a growing number of commercial sleep tracking products, yet how current users interact with sleep technologies remains unknown in HCI community. I conducted a qualitative study aimed at understanding how current users of sleep tracking technologies practice sleep tracking, with a focus on what are the challenges they have encountered. I examined three types of sleep tracking technologies: Mobile applications, wearables and embedded sensors, and collected 51 threads from 5 online forums mixed with personal informatics enthusiasts and general users. 22 single challenges were identified under 4 themes: Tracking continuity, Trust, Data manipulation, Data interpretation. Based on these results, I proposed 6 opportunities and considerations for both researchers and practitioners for better designing sleep tracking technologies and for supporting improved user experience.

About the presenter

After finishing my bachelor degree, which allowed me to acquire solid knowledge in computer science and mathematics, I continued my master degree at University of Melbourne, where I was greatly inspired by HCI and determined to devote myself into this field. This minor research project helps me develop the research skills required to do a PhD. It is likely that I will join a HCI research team at Telecom ParisTech, France, this September to start my PhD.

Wearable Interventions for Hand Rehabilitation after Stroke: A Systematic Review

Stroke is the leading cause of disability worldwide, with one of the most common resulting disabilities being paralysis of an upper limb. Rehabilitation will typically begin as soon as possible following the stroke event, and will include close involvement with a physiotherapist. Wearable technology has applications to hand rehabilitation after stroke in that it can offer methods to gather movement data of the impaired hand in ways that a human therapist cannot, and capture the minute details needed to make decisions about rehabilitative therapy.

While current literature shows a number of emerging technologies being developed in this space, and systematic reviews exist that consolidate evidence of general interventions to promote upper limb recovery in stroke survivors, there is currently no overview of the achievements and gaps in the development of wearable technology specifically as applied to hand function rehabilitation. The main objective in performing this systematic review was to investigate the current state of research regarding wearable technology that can be used as part of hand function rehabilitation after stroke in order to discover where there is promising evidence of the effectiveness of these interventions or where changes and improvements may be needed.

About the presenter

Hayley Rickett is in her final semester of the MIT(Health) program at the University of Melbourne and is completing her Health IT Project under the supervision of Associate Professor Frank Vetere and Dr Bernd Ploderer. Outside of the MIT(Health) program, Hayley has a background in IT Consulting and has been working as a Technical Designer while studying part-time.

Whose mind is the signal? Focalization in video game narratives

This research presents a framework for describing and analysing subjective experiences in games and virtual worlds. This framework can assist researchers and designers in identifying ways to allow players to access modes of thinking that accord with a perspective other than their own. Utilising an appropriation of Gérard Genette’s (1980) concept of focalization to analyse several contemporary videogames, I demonstrate that internal focalization can be made apparent through audiovisual presentation, ludic affordances and the selection and restriction of private knowledge. This paper was first presented at the Digital Games Research Association conference in Lüneburg, Germany, earlier this month.

About the presenter

Fraser Allison is a PhD candidate in his first year at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on perspective and identity in videogames and virtual worlds, and he is now extending this into research on voice interaction as an embodied expression of identity. Prior to his PhD, Fraser worked for several years as a manager and consultant at an Australian strategic market research consultancy.

zSense and RippleTouch: Appropriating Technologies for Social and Ubiquitous Interfaces

Creating interfaces for social and ubiquitous interactions poses new challenges to appropriate technologies to fit in different contexts and limitations. In this talk, I will present how two new technologies, zSense (a shallow depth gesture recognition technique) and RippleTouch (a full body haptic interface) are designed with the intent to address those challenges. The talk will first briefly introduce the challenges of social and ubiquitous interaction in terms of design challenges (such as availability, mode of interaction, privacy, shared interfaces, etc.) and the technical challenges (such as energy, form factors, etc.). Then, the two projects will be discussed with respect to their inspiration, novelty and how they address the aforementioned challenges. Afterwards, I would like to engage the audience to join me in the conversation to explore possible future possibilities in interface design and further understand the challenges in social and ubiquitous computing.

About the presenter

Anusha Withana is a postdoctoral research fellow at SUTD-MIT International Design Centre, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). He did his postgraduate studies at the Graduate School of Media Design, Keio University, Japan and earned his PhD (2014) and Masters (2010) degrees before joining SUTD. HIs primary research focus is in creating Blended Interfaces, which, he defines as interfaces that are ubiquitous, blend into the environment and leverage on natural affordances of the context. Within the abstraction under this umbrella term, he explores design factors such as interactivity in personal and shared spaces, implicit interactions and natural interfaces.

Not The Internet, but This Internet: How Other nets Illuminate Our Feudal Internet

What is the Internet like, and how do we know? Less tendentiously, how can we make general statements about the Internet without reference to alternatives that help us to understand what the space of network design possibilities might be? This paper presents a series of cases of network alternatives which provide a vantage point from which to reflect upon the ways that the Internet does or does not uphold both its own design goals and our collective imaginings of what it does and how. The goal is to provide a framework for understanding how technologies embody promises, and how these both come to evolve.

About the presenter

Paul Dourish is a Professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Anthropology. His research focuses primarily on understanding information technology as a site of social and cultural production. His work combines topics in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and science and technology studies. He has published over 100 scholarly articles, and was elected to the CHI Academy in 2008 in recognition of his contributions to Human-Computer Interaction.

Before coming to UCI, he was a Senior Member of Research Staff in the Computer Science Laboratory of Xerox PARC; he has also held research positions at Apple Computer and at Rank Xerox EuroPARC. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University College, London, and a B.Sc. (Hons) in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh.

Interaction Design for Sustainability

Sustainability has in recent years become an area of interest in HCI research exploring. Amongst other things, the design and use of "eco-feedback displays" for informing people about their consumption of various resources, such as water and electricity. In this talk we present some of the projects within Interaction Design for Sustainability that we are currently doing at Aalborg University, including the design and evaluation of the PowerViz and eForecast prototype systems.

About the presenter

Jeni and Jesper are Associate and Full Professors, respectively, at Aalborg University in Denmark. They have worked with Interaction Design research for over a decade, and have contributed extensively to the HCI literature, including TOCHI, CHI, CSCW UbiComp, and MobileHCI. Jeni and Jesper have a long history with the Melbourne University’s Human-Computer Interaction, and are currently visiting Melbourne as Honorary Senior Fellows.

The Emergence of EyePlay: Designing Games with Eye Tracking Control

2015 is a landmark year for the use of eye tracking in games: Steel series released the first affordable gaming-oriented eye tracker and Ubisoft released Assassin’s Creed Rogue, the first AAA game that natively supports eye tracking. Despite the recent media hype, researchers have been exploring the use of the eyes as gaming input for decades. In this talk, I will present an overview of what has been accomplished in previous works on the topic we call EyePlay. My goals in this talk are to equip the audience with the basic understanding of what it takes to build games that leverage the power of the eyes; to overview the various EyePlay mechanics that game developers and researchers have created over the years; and to suggest areas for future research.

About the presenter

Eduardo Velloso is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Lancaster University, UK, under the supervision of Prof. Hans Gellersen, Dr. Jason Alexander, and Dr. Andreas Bulling. He has been a MERIT scholar in Melbourne School of Engineering for the past three months, and he will join the Microsoft Research Centre for Social NUI as a Research Fellow in January, 2016. His background is in Computer Engineering and his research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Affective Computing, Eye Tracking, and Novel Input Devices for Gaming.

This seminar is generously supported by Melbourne School of Engineering's MERIT visiting scholar grant.

Initial steps towards Assistive Augmentation

As sensor technologies become pervasive and their precision increases, we are creating a ‘fertile substrate’ for augmenting human senses. However, technologies are often disconnected from Humans. In Augmented Human Lab (AHL), we focus on exploring the ways of creating ‘enabling’ human-computer interfaces that seamlessly integrate with a user’s mind body and behaviour. We call this ""Assistive Augmentation"".

With modern biological understanding of sensation, emerging electronic devices, and agile computational methods, we now have an opportunity to design a new generation of enabling interfaces. This talk will present project BWard as a demonstrator of the approaches that AHL has been undertaking in managing health and well-being.

About the presenter

Dr. Suranga Nanayakkara Assistant Professor at the Engineering Product Development Pillar of Singapore University of Technology and Design. Before joining SUTD, Suranga was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Fluid Interfaces group, MIT Media Lab (fluid.media.mit.edu). He received his PhD in 2010 and BE in 2005 from National University of Singapore. At SUTD, he directs the Augmented Human Lab (www.ahlab.org) to explore technologies for enhancing sensory and cognitive abilities of humans. His work has resulted in many patents; publications at prestigious conferences such as CHI, UIST; printed and electronic media such as Time Magazine, Discovery News, Engadget, TechReview etc. For the totality and breadth of achievements he was recognised as a young inventor under 35 (TR35 award) in the asia pacific region by MIT TechReview.

URLs

When Organising Multiactivity Becomes a Challenge in Domestic Video Calls

Domestic video calls have become a rich source of multiactivity situations due to the recent shift towards video call experiences that include video callers’ everyday activities in addition do their mediated conversation. In order to manage multiple activities simultaneously, video callers assign different interactional resources to different activities. When an incompatibility between required interactional resources occurs, one of the ways to organise multiactivity is to put one of the activities on hold in favour of the other one(s). This challenge that creates interstitial moments for the activity being held, in this case the video call, has been relatively overlooked in the literature, despite its prevalence. In this talk, I will discuss the role of technology on shaping these interstitial/multiactivity experiences. The discussion is based on the observations of 14 pairs of participants Skyping on Xbox One.

About the presenter

Behnaz is a third year PhD student in the Microsoft Research Centre for Social NUI at the University of Melbourne. Her research interest is on understanding use of video call technologies in the domestic context through studying naturally-occurring experiences. She aims to enhance video call experiences by incorporating design considerations emerging from her studies into the video call technologies.

SocialNUI Public Spaces seminars: Masquerade

The SocialNUI Centre has installed two interactive displays with Kinect sensors around the Engineering precinct at The University of Melbourne's Parkville campus. In this seminar, John Downs will describe the purpose of these displays and will describe Masquerade, the initial flagship game that has been installed on these displays. Masquerade is a social game incorporating natural user interface elements including gesture and body. Masquerade was designed with several research questions in mind. This seminar will also introduce a future application, currently under seclpment for the displays.

About the presenter

John Downs is a research fellow in the Microsoft Research Centre for Social Natural User Interfaces (SocialNUI) at The University of Melbourne. John’s role involves leading a range of research related to the use of NUI technologies in public spaces. John’s PhD work examined the experience of audience members in social and physical videogaming contexts. John holds degrees in computer science, psychology, and human-computer interaction.

Code, Display, User: Semiotic Dialogues in Interactive Computer Art

Travis Cox will present on his practice-led PhD research, Code, Display, User: semiotic dialogues in interactive computer art and the research questions that have developed from this. This research interrogated code as an encapsulation of artistic intent through which input from a user is examined and interpreted. The output of this code becomes then a dialogue between the user’s exploration and the meaning of an artwork that the artist has enshrined within code. This in turn begins a semiotic dialogue between what the artist aims to convey and the user’s own interpretation of the artist’s coded rules. This intentionality was explored through a series of interactive artworks including webpages, a browser plug-in, interactive installations and live performances with dancers and composers. Bringing together the arts, semiotics and HCI, he will discuss his interests in performing data, live coding, machine learning and neural networks and the role of the coder in artistic meaning production.

About the presenter

Travis Cox is an artist researcher based in Melbourne. His theoretical and artistic practice engages with the dialogue between a user/viewer and an interactive/generative artwork. Cox examines this concern through webpage artworks, generative installations, machine learning and large-scale collaborative performances as well as theoretically through his research at the Microsoft Research Centre for Social Natural User Interfaces, University of Melbourne. Cox has presented at conferences and shown artworks across Australia. His most recent works include E.L.A.I.N.E. for Telematic Embrace Café, George Paton Gallery Melbourne and as part of Encounters a cross-discipline interactive public artwork presented over four weekends for SummerSalt.

Technology at Mealtime: Beyond the ‘Ordinary’

In this research we investigate the role of information and communication technologies during domestic mealtimes. We examine the everyday interactions of familial uses of technology around mealtimes and explore how family members configure the dinner space and the technologies within it. We seek to understand how technologies are used and negotiated amongst family members and the influence of technologies on the content and context of their interactions. Finally, we aim to investigate how our everyday technologies support our regular mealtimes as well as special occasions.

About the presenter

Hasan Shahid Ferdous is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has completed Master of IT (Research) degree from GSIT, Monash University, Australia in 2011, and BSc in CSE from the Department of CSE, BUET, Bangladesh in the year 2008. He is an active member of the Microsoft Research Centre for Social Natural User Interface (SNUI) at the University of Melbourne, specially focusing on technology usage in the family context.

The Supportive Network: Rural older people, social disadvantage and ICT

The supportive network research project involved working with seven older people in rural Victoria with histories of homelessness, social isolation and complex needs, who are being supported by a homelessness services organisation. Using an action research methodology, the project worked with both the older people and the social workers that were supporting them, to trial new ways to communicate, build social connections and link with services and supports using tablet computers. Currently in the data analysis and reporting phase of the research project, this presentation will discuss preliminary findings with an emphasis on the technical barriers facing the older participants and the impact that social disadvantage plays in adding an additional layer of complexity when learning to engage with Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

About the presenter

Steven Baker is currently in the final year of his PhD project at La Trobe University, Australia. Having worked as a social worker, predominantly within the homeless services sector, Stevens research interests include; ageing and technology, the use of technology in social work practice, social disadvantage and the impact of technology on disadvantaged groups. Steven is the recipient of the David Myers Research Scholarship at La Trobe University and has presented on the subject of ageing and technology at conferences in Australia and Internationally.

URL FOR THE PROJECT

http://www.latrobe.edu.au/aipca/john-richards-initiative/about-jri/phd-students

eTechnologies for the Psychological Management of Chronic Pain

Chronic pain is a distressing and disabling condition that affects one in five Australians, with a total economic cost of $34 billion dollars a year. Treatment requires a multi-disciplinary approach, however demand for clinical resources outstrips supply. The aim of this project is to design a mobile phone app that will deliver a psychological therapy in a low-cost convenient manner to people who are experiencing chronic pain. By employing user-centred design, I hope to overcome known obstacles inherent in delivering e-therapy, while capitalising on some of the clinical advantages offered by mobile, personal technology. The app will have temporal dimensions as it offers a course of treatment over 4-weeks, while adapting to the user’s progress and eventually becoming obsolete. The app will also include exercises in the form of games which will provide feedback to the user on how they are progressing through their treatment course.

About the presenter

Arthur David Stabolidis is undertaking a combined PhD/Master of Psychology (Clinical) course in the School of Psychological Sciences (University of Melbourne). He is being supervised by A/Prof Christina Bryant, A/Prof Lisa Phillips and Dr Greg Wadley. He previously completed an undergraduate degree in Commerce through the Mathematics and Computer Science Faculty at The University of Adelaide. Prior to studying psychology, Arthur managed the design and development of a web-based software called Chemwatch, of which the University of Melbourne is a subscriber. In his spare time, Arthur writes, records and produces music, and plays in a number of bands in Melbourne. His music skills will also be utilised within his project.

Write What You Know

What are the attributes of immersive digital texts? How can theories of cognition and poetics inform the design and authoring of digital content to foster empathy and social connectedness in young adult readers?

This seminar will discuss a creative writing approach incorporating HCI methods to a multidisciplinary problem: how to engage young people with therapeutic content in online therapy for mental health and wellbeing. The title, a common aphorism in popular discourse about creative writing, hints at the structure of the seminar: a discussion of what my experiences of writing online have taught me about creative engagement in digital spaces and how these lessons might inform the direction of my PhD. It also hints at a participatory role for readers in the creation of therapeutic content.

About the presenter

Penni Russon is the award-winning author of ten novels for young adults published in Australia and the US. Her most recent novel Only Ever Always, won the Aurealis, the Ethel Turner and the WA Premier’s awards. She teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne in the MCWPE program. She has been working for 2 years in the Online Interventions and Innovation Research program at Orygen, The National Centre for Excellence in Youth Mental Health, and has recently commenced a PhD with the program. She is pursuing Creative Writing PhD with the Centre for Youth Mental Health, co-supervised by Dr Mario Alvarez (MDHS), Dr Greg Wadley (CIS), and Professor Kevin Brophy (School of Culture and Communications).

URLs

http://www.eglantinescake.blogspot.com

http://most.org.au/

New live performance instruments and Selecting the best UI icons

Two related, yet independent, projects will be presented. The first is PlanMixPlay, a new performance instrument for interactive surfaces. With it, we explore new interaction techniques to enable solo artists improvising coordinated audio/video performances. We also try to solve an ever-growing problem for internet broadcasters. How do you properly interact/work with an audience of thousands when the traditional chat window no longer suffices?

The second is a spin-off project evolved from designing upcoming functionality for PlanMixPlay, and seeks to answer a simple question: If an icon consists of a signifier, the shape which the icon takes, and the signified, the concept the shape/icon represents - how do you select the best signifier for the signified? I.e. what is the best icon to select? We use human computation to optimally select the best icons based on two measured properties: Identifiability and Comprehensibility.

About the presenter

Lasse Laursen comes from a diverse background, and with a broad set of interests. Born in Denmark, his family relocated to Sweden, Austria, and Germany over the course of his adolescent life. Continuing this international adventure, Lasse recently spent three years in Japan, and completed a two year post.doc position at the University of Tokyo under the JSPS scholarship. He has completed significant projects within the fields of Computer Graphics, Artificial Intelligence, Game Design, Augmented Reality, and most recently within Human Computer Interaction. His most recent projects have led him to actively perform with an instrument of his own design on weekends. Currently, he is working as an independent researcher.

URLs

http://www.lasselaursen.com/project/social-dj http://www.pechakucha.org/users/lasse-laursen http://www.planmixplay.com/

Exploring the Combination of Eye Gaze and Gesture on Large Displays

Richard Bolt (1980)’s "Put That There" seminal work demonstrated the potential of making human-computer interaction more natural when human modalities are combined in an interface, largely due to the fact that human interaction with the world is inherently multimodal. In recent times, eye tracking technology has improved while becoming more affordable and accessible, but inherent problems (e.g. "Midas Touch") and limitations (e.g. gaze tracking over distances is inaccurate) still exist. Nevertheless, this provides the opportunity for the combination of gaze with modalities that have been extensively developed and studied such as gesture to ultimately address the inherent limitations in both modalities as the weaknesses of one modality can be overcome by another.The seminar will focus upon two projects that explored the combination of eye gaze and gesture on large displays, EyeSheep and X-Gaze (Work in Progress). The motivations, design challenges, findings and future directions of both projects will be presented.

About the presenter

Joshua Newn is in his final semester of the Master of Information Systems (Research) course at the University of Melbourne. His research component is under the supervision of A/Prof Frank Vetere and Dr Marcus Carter. Prior to his current studies, Joshua has worked in industry with large-scale real-time enterprise systems after completing a Bachelor of Information Technology and Systems at Monash University. His current research interests are in novel interactive interfaces and techniques using eye gaze, gesture or a combination of in various contexts. Joshua is keen to continue on to do a PhD at the university in this field.

You put what, where? Hobbyist use of insertable devices

Over the last century the body has emerged as a platform for devices, including internal medical devices and wearable fitness monitors. Within the last decade individual hobbyists have begun inserting non-medical devices in, through and underneath their skin voluntarily. Individuals are taking technological integration with the body to the next level, experimenting insertable devices instead. Our work introduces this new category of devices we refer to as insertables and explores what insertable devices individuals are using. It also looks at how they are using insertables and their motivations for insertion. Are insertables the next thing?

About the presenter

Kayla J Heffernan is a UX designer at SEEK who is also undertaking her PhD in interaction design at The University of Melbourne exploring a new category of device: insertables. Kayla’s previous masters research helped created an app for complex messaging to improve vitamin D status in young women.

URLs

#insertables on twitter
@kaylajheffernan on twitter

Animal-Computer Interaction at the Zoo

The growing discipline of animal-computer interaction (ACI) has to date focused primarily on the wellbeing of pets, and collaboration between working animals and their handlers. However, the zoo is an important site of intersection between the human and animal worlds, where ACI can make an important contribution. This seminar will provide an overview of the Centre's research into the impacts of technology on the work of the zoo and the way animals are exhibited; the important intersections between animal welfare science and ACI; and the design of technology (Kinecting with Orang-utans) to enhance human-animal encounters and contribute to animals’ cognitive enrichment.

About the presenter

Sarah Webber is a PhD student in the Microsoft Research Centre for Social NUI investigating the design of technology for the zoo. Her recent research has focused on the increasingly pervasive presence of digital and interactive technologies, and the impacts of this on learning, recreation, and the way we relate with others and the world around us. Sarah holds a MSc in Information Systems, and has a professional and academic background in interaction design, user research and user-oriented technology evaluation.

Grasp and Squeeze: Exploring Grasping Motions as an Interaction Mechanism

Tangible interaction with a system through grasping, movement or transformation has many advantages over traditional means such as a keyboard or button as they are able to create interactions that leverage off of human’s regular interactions with the real world. This seminar will provide a background on tangible interaction as a field focusing particularly on the deformation and grasping of objects before leading into the proposed project and the technology being developed to support it. The aim of the proposed project is to explore the deformation of a grasped object, through squeezing and manipulation, as a means of interaction with the digital world, facilitated by a developed interaction technology.

About the presenter

Tristan Beven is a Masters researcher in the Microsoft Research Centre for Social NUI exploring tangible interactions. His current research focuses on the deformation of a grasped object as a mode of interaction with the digital world. Tristan holds a Bachelor’s in Commerce and Science, and has a professional background in network engineering and application development.

Kinect-based Stroke Rehabilitation in the Home Environment: A Systematic Review

Stroke is the leading cause of disability in the world, and its incidence is rising. This presents a need for alternative and improved ways of rehabilitation, and has given rise to the use of body-tracking technologies for post-stroke rehabilitation. Kinect is particularly popular because of its ability to track the whole body, and has been shown to be effective, accurate, and reliable. However, a review of the literature shows that many studies have focused on assessing the technical aspects of a Kinect-based stroke rehabilitation, in clinical settings; rather than patient outcomes from systems implemented in the home. This is a systematic review to understand how Kinect-based stroke rehabilitation designed for the home environment consider patient outcomes, the metrics they use, and their potential for integration to existing health systems or processes.

About the presenter

Ikee is a final year Master of Information Technology student, specialising in Health. Aside from working on his minor thesis, he is also doing his Industry Placement at Alfred Health hospital, helping them design an improved document management platform using MS SharePoint. His main interest lies in the intersection of IT, health systems, and rehabilitation for disabilities. He has recently published a paper in the Health Information Science conference, for an evaluation of a mobile phone-based system that tracked medicinal stock counts in Africa.

Better Health Explorer: Designing for Health Information Seekers

A vast amount of health information has been published online, yet users often report difficulties in locating and discovering such information. How can we design for easily accessible health information, and satisfy the needs of different kinds of users? In this talk, I will begin by describing the theoretical work of health information seeking and the information needs of health information seekers. Although their searching needs are well satisfied by keyword-based search engines (e.g. Google), their needs for exploring information are not well supported. In order to bridge this gap, I will propose a few design principles for supporting the exploration of health information. In addition, I will present the application of these design principles in the development of "Better Health Explorer": a proof-of-concept app for exploring health information through an interactive and engaging experience. This work contributes to the design of online health information systems and gives an example of supporting exploratory search.

About the presenter

Patrick Pang is a PhD candidate at the Human-Computer Interaction in The University of Melbourne. His PhD research is about health information seeking behaviors of lay-people and the design for a better user experience in this context. Particularly he wants to know more about the exploratory search found in the search process, and creates novel designs for supporting information exploration. Additionally, his research interests include using ICT in social & educational scenarios and making sense of data with information visualization.

Beyond YouTube: Sharing Personal Digital Stories on a Community Display (OzCHI Practice Talk)

Video-sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo have been used to share videos that describe difficult life experiences, and provide a forum for people living with adversity to express themselves and connect with others. This may not benefit those who require support in building local connections, however, as audiences are unknown and may not be supportive of content. In this paper we present findings from a project that investigated how creating and sharing digital stories in local community settings could help build a sense of connection for those who are housebound and unable to participate in community activities. This paper outlines two interlinked studies. Study One describes an analysis of online videos shared by housebound people. This informed Study Two, which involved creating digital stories with participants, and developing an interactive display to share the stories at a local community event. This paper contributes insights into the opportunities and challenges of using a community display for sharing personal digital stories.

About the presenter

Dr. Hilary Davis is a Research Fellow in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne and a Senior Research Associate at Swinburne University. Her research examines the role technologies play in people’s work, social activities and home lives. Recently she has focused on the design and use of technologies to support families, people living with serious illness and housebound people.

The Challenge of Technology Research in Sensitive Settings: Case Studies in ‘Sensitive HCI’ (OzCHI Practice Talk)

A growing proportion of human-computer interaction research now takes place in sensitive settings with participants who might be considered vulnerable, such as the chronically ill, older adults, and people living with mental health issues. Alongside this move into complex "real life" settings there is growing interest in the ethical challenges HCI researchers encounter, the emotional impact research can have on participants and researchers, and the risk that new technologies might exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, existing vulnerabilities. Some authors have called for researchers to openly reflect about ethical challenges so we can learn from shared experiences. Others have warned that HCI researchers may not be sufficiently equipped to understand and respond to the needs of vulnerable participants. This paper documents cases of "sensitive HCI," drawing on research conducted in diverse sensitive settings. By reflecting on common challenges and discussing possible responses we contribute to growing discourse that promotes reflexive practice in sensitive HCI.

About the presenter

Dr Jenny Waycott is a lecturer in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. Her recent research has focused on the design and use of technologies to enhance the social lives of older adults and housebound people who are socially isolated.

‘It feels different from real life’: Users’ Opinions of Mobile Applications for Mental Health (OzCHI Practice Talk)

Mobile applications for mental health are being used by people suffering from mental health disorders. However, there is a paucity of knowledge in relation to their opinions about such applications. The aim of this study is to understand users’ needs and expectations to self-manage their mental health through the use of mobile apps for mental health and to highlight possible design opportunities. We collected and analysed comments and reviews of users on a community forum, Reddit, and Apple’s iTunes and Google’s Google Play stores. We identified four requirements of technology related to: emotional use, real life context, users’ interpretation about themselves and social aspects. Based upon our findings we proposed further exploration of two design sensitivities: Self-reflection and Co-experience.

About the presenter

Fernando Estrada Martinez de Alva is a PhD candidate at the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. The main focus of his research is to understand how technologies for mental health are being experienced by both mental health professionals and their patients.

Social Media and Self-concept: Does social media change the way we understand our self?

Social media has become an important factor for the construction and presentation of the self, especially for young people, who now often manage a significant proportion of their social interaction with their peers through online mechanisms. Research into the implications of online communications have been broadly focussed around social interaction and connectivity rather than uncovering how the technologies impact on the underlying conceptual elements that constitute a person’s understanding of their self. This research project aims to better understand how online technology impacts on the development of self-concept, by investigating the impacts of growing up with ubiquitous social media, to determine whether heavy use of social media by young people changes the nature or relative importance of the cognitive building blocks that inform the individual’s understanding of themselves.

About the presenter

Toni McLennan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, working under the supervision of Martin Gibbs and Michael Arnold. Toni is a veteran software developer who has worked in the Internet industry since before the web had pictures and can sometimes be convinced to tell amusing war-stories about being on the front-line during the dot.com boom. Toni returned to study in order to devote her time to thinking hard about the impacts and implications of the online technologies that have transformed our lives during the course of her career. (This seminar is his PhD confirmation seminar.)

In Bed with Technology: Challenges and Opportunities for Sleep Tracking (OzCHI Practice Talk)

In recent years a variety of mobile apps, wearable technologies and embedded systems have emerged that allow individuals to track the amount and the quality of their sleep in their own beds. Despite the widespread adoption of these technologies, little is known about the challenges that current users face in tracking and analysing their sleep. Hence we conducted a qualitative study to examine the practices of current users of sleep tracking technologies and to identify challenges in current practice. Based on data collected from 5 online forums for users of sleep-tracking technologies, we identified 22 different challenges under the following 4 themes: tracking continuity, trust, data manipulation, and data interpretation. Based on these results, we propose 6 design opportunities to assist researchers and practitioners in designing sleep-tracking technologies.

This OzCHI’15 paper was written by Wanyu (Abby) Liu, Bernd Ploderer and Thuong Hoang at the University of Melbourne. Abby has recently started her PhD at Télécom ParisTech, hence Bernd will present this paper on her behalf.

Pairing Technology and Meals: A Contextual Enquiry in the Family Household (OzCHI Practice Talk)

Recent research about technology during mealtime has been mostly concerned with developing technology rather than creating a deeper understanding of the context of family mealtimes and associated practices. In this paper, we present a two-phase study discussing how the temporal, social, and food related features are intertwined with technology use during mealtimes. Our findings show how people differentiate technology usage during weekday meals, weekend meals, and among different meals of the day. We identify and analyse prototypical situations ranging from the use of arbitrary technologies while eating solitary, to idiosyncratic family norms and practices associated with shared technologies. We discuss the use of mealtime technology to create appropriate ambience for meals with guests and demonstrate how technology can be used to complement food in everyday meals and special occasions. Our findings make recommendation about the need for HCI research to recognize the contextual nature of technology usage during family mealtimes and to adopt appropriate design strategies.

About the presenter

Hasan Shahid Ferdous is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has completed Master of IT (Research) degree from GSIT, Monash University, Australia in 2011, and BSc in CSE from the Department of CSE, BUET, Bangladesh in the year 2008. He is an active member of the Microsoft Research Centre for Social Natural User Interface (SNUI) at the University of Melbourne, specially focusing on technology usage in the family context.

Good Frustrations: The Paradoxical Pleasure of Fearing Death in DayZ (OzCHI Practice Talk)

The design of modern digital games has become increasingly oriented towards providing players with positive experiences such as fun and flow, and reducing negative experiences such as frustration and anger. DayZ is one notable exception, where negative experiences are central to its design. When a player is killed in DayZ, they lose their character with all its advancement, often equivalent to weeks of play, which can be an enormously frustrating and demoralising experience. However, the majority of its players view this as a positive and attractive feature, and one of the keys to the game’s appeal. In this paper, we draw on 1,704 responses to a player motivations survey to unpack the complex player experience of permanent character death and demonstrate how this moment of negative affect contributes to the positive experience of DayZ more broadly.

About the presenter

Fraser Allison will be presenting this paper. Other authors of this paper are Marcus Carter and Martin Gibbs.

Designing a health screening tool to help young people communicate with their general practitioner (OzCHI Practice Talk)

Adolescence is an important developmental period for physical, cognitive, social and emotional development when a wide range of health problems and risky health-related behaviours may emerge and co-occur. General Practitioners (GPs) are ideally positioned to deliver preventive health and early intervention as part of young people’s routine health care. A quick and effective way for GPs to identify areas of concern is through technology-based health screening tools, which are acceptable to young people and facilitate self-disclosure about sensitive topics. Despite these advantages, the rate of using this technology remains low. This is the first study that involves all end users and stakeholders in the design of a health screening technology for young people in general practice settings. Our rich findings on the design needs and concerns of young people, GPs, practice staff and parents regarding technologies for health communication will be useful to any researchers and practitioners designing health technologies in a general practice setting.

About the presenter

Marianne Webb is a PhD candidate in the Department of General Practice at the University of Melbourne, supervised by Lena Sanci, Sylvia Kauer and Greg Wadley.

Understanding Video based Parent Training Intervention for Children with Autism (OzCHI Practice Talk)

This paper investigates the challenges of delivering parent training intervention for autism over video. We conducted a qualitative field study of an intervention, which is based on a well-established training program for parents of children with autism, called Hanen More Than Words. The study was conducted with a Hanen Certified speech pathologist who delivered video based training to two mothers, each with a son having autism. We conducted observations of 14 sessions of the intervention spanning 3 months along with 3 semi-structured interviews with each participant. We identified different activities that participants performed across different sessions and analysed them based upon their implications on technology. We found that all the participants welcomed video based training but they also faced several difficulties, particularly in establishing rapport with other participants, inviting equal participation, and in observing and providing feedback on parent-child interactions. Finally, we reflect on our findings and motivate further investigations by defining three design sensitivities of Adaptation, Group Participation, and Physical Setup.

Deepti Aggarwal will be presenting this paper. Other authors of this paper are Robyn Garnett, Bernd Ploderer, Frank Vetere, Patricia Eadie, and Bronwyn Joy Davidson.

Older Adults' Use of a Novel Communication System: Client Goals versus Participant Experiences (OzCHI Practice Talk)

We report on the outcomes of a collaborative industry project which designed and deployed a novel communication systems for older adults. We outline a gap between the goals of our industry partner and the needs and experiences of our participants. We highlight the need to carefully consider the location of set-up, the training needs of older people, and any existing social support networks and technological systems already in use, while ultimately recognising the emotional connections of older people. These contextual factors influence individual older adults’ acceptance, use and adoption of novel technologies such as the one presented in this paper.

Hilary Davis will be presenting this paper. Hilary Davis (Senior Research Associate, Swinburne University of Technology) and Sonja Pedell (Senior Lecturer, Swinburne University of Technology) are the authors of the paper.

Space Between: A novel system for video-mediated playful interaction

Space Between is a novel system for video-mediated interaction. While popular video conferencing systems like Skype and FaceTime show the remote user in a large picture with a small picture for one’s own video, the Space Between system shows both users side by side in the same picture. By digitally removing the user’s background, the system gives both users the impression of being in the same space. In our research we are interested in how this change in perspective may shape how people communicate, collaborate and play over a distance. The idea for Space Between came out of a design workshop held in the Human-Computer Interaction late in 2013. RenZhi has worked on the implementation of the idea and will demo the system. Bernard will develop the system further for his Masters research project. He will present related research and ideas for his study. We would like to use this seminar to generate ideas on the design, conceptual framing and study of the Space Between.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

RenZhi Wu is an Engineering student at the University of New South Wales. He is currently working with the Human-Computer Interaction through a Summer Research Experience scholarship.

Bernard de la Coeur is an experienced software engineer, a member of the Melbourne Ukulele Kollective, and a Master of Information Systems student at the University of Melbourne.

Bernd Ploderer is a Lecturer at the University of Melbourne.

Overseas Research Experience Presentation

For this seminar Joanne will present her overseas research experience within the Embodied Audio Visual Interaction group (EAVI), department of computing, Goldsmiths University of London.

About the presenter

Joanne has been making, playing and researching digital musical instruments since the mid 1990’s. Within the Bent Leather band duo with Stuart Favilla, she has developed unique and spectacular digital wind controller instruments including the Serpentine Bassoon and the Contra-Monster. Work of the Bent Leather Band has been recognized nationally and internationally through prizes, awards and many concert and festival invitations. Joanne is currently undertaking her PhD on digital musical instrument systems within the department of Computing and Information Systems (CIS), Human-Computer Interaction (IDL) University of Melbourne Australia.

Understanding how technology can support the practice of indigenous knowledge

Indigenous knowledge (IK) has been marked as vital to the age-old fight against hunger, poverty and underdevelopment. This recognition of its benefits has led to an increase in technological research and design efforts geared towards collecting and preserving indigenous knowledge, so as to save it from extinction. While these efforts are a necessary first step, my research aims to focus on studying, not only the collection of indigenous knowledge, but its practice and performance by indigenous communities themselves. This is based on a view of knowledge as embodied. i.e. knowledge is created from the social and physical interactions of people, objects and the environment. From this perspective, for indigenous knowledge to survive, it needs to be performed in the social and physical environment of indigenous communities.

About the presenter

Kagonya Awori is a Computer Engineering PhD at the Human-Computer Interaction. She recently joined the department in November from Nairobi, Kenya. Kagonya has a background in Human-Computer Interaction with a dual Masters from Carnegie Mellon University, USA and University of Madeira,Portugal. She has also worked on various UX research and design projects in Kenya, the States and Portugal. Kagonya is being supervised by Frank Vetere. She is keen on understanding how situated technologies can support indigenous communities in Australia and Africa.

Understanding how technology can support the practice of indigenous knowledge

People stay connected to their family members and friends when circumstances impose distance upon them. While they use different combinations of technologies to have remote connections, video conferencing tools have been widely used to support this connection among people. Research on domestic use of video conferencing tools has revealed their significant role on reinforcing shared values, identity and relationships. Surprisingly, recent literature has revealed that nowadays people not only use video conferencing tools to converse with others, but they also use this medium to do everyday activities together. Watching video programs, cooking, gardening and dancing are some of these shared activities. Exploring this phenomenon is what Behnaz is doing in her PhD, and she will talk about it in her presentation.

About the presenter

Behnaz is a PhD student in the Interaction Design Group at the University of Melbourne and a member of Social NUI (Natural User Interface) Centre. She is close to finish her first year of PhD and her research interest is on use of video conferencing tools at domestic context.

International Digital Civics: Exploring the Role of Technology in Cross-Cultural HCI Research

In this short talk I will present two projects that I am currently working on with colleagues from Culture Lab - Newcastle University,UK - IIIT Delhi and the Public Health Foundation of India. The first project focuses on exploring the role of technology in fostering cross-cultural understanding between UK and Indian students. The second one aims to identify the potential of mobile technology in supporting the self-management of diabetes and depression in rural UK and India settings. I will go through some key initial findings and trigger discussion on the underlining design implications and methods for cross-cultural technologies within the International Digital Civics agenda.

About the presenter

Kostas is a Research Associate in the Culture Lab at Newcastle University, UK. His research interests are on cross-cultural design methods and international digital civics.

Designing a 'Virtual Locker' for young people in out of home care

People who grow up in out-of-home care (residential care, foster care) often lack access to personal artefacts such as mementos, photographs, letters, as well as official identity documents. It is proposed that an online repository (a 'Virtual Locker') could provide continuity for both young people and carers. The management of personal possessions has been explored in HCI work as a socially situated activity which draws on and contributes to interpersonal structures. These social dimensions are problematic for young people in care, due to multiple moves, high staff turnover, challenging relationships with family, and the effects of childhood trauma. In this presentation I will discuss my Masters minor thesis research, investigating and designing for the social dimensions of the proof-of-concept Virtual Locker developed by the interdisciplinary Working in the Cloud project.

About the presenter

Sarah Webber is in her final year of the MSc (Information Systems). She works as a UX research consultant, tackling challenges in the evaluation of complex technology products and services. She has an enduring passion for making technology work better for social good and in low-resource settings.

Ambience: Idea, Experience and Strategies

This talk dives into ambience, as idea, as experience and associated strategies of practice. Idea: Whilst many narratives on ambience nod back to Brian Eno's Ambient Music, I've discovered that idea of ambience goes back, at least in English-language discourse, to early-industrial times--to Romantic poetry and interior design. Recently, the idea has explored, such that we have ambient advertising, ambient architecture, ambient media, ambient technologies, ambient television, ambient video and so on. But is it more than a buzz word?

Experience: With the help of the philosophical insights in the wake of phenomenology, including Heidegger and Deleuze, I've begun to construct a theory of ambient (human) experience. I propose an ambient-ground of the here-now-happening-all-around prior to the foreground-and-background distinction that typically structures our lives. In music John Cage becomes significant here, more so than Eno. Strategies: Even if we don't want to occupy this (weird, uncanny) ambient-ground, knowing something about how fore/back/ambient grounds function can give us ways of thinking about our entry into, and exit our of, different modes of being in our surroundings. This is where the strategies of artists, designers and others come into the mix. In my talk I will outline a range of strategies, and also welcome your suggestions.

About the presenter

Luke Jaaniste is a sonic and visual artist, writer/philosopher and community facilitator. He conducted his PhD research on ambience at QUT (2003-2007) and has since presented a range of happenings that invite us into an ambient full-body (re)experience of our surroundings. Current ongoing projects include PORTAL (with multiple vintage keyboards), DRO FO (freeform movement within drone fields), TRANCE PIANO (solo duration piano performance), SUPER CRITICAL MASS (participatory sound art in public spaces), G/LISTEN (networks of wireless speakers) and PROPAGATIONS (live coding of propagating sine waves). Luke is in Melbourne to speak at the AGIdeas Conference at Melbourne Arts Centre for Design Week 2014, and will also appear at Make It Up Club.

Rehearsal Talk for CHI Conference

Videogames are often played socially with both co-players and audiences. Audience members’ experiences are not well understood, nor are the factors of videogaming sessions that influence their experience. In this talk John will present the design and results of an experimental study examining the effects of turn anticipation and game physicality on audience experience in videogaming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9TIUNsXzh0

About the presenter

John Downs is a third-year PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on the sociality of videogaming, and specifically the ways in which non-players experience social and physical videogames. John holds degrees in computer science and psychology.

Rehearsal Talk for CHI Conference

Greg will present the ongoing design and testing of an online therapy for youth mental health. This is a joint project between the University of Melbourne, Australian Catholic University and the Orygen Youth Health Research Centre. Early results indicate that a combination of psychoeducation, social interaction and active moderation by clinicians has therapeutic benefits and maximizes client engagement.

https://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/gwadley/WadleyMostCHI.mp4

About the presenter

Greg Wadley is a research fellow in the Human-Computer Interaction, working on technology projects that address health and wellbeing.

An opportunistic client user interface for intelligent mobility on-demand

Existing on-demand transport user interfaces are rigid. They rely on the a priori communication of discrete, spatio-temporal constraints from both vehicle and client to perform ride matching. For a client seeking mobility ad-hoc however, such a requirement is problematic in regards to their privacy and choice. Addressing this in previous work, this traditional 1-step approach is replaced by a novel 2-step negotiation. During this process service potential is visually communicated in feedback known as launch pads; geometric features delineating those locations affording pick-up, overlaid in the client’s digital map. Depending on the level of abstraction, launch pads can be either discrete or continuous. Whilst a discrete approach may be more familiar, e.g., a virtual bus stop, a continuous approach offers greater choice. With such increase however, additional interaction (discretization) is required. Further, with additional visualization, e.g., cost or depature time, questions of cognitive loading are raised, an important factor in on-demand mobility where timely decision making is essential. This seminar will present an overview of the launch pad concept and its supporting architecture, and seeks to discuss issues of visualising opportunity in on-demand mobility.

About the presenter

Michael Rigby received the B.GeomE (Hons.) degree in Geomatic Engineering from The University of Melbourne, and B.Des degree in Multimedia Design from Monash University, Australia. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Infrastructure Engineering at The University of Melbourne. His research focuses on human-computer interfaces for intelligent transportation systems, specifically in on-demand scenarios. Mr. Rigby is a member of the IEEE ITS, SMC and SSIT Societies and ACM SIGSPATIAL.

URLs

Research Wiki: http://www.spatialart.org/

Linkage Project: http://imod-au.info/

Dipping a toe in the water - How can technology offer social support to ageing gay men living with HIV?

People living with HIV experience earlier onset of the chronic diseases associated with ageing and the presence of these chronic co-morbidities makes caring for their HIV more complex and problematic.

It is often assumed that social support is an effective tool in helping people living with a chronic disease to cope and to self-manage their condition. However we do not know how appropriate it is to try to design technology-based social interactions for a highly stigmatised population, in particular the ageing HIV positive population in Australia. In addition many people living with HIV experience growing social isolation and psychosocial stresses as they age. 80% of people living with HIV in Australia are gay men.

With this in mind I have examined qualitative data collected for the HealthMap intervention design. HealthMap is a cluster randomised trial of interactive self-care plans to prevent and manage chronic conditions by people living with HIV. By collecting information on the effects of stigma on people’s attitudes and behaviours, their use of social media and their levels of social connection we can start to frame design guidelines derived from an understanding of the impact of stigma on people's willingness or ability to participate in online social behaviours. The HealthMap design team includes HIV clinicians, social researchers, self-management researchers, design researchers and practising designers.

About the presenter

Irith Williams joined the HealthMap team mid 2012 as a Design Intern. As a consequence she commenced a Masters in Interaction Design through Professor Margot Brereton (HCI and Participatory Design at QUT) who was a member of the Project Team. An abstract introducing HealthMap was presented to the OzCHI 2012 Smart Health workshop. Irith spent twelve months immersed in HealthMap Design and Development activities and is now writing up her Research Papers. This seminar is based on research for an exploratory paper on the impact of stigma when designing online social features.

Irith also facilitates the UX Book Club for the UX Melbourne community, manages the 'Designing for Health in Australia' group on LinkedIn and is an avid tweeter, @irithwilliams.

Audiences in Domestic Social and Physical Videogames (PhD Completion Seminar)

Videogames are generally played socially, with both co-players and non-playing 'audiences' who do not play directly for a variety of reasons. However, audience members within videogaming contexts have received little research attention. This research project has examined both the behaviour and experience of audience members in social videogaming contexts. The first study explored the social roles that participants in a gaming session adopt, how the game technology supports their participation in a variety of ways, and the types of factors that influenced their experience throughout the session. The second study examined audience members' experiences in an experimental context with particular reference to game physicality and turn-taking. The third study examined audience experience in mediated gaming scenarios and identified the importance of social context for game spectatorship. Overall, this thesis provides an account of audienceship in domestic social videogaming context and a number of implications for the designers of physical and social videogames.

About the presenter

John Downs is a third-year PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on the sociality of videogaming, and specifically the ways in which non-players experience social and physical videogames. John holds degrees in computer science and psychology.

Developing interactive e-health apps for complex messaging: Leveraging the Safe-D Case Study

Smartphone devices have become ubiquitous, and with this e-health applications common. However, the efficacies of available apps vary greatly due to lack of behavioural change theory, scientific foundations and healthcare professional involvement. This research is concerned with leveraging the Safe-D case study to develop an iOS and Android application in conjunction with clinicians, Safe-D, to improve vitamin D status in young women. This research will contribute both theory, and a tangible solution on a practical level. Lessons learned from the Safe-D case study will be leveraged to developed proposed principles of development for interactive e-health apps for complex messaging. This will also provide a tangible solution of the Safe-D app to the greater Safe-D study.

About the presenter

Kayla is a UX designer, presently employed in this role at Apparel21 with previous experience at IBM and Unisys. Kayla has a Bachelor of Business Information Systems from Monash University and returned to academia in 2012 to pursue a Master of Information Systems at The University of Melbourne. Kayla’s area of interest lies at the intersection of IT and health, with a specific focus on e-health technologies. Her Masters research thesis focuses on usability and user experience of e-health, working with the Young Female Health Initiative (YFHI). Led by the Royal Women’s Hospital in partnership with The University of Melbourne, the YFHI is a series of research projects that aim to improve the health of young women in Australia. When she’s not busy at work, or doing her only uni work, she can be found guest lecturing around Melbourne, public speaking at various events or tweeting on Twitter.

URLs

https://twitter.com/kaylajheffernan

http://www.safedstudy.org/

https://yfhi.org/

Blogging as a Liminal Space

Liminality is a transitional form of cultural existence in which orthodox customs and societal structures are deferred and replaced with novel ceremonies and rituals that often lack the impression of rigorous permanence. Taking inspiration from the anthropological analyses of Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner this paper reflects in a philosophical manner on the metaphor of blogging as a liminal space. Through interpretation of ongoing ethnographic analyses of music blogs the argument is raised that blogging can be viewed as a liminal process for those that actively contribute to these online forums as well as their anonymous readership. Since a liminal space may contain an unstructured social network then blogging could also lead to a credible emergence of the latter.

About the presenter

Dr John Lenarcic is a physicist and applied mathematician by training, an IT academic by fortunate accident and an armchair philosopher by conscious choice. His research interests include the philosophy of information systems, human-computer interaction and the cyber-anthropology of social networking. Dr Lenarcic is a frequent media commentator on issues dealing with social and ethical aspects of information technology with a particular emphasis on social media.

URLs

http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2013/ISPhilosophy/RoundTablePresentations/5/

The Impact of Explicit and Implicit NUI Interactions on Video Mediated Social Collaboration

ABOUT THE SEMINAR

Video Mediated Collaboration (VMC) is an area of growing interest both socially and commercially, with everyday consumer technology possessing the capacity to facilitate video communication. It is evident that VMC has not only become widely familiar, but it is consistently evolving, in particular with complimentary emerging technologies that allow us to share relevant Content. With the emergence of Natural User Interfaces (NUI’s) on the horizon, we will have the capability to remove users from traditional system controls and allow ’natural’ interfacing through means of speech, gesture and facial expressions to name a few. This method of interaction is technologically in its infancy, however the potential to combine shared content using NUI’s with VMC is seemingly appropriate. The combination of these technologies will allow for a greater versatility in both direct interface control (explicit interactions) and indirect interface control (implicit interactions) whilst collaborating over an audio-video channel.

Looking at the combination of these technologies we explore the impact of NUI interaction on social VMC and the variance of explicit and implicit interaction within this context. This presentation will provide a deeper overview of this topic and summarise our research findings from a set of recently conducted experiments.

About the presenter

Lynds is a Master of Information Systems student completing a research component to conclude his degree. He has prior work experience in consulting, UX, design and development, employed by two small sized digital organisation and more recently with Deloitte Digital. His previous education was in Animation & Interactive media of which he majored in Interactive Media. He has recently completed a portion of his master’s course at the University of Birmingham, where he studied several HCI components and multimodal interaction. Lynds’ primary interests lie in experience design and usability with emerging technologies.

Use of spatial audio to support connectedness between mobile phone users in public spaces

There are a number of apps that help you to locate your friends, using the GPS and mobile internet capabilities of mobile devices to provide real-time updates from your social network, usually displayed on the screen via text or on a map. Many people also use 'traditional' features of phones (phone calls and SMSs) to conduct this 'micro-coordination' task, where, having established broad plans to meet, the exact details of the rendezvous is refined in real time. For example, if one person is running late, they can advise others; or if the plan was to dine in a certain district, the choice of the exact restaurant can be done when the first people arrive and then communicated to latecomers.

Using a screen-based interface can facilitate this process however it can also cause frustration and be a disruption to the user. This study will investigate the potential for using spatialised audio to provide a sense of connectedness between friends about to meet; reducing anxiety about latecomers and examining what effect it may have on the social dynamics when the rendezvous finally occurs.

About the presenter

Bernard (BEng - Electrical & Electronic & BSc - Computer Science, University of Melbourne 1992) has returned to the University for a break from the corporate world, to do a Masters of Information Systems, after 21 years working in various IT projects such as programming 3D terrain visualisation, implementing a Business Information System for a construction company, and many other software engineering and IT roles. He will be finishing his MIS at the end of this year and is currently exploring options for what to do next.

He is a keen amateur musician, involved in the Melbourne Ukulele Kollective and Melbourne Ukulele Festival, Wadaiko Rindo (Japanese Drumming), and has returned to the Engineering Music Society, on trombone, after being a foundation member in 1992. He is now also an award-winning songwriter (if you count the voucher from Bootstraps and Buckles country & western outfitters), and is working on his 2nd album as ""The Brass Traps"". He also volunteers as a penguin guide with Earthcare St Kilda and as a podcast producer with RRR FM.

6 month PhD Review: Supporting Indigenous Knowledge with ICTs

Knowledge is vital for the development and sustenance of any community. For indigenous communities, indigenous knowledge (IK) drives growth and development in ways that institutional knowledge systems are limited. IK enables indigenous communities to sustain their unique identity, progress their livelihoods, and ultimately contribute to the social, cultural, environmental and economic capital of their countries.

For indigenous knowledge to flourish, it is necessary to support the ways that indigenous communities view and develop knowledge. Within indigenous communities, these ways of knowing prioritise face-to-face interactions with people, in-situ interactions with the environment and the performance of knowledge. Indigenous ways of viewing and developing knowledge are ontologically and epistemologically different from western/scientific ways. Consequently, technologies designed from scientific contexts are largely unable to sufficiently support indigenous ways of developing IK. I propose that to adequately support indigenous knowledge, it is necessary to support the people, place and practise of IK. Moving toward supporting this people-place-practise triad necessitates a fundamental shift for researchers/designers in three areas:
- how we approach and frame the IK 'problem',
- how we define indigenous knowledge, and ultimately
- how we design IK technologies.
My talk will discuss these three areas in more detail, and outline the research and design processes my thesis will undertake. The ultimate goal of this research is to design social and natural interfaces that will adequately support the nurturing of indigenous knowledge.

About the presenter

Kagonya Awori is a Computer & Information Systems PhD at the Human-Computer Interaction. She joined the department in November, 2013 from Nairobi, Kenya. Kagonya has a background in Human-Computer Interaction with a dual Masters from Carnegie Mellon University, USA and University of Madeira,Portugal. She has also worked on various UX research and design projects in Kenya, the States and Portugal. Kagonya is being supervised by Assoc. Prof.Frank Vetere and Dr. Bjorn Nansen. She is keen on understanding how situated technologies can support indigenous communities in Australia and Africa.

Digital anatomies: from virtual cadavers to online memorials for body donors

This presentation explores how digital technologies are shaping the post-mortem lives of the deceased persons who are anatomized for the purposes of medical education. Drawing on anthropological research in medical schools, in the UK and in comparative contexts, the paper discusses the increasing significance of the digital in processes of preserving, learning from, and memorializing the dead.

About the presenter

Elizabeth Hallam is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, and a Research Associate in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. She has conducted fieldwork, museum and archival research in England and Scotland. Her interests and publications focus on the anthropology of the body; death and dying; material and visual cultures; histories of collecting and museums; the anthropology of anatomy; three-dimensional modelling, especially in medical education; and mixed-media sculpture. Her books include the co-authored Death, Memory and Material Culture (2001, with Jenny Hockey) and the co-edited Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (2007, with Tim Ingold). She has recently co-edited Medical Museums: Past, Present, Future (2013, with Samuel J.M.M. Alberti), and Making and Growing: Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts (2014, with Tim Ingold). Her forthcoming book is Anatomy Museum: Death and the Body Displayed (Reaktion Books)..

Designing technology for citizen involvement in climate change adaptation projects in the Pacific

Climate change is a very real problem for people on Pacific islands where higher sea levels, stronger storms and bigger floods are inflicting increasing damage on homes and livelihoods. International bodies such as the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) conduct a range of programs aimed at helping citizens better adapt to climate change. But logistic, economic and political factors make it difficult for the voices of affected citizens to inform these programs. Conversely, disaster warnings and rescue information need to be transmitted effectively to affected citizens. We frame these as informational problems - knowledge exists but is not being collected, stored and transmitted appropriately – and such problems might be addressable by ICT. Since mobile phones and the Internet are enjoying rapid uptake in the Pacific region, we are exploring whether mobile devices could be used to help citizens capture and share information about the environmental problems they face within their everyday contexts. Based on earlier ICT4D work in the Pacific we have conducted a series of workshops in Fijian villages, as well as interviews with stakeholders in local government, the UNDP and Vodaphone Fiji, to explore feasibility and design of a smartphone-based system that might enable these information flows. This work-in-progress seminar will discuss our study design, methods, preliminary results, possible technology designs and how we might progress the project further.

About the presenter

Greg is a Research Fellow in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. He designs, builds and evaluates techologies for healdh and wellbeing. Details of his work can be found at https://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/gwadley.

Engaging the Ageing: The benefits of digital technologies for older people

This talk gives an overview about several projects of the Swinburne people-oriented technology group and speaks in more detail about the project on music and dementia in collaboration with the Wyndham City Council. The authors argue that dementia technology has yet to focus on collaborative multi-user group musical interactions. The project aims to contribute to dementia care while addressing a significant gap in current literature.

The music dementia presentation focuses on two trials exploring contrasting musical scenarios: the performance of abstract electronic music and the distributed performance of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Findings presented in this paper; demonstrate that people with dementia can successfully perform and engage in collaborative music performance activities with little or no scaffolded instruction. Further findings suggest that people with dementia can develop and retain musical performance skill over time. This presentation also proposes a number of guidelines and design solutions.

About the presenter

Dr Sonja Pedell is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Health, Arts and Design at Swinburne University of Technology. Her research interests include user-centred design, future use scenarios, and the development of engaging novel technologies for the ageing population. Sonja worked for several years as Interaction Design Consultant and Product Manager in industry. Stu Favilla is a composer and performing musician interested in digital musical instrument design. He has a diverse research background spanning a number of fields including live-control, sensor technologies, audio signal processing and ophthalmic electrophysiology. He is currently working at Swinburne as a researcher in digital music in the Faculty of Health, Arts and Design.

URL FOR THE PROJECT

https://vimeo.com/101265229

Housebound residents and digital storytelling: Enhancing community inclusion with an interactive public display

Disability, age, and mental health issues can confine people to their homes, leaving them with few opportunities to participate in local community activities. In this project we are exploring new ways of leveraging technologies to enable housebound people to engage with the community by creating and sharing digital stories about their lives. To better understand the experiences of housebound people and to explore how they have used technology to share their stories with others, we have analysed YouTube and Vimeo videos created by housebound people. In this seminar we present key themes from this analysis and outline future stages of the project, which will involve co-creating digital stories with housebound residents in a Melbourne suburb and sharing their stories with a local audience via a community-placed public display. Working in collaboration with the IBES Lab, the project has developed a prototype interactive display that will be used to share participants’ digital stories. In this seminar we will demonstrate the prototype and invite audience feedback.

About the presenter

Dr Hilary Davis is a Research Fellow in the Department of Computing and Information Systems. She is interested in the use of technology in domestic settings, and between co-located and distributed family members. Hilary specialises in working in difficult and sensitive settings and has a particular interest in technologies for children, the aged and people living with serious and chronic illness.

Dr Jenny Waycott is a Research Fellow in the Department of Computing and Information Systems. Her research aims to understand the role technologies play in people’s learning, work, and social activities and how new technologies can be used to enhance those activities. Most recently, Jenny has contributed to projects that aim to support marginalised communities and build social cohesion through creative uses of new technologies. She is collaborating with Hilary Davis, Deb Warr, and Fran Edmonds on the IBES-funded project "Making the Invisible Visible: Digital Storytelling for Neighbourhood Social Cohesion".

Memorials, Commemorative Practices and Digital Games

As people devote more leisure time to online video games, and as they form social relations associated with these media, it is unsurprising to find that these games become vehicles for expressing grief and for memorializing the dead (Gibbs et al, 2012; 2013). These games provide a social context in life, and they also provide a social context for people's attention to death. Many examples of funeral rites that act to memorialize the dead are conducted within multiplayer games and are documented through player-generated materials posted to video hosting sites such as YouTube. Much like book dedications, the developers of games also have been known to place epitaphs and mementos acknowledging the deceased within games. Sometimes these can take the form of a dedication in the manual, or in release notes for the game. More interestingly, developers have placed memorials within games. In this paper we extend previous work (Gibbs 2012; 2013) by documenting and discussing examples of memorials found in a wide variety of digital games. The aim of this paper is to explore this developing genre of in-game memorials and commemorative practices and connect them to broader trends in vernacular commemoration.

Gibbs, M., Mori, M., Arnold, M. & Kohn, T. (2012). Tombstones, Uncanny Monuments and Epic Quests: Memorials in World of Warcraft. Game Studies 12(1): http://gamestudies.org/1201/articles/gibbs_martin

Gibbs MR, Carter M, Mori J. Vile Rat: Spontaneous Shrines in EVE Online. Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Eve Online, Foundation of Digital Games, 2013. Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games. 2013.

About the presenter

Martin Gibbs is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne. His research covers a range of topics associated with the social use of digital technologies. He is currently Chief Investigator on the ARC funded Digital Commemorations project. His has written and continues to write about computer games and has a specific and strange interest in the ways game designers and game players use games to commemorate and memorialize the dead. He was the co-editor of the recent MIT Press book, From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen, and he also co-edited the May 2013 special issue of The Information Society, on the Death, Afterlife and Immortality of Bodies and Data.

To know Knowns and Unknowns about Socially Assistive Robots in elderly care

This presentation reports a systematic review of the roll of Socially Assistive Robots (SAR) in elderly wellbeing. Relevant publications from diverse databases, including healthcare, engineering, and robotics were sourced and screened. Ninety five studies in forty two study groups have been synthesized. The reported outcomes have been categorized based on five PERMA constructs (Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement) in addition to the sixth category (other effects). The findings imply SAR potentially can enhance elderly wellbeing. Based on concerns uncovered during the quality appraisal process, several significant recommendations are made to improve future research and its applicability. Furthermore, acknowledging individuals’ needs, expectations, and preferences alongside multi-modal interaction and data collection translates into improvement of personalization of care. Development of new approaches such as web-based interfaces and cloud computing are highly recommended to overcome the impact of limited computing and storage capabilities in SAR. Moreover, human-like engagement characteristics of socially assistive robots should be seamlessly integrated with other assistive technologies like tele-health, e-health, and smart homes.

About the presenter

Reza Kachouie is currently a PhD student at the Department of Marketing, Monash University. With a multi-disciplinary background, in applied mathematics, engineering, and management, he has work experience in academia and industry. Previously he worked at the Research Centre for Computer, Communication, and Social Innovation, La Trobe University as a researcher. Reza coordinated and supervised a systematic review about the role of social assistive robots in elderly care. He was responsible for the study conception and design, the data collection and drafting of the results. He has co-authored publications in management and social robotics.

Use of Communication Technologies during Family Mealtime

The goal of our research is to understand the use of communication technologies during family mealtime, whether they are used as information source, entertainment, or enabling social connection, among many other uses. We aim to understand the comprehensive relationship between technology and people, between the people themselves, and also the interaction among multiple technologies/devices in the context of family mealtime activities. In this discussion we want to position our work to address the research question that has arisen in this context and the related works have not addressed yet, to the best of our knowledge.

About the presenter

Hasan Shahid Ferdous is an MPhil leading to PhD student at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has completed Master of IT (Research) degree from GSIT, Monash University, Australia in 2011, and BSc in CSE from the Department of CSE, BUET, Bangladesh in the year 2008. He is an active member of the Microsoft Social Natural User Interface (SNUI) research group at the University of Melbourne, specially focusing on technology usage in the family context.

URLs

https://sites.google.com/a/student.unimelb.edu.au/technologyatmealtime/ href="https://sites.google.com/site/hsferdousnow/

Experiences with Mobile Mental Health Therapies

ABOUT THE SEMINAR

Mental health disorders have been identified by the World Health Organisation as one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. Therapy apps for mobile smart phones are beginning to be used to support mental health patients, whether as part of face-to-face therapy, between therapy sessions or as a way to reach isolated users. However, little research has been done into how patients experience mobile mental health therapies. Furthermore high levels of attrition have raised concerns about acceptability and engagement.

This seminar will present an overview of existing work on mobile mental health therapies and will propose a research program aimed at better understanding patients’ and clinicians’ experience of these apps. This research aims to contribute by providing guidelines for the design of mobile mental health therapies that support positive clinical outcomes.

About the presenter

Fernando Estrada is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. His background is in Information Systems and Computer Science.

Digital Memorials: Memorialization Practice within a Networked Society

In this seminar, I will give an overview of my technology-based, interdisciplinary research across transition points in the human lifespan – emerging adulthood, becoming a parent, retiring, death and bereavement. I will focus in on my recent work in devising a framework for digital memorials. The framework is grounded in examples of current memorialization practice, and situated within a contextual understanding of memorials as an emergent digital phenomenon within a networked society. It has recently been tested through the creation of a bespoke digital memorial for a bereaved parent, which led to the creation of a hybrid digital-physical artefact through a participatory design process. In detailing the framework, I will highlight features of the design space that can be exploited in the development of bespoke memorial technologies, and identify potential areas of future interest that this framework brings to the fore, such as HCI’s engagement with critical concepts of the postself and temporality.

About the presenter

Dr Wendy Moncur is a Reader in Socio-Digital Interaction at the University of Dundee. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, and a Key Technology Partner at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Intrinsically interdisciplinary, yet grounded in Computing, Wendy’s research program focuses on the design of technology to support being human in a Digital Age.

Wendy is Principal Investigator on the EPSRC-funded Charting the Digital Lifespan, which unites internationally leading researchers at five UK institutions across the social and computer sciences. The research program investigates how the digital is woven into the fabric of people’s lives across three life transition points – emerging adulthood, becoming a parent, retiring - both now and in a future where citizens have lived entirely in a Digital Age. The research is conducted through ethnographic and design studies, facilitated through novel social data mining technology. Concurrently, Wendy holds an EPSRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship for Digital Inheritance. This research explores the bequest, inheritance and repurposing of personal data (such as emails, photos and social network site interactions) in the context of the death of technology users.

She is actively involved in public engagement as an invited speaker at a range of venues, including the Edinburgh Turing Festival 2012, the Cheltenham Literature Festival 2013 and the Royal Society. Her research has also informed policy-making – e.g. through provision of written evidence to the 2014 UK Commons Committee on Social Media Data and Real Time Analytics.

URLs FOR PRESENTER

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/staff/wendymoncur/ @wendymoncur

The biopolitics of touch: a phenomenological study with practical applications

Touch acts a form of biopolitics in that it is deployed to reinforce social, cultural and individual beliefs and prejudices. We commonly use metaphors that demonstrate that practice: "I wouldn’t touch him/her with a barge-pole". "I was touched by his story". In this way touch is also integral to our formation of identity, our sense of ourselves as human beings and social subjects, and a specific touch regime can also be identified as characteristic of a particular culture or society. This paper identifies some of the fundamental meanings of touch that make this sense so crucial to individual, cultural and social practice and being. Because artworks use the sensory engagement of viewers or listeners to create meaning, the practice of touch is demonstrated by reference to a number of artworks, including Ron Mueck’s hyperrealist sculpture and the sound sculptures of Bob Rutman. And because touch is fundamental to a range of technologies, the possible meanings that touch might bring to the use of some technologies will also be explored.

About the presenter

Anne Cranny-Francis is Professor of Cultural Studies and Research Coordinator in the School of Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her current work focuses on the relationships between the body, the senses, knowledge and being, and the deployment of these relationships by new technologies and new media. Her most recent book is Technology and Touch: the Biopolitics of Emerging Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

If you’re lost you can look and you will find….what?

Getting lost in the library stacks used to be an academic rite of passage. These days many books have moved online, but they are frequently rejected by users. This talk will cover the literature and Dana’s early work that led to the interest in her PhD topic, book browsing, look at the value of browsing in book use (the first study from Dana’s PhD), then look at where Dana’s research is going next.

About the presenter

Dana has been an HCI researcher practitioner at Swinburne Library for the past eight years, where she has done extensive work on how library users search, get lost, find and publish. Before that she worked at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. She started her PhD at the University of Melbourne part time in March 2014.

Interactive surfaces for collaborative learning and collaborative design (for learning)

The use of large interactive surfaces in learning contexts has the potential to support collaborative learning in multiple ways. However, these devices may also impose a number of challenges that should be addressed from an interdisciplinary perspective, beyond traditional usability. Our perspective is grounded on the intersection between HCI, the Learnings Sciences (Collaborative Learning) and Learning Analytics. This talk will provide insights on our work which explored ways to support teachers and learners using multiple interactive surfaces (both vertical and horizontal) in the classroom. Additionally, the talk will describe our current work exploring how these devices may be used to support teachers-as-designers in the future.

About the presenter

Roberto Martinez-Maldonado is a postdoctoral research associate in the Centre for Research on Computer Supported Learning and Cognition (CoCo) at the University of Sydney. He did his PhD in the Computer Human Adapted Interaction Research Group (CHAI) in the same university. Research interests: Human-Computer Interaction, Health Literacy, Interactive Surface Interfaces, Educational Data Mining, Learning Analytics, Sustainability and Environment.

Choreography of Waiting: Strategies for Dealing with Waiting in Family Video Calls

Waiting may seem like time wasted on doing nothing, yet people resort to all kinds of activities while waiting as if to forget about the wait. Although most previous research has approached waiting from a psychological point of view that requires understanding people’s thoughts and feelings, researchers have made few attempts to examine people’s activities during waiting time. Moreover, these attempts are limited to non-technology mediated interactions. Hence, little is known about how people fill waiting times caused by technology-mediated interactions. Recent studies show that family video calls are a rich source of interruptions and waiting times due to the switching between ‘talking heads’ and shared activities modes during video calls. Thus, the purpose of this seminar is to present the findings from an analysis of the strategies people use to deal with waiting time in naturally-occurring family video calls.

About the presenter

Behnaz is a PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction and Microsoft Centre for Social NUI at the University of Melbourne. Her research interest is on understanding use of video calling tools in the domestic context through studying naturally-occurring experiences.

Exploring Urban Events with Smartphones

Figuring out which event to go to here-and –now in an urban environment with plenty of events to choose from can be a time consuming and difficult task. Decision making is done just-in-time and people often don’t know what their preferences are until they are presented with a choice. Many mobile tourist recommender systems have been developed to ease this task of decision making for events, but they lack the ability to dynamically adapt to the user’s changing preferences and easily let the user explore the data set, to find the best event to go to. This project is developing a mobile application to support exploring and finding urban events by taking the users changing preferences into account. This talk will cover some of the early work done to understand the requirements for a mobile application to support this event finding activity, the current application design, and future work.

About the presenter

Per Møller Nielsen is a Master’s student in Informatics at Aalborg University, Denmark. Currently he is visiting the Human-Computer Interaction and Microsoft Centre for Social NUI at the University of Melbourne as part of his Master’s Thesis. His research interest is in mobile HCI.

Interaction in Augmented Reality, Wearable Computing, and Tangible UI

My previous research experience is focused on precise interaction techniques for outdoor augmented reality system. Augmented reality is an interactive medium through which the real-world environment is supplemented with virtual information. Outdoor augmented reality is enabled with the usage of wearable computers. Interaction with virtual objects in an outdoor environment is challenging because virtual objects are often located at a distance and large in size. I developed an augmented viewport technique that utilises remote cameras in the environment for precise manipulation and a patent pending ultrasonic gloves input devices for modelling in outdoor augmented reality. My previous experience also involves designing tangible interface for rehabilitation tasks for Alzheimer patients.

About the presenter

Thuong Hoang completed his PhD in Computer Science and Bachelor of Information Science (Honours) at the Wearable Computer Lab, University of South Australia. During his PhD, his research focus is on augmented reality, wearable computer, and human computer interaction. Thuong previously postdoc work was at the University of Angers, France, on tangible interface for rehabilitation for Alzheimer patients.

There’s more than one way to batter a fish!

As search engines like Google and Bing get better and better at pinpointing the exact item you are searching for, we turn our attention to broadening the search – helping the user to spend more time, explore more broadly, and enjoy the experience of wallowing in information. In this seminar we will discuss the concept of exploration, and present some of the ideas we have been working on in diverse areas such as health, books, conference papers, even science blogs. We will demonstrate some of the recent instantiations of these ideas through our exploration engine iFISH and discuss where we see these ideas re heading.

About the presenter

Jon Pearce is a Senior Fellow in the Human-Computer Interaction research group at The University of Melbourne. His research focuses on engagement and interactivity, in both educational and non-educational contexts. His current research interests weave together strands from interactivity, multimedia, engagement, learning and sustainable Human-Computer Interaction.

Shanton Chang is a Senior Lecturer in Information Systems at The University of Melbourne. His research focuses on information needs and information seeking behaviour, in educational, health and business contexts. His current projects include the SafeD App, the Young Female Health Initiative, the Asian Language Acquisition via Social Media Initiative and the International Students’ Information Seeking Behaviour Survey.

URL FOR THE PROJECT

https://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/jonmp/projects/iFISH/

Treacherous Play in EVE Online (PhD Completion Seminar)

Games enable players to simulate engagement in a broad variety of activities that may otherwise be impossible in non-game contexts. In Dungeons and Dragons, players can simulate slaying monsters and casting spells. In Forza Motorsport, players can simulate driving million dollar race cars in the Monaco Grand Prix. Commonly, games also enable players to simulate engagement in activities that would otherwise be considered immoral, even illegal. Monopoly, a game widely considered acceptable for children, simulates the monopolisation of real estate markets and forces players to bankrupt family members and friends.Yet, deception and betrayal are rare forms of activities in online multiplayer game-play. The vast majority of online digital games do not permit players to play treacherously. The relationships between players are usually formalized, and betrayal of one’s teammate disabled or ruled against.

In this PhD thesis completion talk, I will discuss my research into treacherous play in the sci-fi MMORPG EVE Online. In accordance with EVE's hyper-capitalistic narrative, players are not restricted from deceiving, tricking, lying and generally being dishonest towards other players in the pursuit of game goals. This has manifested in the pervasive occurrence of stealing, scamming, bribery, match-throwing (inEVE's official tournaments), spying and sabotage. My thesis explores the practices, experiences and impacts of treacherous play in EVE Online and develops theory regarding its appeal and success. No research has previously examined this type of play in a context where it is expected and within the rules of the game.

As I have already presented the results of my studies on scamming and match-throwing in EVE's eSport to the Human-Computer Interaction, this study will focus on my third and final study on espionage; the use of spies and sabotage in the wars between EVE's 10,000 player-strong Alliances, and my final thoughts and conclusions.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Marcus is a Research Fellow in the Microsoft Research Centre for Social Natural User Interfaces.

When Stores Come Alive: The Impact of Augmented Reality on Service Experiences

Augmented Reality (AR) applications and technologies represent an emerging category of ICTs that blend the physical with a virtual reality. This process intends to enhance a user's perception of his or her physical environment, objects, or experiences. Until recently, AR technologies have been limited to the lab but now, with the advent of smart-phones and tablets, a new generation of mobile AR applications are beginning to change the way real-world service systems work, opening up new opportunities for firms to generate revenue and engage with customers. Despite the inherent potential of AR, we know very little if, how, or why this emerging technology may contribute to the economic performance of organizations in general, and service experiences, in particular. Drawing on findings from an ethnographic study of a fashion retailer in San Francisco, CA that uses AR applications on its premises, the talk demonstrates how AR applications are used to enhance customer experiences in real world settings. The preliminary findings of this study suggest that AR may enhance the value proposition of merchandise sold, facilitate new types of interactions between customers and frontline employees, and ultimately increase sales.

About the presenter

Dr Christoph Breidbach is a Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, Department of Computing and Information Systems. Prior to joining the University of Melbourne, Dr Breidbach was a Postdoctoral Scientist at the University of California, Merced, and held visiting positions at IBM’s Almaden Research Center and the Indian School of Business. His research addresses the fundamental question of how ICTs transform service systems, and has been published, or is forthcoming, in the Journal of Service Research, Managing Service Quality, The Service Industries Journal, Service Science, Marketing Theory, and other outlets. He serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Service Research and the Journal of Service Theory and Practice.

Cooking Together: A Digital Ethnography on YouTube

Cooking together is an important part of our lives. We cook with others not only to create a meal, but also to enhance our relationships. But how does this role of communal cooking translate into modern society where families and friends are increasingly separated physically and connected primarily online? Motivated by this question we have embraced research into the design of future networked cooking spaces. The first step has been to understand how people use physical space while cooking together. Through a digital ethnography on YouTube videos, we have analyzed the spatial configurations of people, food and technology based on Kendon’s notions of spacing and orientation. Our main contribution is the identification of known F-formations as well as new formations taking place during social cooking. Based on this we suggest that given the presence of formations in the kitchen different from those found during activities that are mainly conversational, simply installing traditional video-conferencing systems in people’s kitchens will not suffice in facilitating the interactions taking place there. Instead, designers need to rethink the positioning and use of cameras and displays.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Jeni Paay is Associate Professor at Aalborg University's Department of Computer Science/Center for Socio-Interactive Design. She did her PhD at The University of Melbourne in 2005 investigating the socio-physical context of mobile technology use at Federation Square, exploring her cross-disciplinary background in architecture and computing. Since then she has worked as an academic overseas, as a research scientist at CSIRO in Sydney, and has published more than 50 papers within the area of Human-Computer Interaction. Jeni has worked within the overall research themes of design methods and interaction design for urban and domestic computing.

Jesper Kjeldskov is Associate Professor at Aalborg University's Department of Computer Science/Center for Socio-Interactive Design. Jesper’s research interests are Interaction Design and User Experience with particular focus on mobile and ubiquitous technologies in non-work settings. Jesper has a cross-disciplinary background spanning the humanities, social sciences and computer science. He has published more than 120 papers within the area of Human-Computer Interaction. In 2008-09 Jesper was the research leader of a User Experience Research group at CSIRO in Sydney, Australia. Since 2009 he has revisited his interests in mobile HCI but also extended his work on domestic computing with new projects within sustainability, digital media, mediated relationships and interior architecture.

Eating and being together apart

I would like to present to you a project that I am currently in the process of starting up. We are collaboration with a hospital in Denmark called Hammel Neurocenter. They only treat people who have suffered a brain injury.

When suffering a brain injury, even minor cases, it rarely takes less than three months of recovery and rehabilitation before going home to the family again. Often it takes closer to 6 months or even 12 months. This means that the patient is away from the family for quite some time. We want to study if keeping contact through Skype can help maintaining or rebuilding the relationship between patient and family, and the patient might end up feeling less excluded from the family. This project is derived from an earlier project in the department also involving patients and Skype.

About the presenter

My name is Jane Billestrup, I am currently working as a Research Assistant at Aalborg University in the HCI department. My Supervisor is Jan Stage. The plan is that I will apply for a PhD Scholarship this year. I got a Master in Informatics in 2009 from Aalborg University. I'm coming to Melbourne for two days since I am already in Australia on my honeymoon.

Completion Seminar: Managing the stress that persuasive technologies can generate: The Case of Self-monitoring and Social Comparison

Persuasive technologies are systems explicitly designed to motivate people to achieve a behaviour change. However, persuasive systems can also generate stress on the user. Stress has been found as an element that can affect in a negative way people’s performances. Currently, there is a lack of understanding on how people manage the stress generated by persuasive technologies. I use the area of sports technology as a case study to explore the management of stress generated by persuasive systems. In particular, systems that combines self-monitoring (i.e. pedometers) with social comparison applications (i.e. online social networks). In this seminar I present the results from the two studies that compose my master’s research. I will present a series of strategies that users employ to a) control the negative effects of persuasive systems, and b) strategies that catalyse the negative effects of stress in to positive forms of motivation.

About the presenter

Pedro Rosas is an Interaction Designer. He is a current research student in Persuasive Technology at The University of Melbourne. His research is supervised by Prof. Steve Howard and Dr. Martin Gibbs. His core passions are: 1) the design of interactive technologies through multidisciplinary team work, and 2) the understanding human behaviour change.

Interactive Ingredients and Rollercoaster Mouthfuls: From Cooking to Wisdom via Technology

I am visiting Melbourne as part of my dream fellowship (http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2012/Pages/dreamfellowshipawards.aspx). This unique scheme is funded by the UK government to enable ""talented researchers to take time out from their every day activities, to give them the freedom to gain new knowledge of novel creative problem solving techniques, explore new radical ideas and develop new ambitious research directions that enable discovery."" My dream is to rethink the relationship between ageing, computing and creativity. My starting point has been to explore cooking and discover what it takes to create the ""rollercoaster mouthful"". I have been looking at how chefs create new eating experiences: what role social media has in shaping and molding their ideas, how they understand and cook for the ever-changing contexts of dining, the restaurant environment and their relationship with the demands of diners. By juxtaposing my understandings of creative cooking, with the challenges of ageing, I seek to move back and forth between them to gain new insights. In my talk I shall give an overview of how far I have come and my latest thoughts on how to shift from the prevailing view of ageing and technology - that of assisted living - towards making technology as interactive ingredients which are engaging, accessible and exciting to people who are in their 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond. I argue that we need to stop thinking about technology as prosthetic devices 'to help the old' and instead think of people who are growing wiser and who have a zest, curiosity and energy for new technological experiences that can stretch their minds that challenge society’s views on what it means to grow older.

About the presenter

Yvonne Rogers is the director of the Interaction Centre at UCL and a professor of Interaction Design. She is internationally renowned for her work in HCI and ubiquitous computing. Her approach is to develop new theories in-the-wild of augmented human behaviour, through designing and evaluating interactive technologies that extend and amplify everyday, learning and work activities. Central to her work is a critical stance towards how visions, theories and frameworks shape the fields of HCI, cognitive science and ubiquitous computing. She has been instrumental in promulgating new theories (e.g., external cognition), alternative methodologies (e.g., in-the-wild studies) and far-reaching research agendas (e.g., "Being Human: HCI 2020 manifesto"). She has just published a new book called ""HCI Theory: Classical, Modern and Contemporary"". She is also the PI at UCL for the new Intel Collaborative Research Institute on Sustainable and Connected Cities (http://connected-cities.org/ICRI/Welcome.html) which was launched in October 2012 jointly with Imperial College.

Welcome to the Jungle: HCI After Dark

In the early 21st Century, the possibilities for the design of new technology are seemingly endless. This makes it an exciting time to be involved in Human Computer Interaction - the process of addressing user problems with technological solutions. But attempts to enhance the experiences of people in the city after dark should be tempered with critical reflection on the potential for utopian outcomes to become a dystopian reality for all but a select group of savvy early adopters. Therefore, central to my research will be ensuring that a methodological and theoretical framework is in place that reduces the all too common problem of design considerations being driven solely by what is technically achievable. Rather, technical innovation emerging from this project will be underpinned with an understanding of the cultural practices within which the technology will operate. For example, balancing privacy and surveillance: a perspective that allows for the fact that while we want to be protected, we do not necessarily want to be watched.

About the presenter

Dr Christine Satchell is a Senior Research Fellow with the Urban Informatics Research Lab at Queensland University of Technology and an Honorary Research Fellow with the Human-Computer Interaction at The University of Melbourne. She has just been awarded a DECRA for her research into Human Computer Interaction After Dark which will investigate the use of mobile technology to enhance personal safety at night.

Invisible Work: An Ambient System for Awareness and Reflection of Household Tasks

Household tasks have been described as the invisible work carried out in the home. Their coordination and especially negotiating a fair and transparent distribution of these tasks between different members of a household is a significant challenge in the busy lives of many people. The persuasive system presented in this talk, Choreflect, aims to address this issue by making the inhabitants' contributions to household work more visible. The prototype uses distributed ambient displays in the home to enable household members to track household tasks, which are then visualized by the system. A four week study of the system carried out in two shared apartments and two family households showed that the system fostered a rise in awareness about this invisible work by showing users their own and other inhabitants’ contributions. The multiple ambient displays situated in the participants homes enabled opportunities for reflection and motivated an increased engagement in household tasks.

About the presenter

Wolfgang Reitberger is a University Assistant in the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the Institute for Design and Assessment of Technology, Vienna University of Technology. His research is focused on technologies that foster reflection and behaviour change, ubiquitous computing, and theories and methods for situated and embodied HCI. His dissertation in the field of HCI dealt with Ambient Persuasion and he received his Ph.D. in 2009 at the University of Salzburg. He earned a Master of Science degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he studied supported by a Fulbright scholarship. He also holds an engineer's degree from the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg.

No SQL: The Shifting Materialities of Databases

In ""The Language of New Media,"" Lev Manovich argues that the database is the primary cultural form of the twenty-first century, as film was to the twentieth and the novel to the nineteenth. But beyond the fact that it is unordered and links items together, he leaves largely unasked the question of quite what the database is. Are all databases the same? Does it matter?

I'll approach this question from the perspective of a larger investigation of the materialities of information -- an exploration of the specificities of digital forms and their consequences. I'll argue that, like writing systems and other forms of inscription, particular kinds of databases represent data in particular kinds of ways, creating a bridge between the architecture of database software and hardware and the forms of knowledge practice in which we can engage with them. This is a particularly interesting moment to ask some of these questions because the platforms have been in flux.

About the presenter

Paul Dourish is a Professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Anthropology, and co-directs the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing. His research focuses primarily on understanding information technology as a site of social and cultural production; his work combines topics in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and science and technology studies. He has published over 100 scholarly articles, and was elected to the CHI Academy in 2008 in recognition of his contributions to Human-Computer Interaction. He is the author of two books: ""Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction"" (MIT Press, 2001), which explores how phenomenological accounts of action can provide an alternative to traditional cognitive analysis for understanding the embodied experience of interactive and computational systems; and, with Genevieve Bell, ""Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing"" (MIT Press, 2011), which examines the social and cultural aspects of the ubiquitous computing research program.

Before coming to UCI, he was a Senior Member of Research Staff in the Computer Science Laboratory of Xerox PARC; he has also held research positions at Apple Computer and at Rank Xerox EuroPARC. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University College, London, and a B.Sc. (Hons) in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh.

Older Adults as Digital Content Producers

Older adults are normally characterized as consumers, rather than producers, of digital content. Current research concerning the design of technologies for older adults typically focuses on providing access to digital resources. Access is important, but is often insufficient, especially when establishing new social relationships. This presentation will examine the nature and role of digital content that was created by older adults, for the purpose of forging new relationships. We conducted a unique field study in which seven older adults (aged 71-92 years), who did not know each other, used a prototype iPad application (Enmesh) to create and share photographs and messages. We found that older adults, even those in the "oldest old" age group, embraced opportunities to express themselves creatively through digital content production. The findings demonstrate that self-expression and social engagement with peers can be realized when socio-technical systems are suitably designed to allow older adults to create and share their own digital content.

About the presenter

Jenny Waycott is a Research Fellow in the Department of Computing and Information Systems, working on the project, Growing Old, Staying Connected: Touch-screen Technologies for Ameliorating Older People's Experience of Social Isolation.

In the past decade, Dr Waycott has worked on several projects in the fields of human-computer interaction and educational technology. Her research is concerned with understanding the role technologies play in people's learning, work, and social activities.

Understanding Online Health Information Behaviour

More and more people choose to obtain information by themselves when they encounter health problems nowadays. With the rapid development of the Internet, it becomes more convenient to access different choices of online health resources, ranging from healthy lifestyle advices to medical details of diseases, which are readily available in various websites including official health website of government, private health service website and community supporting sites. In addition to traditional methods of searching online information, exploring is another way to obtain health information. However little is known to the exploratory behaviour in the health context. This talk introduces a proposed research project to investigate the exploratory information seeking behaviour for online health information.

About the presenter

Patrick Pang is a PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction at the Department of Computing and Information Systems of the University of Melbourne. His research involves information seeking behaviours of human beings under the healthcare context, which focuses on how and why people look for health information, and how information visualization and information retrieval techniques can improve this experience. He received his MSc degree from the University of Macau.

Behavioural Nudge or Technological Fudge?

We all have a pet behaviour we would like to change, such as eating better, exercising more, or reducing our energy consumption. Many of us would also like to manage our time more effectively, by spending less time randomly Googling, sofa slouching or looking out the window. How can we design new technologies to help people change their behaviour? Nudging methods, derived from behavioural economics and social psychology, have become increasingly popular. But how effective are they and can technology be designed to exploit them? In this talk, I will describe our investigations into how decision environments can be re-structured in innovative ways, using pervasive, ambient and wearable technologies to nudge behaviour in ways that are desirable to the individual. Our goal is to help people make better-informed decisions in situ. Underlying all of this, however, is the nagging question of whether it is ethical, desirable or sustainable to be nudging people in a desired direction. Or, is it a case of technological fudging, where we may be covering over deeper problems?

About the presenter

Yvonne Rogers is the director of the Interaction Centre at UCL and a professor of Interaction Design. She is internationally renowned for her work in HCI and ubiquitous computing. Her approach is to develop new theories in-the-wild of augmented human behaviour, through designing and evaluating interactive technologies that extend and amplify everyday, learning and work activities. Central to her work is a critical stance towards how visions, theories and frameworks shape the fields of HCI, cognitive science and ubiquitous computing. She has been instrumental in promulgating new theories (e.g., external cognition), alternative methodologies (e.g., in-the-wild studies) and far-reaching research agendas (e.g., "Being Human: HCI 2020 manifesto"). She has just published a new book called ""HCI Theory: Classical, Modern and Contemporary"". She is also the PI at UCL for the new Intel Collaborative Research Institute on Sustainable and Connected Cities which was launched in October 2012 jointly with Imperial College.

Skullduggery, Bastardry, Malfeasance and Memorials in EVE Online

EVE Online is a space-themed massively multiplayer online role play game (MMOG) which differs starkly from other games in this popular genre. In this IDL seminar I will be presenting the work of three recently accepted papers on EVE Online.

1 - eSports in EVE Online: Skullduggery, Fair Play and Acceptability in an Unbounded Competition
Electronic Sports', or eSports, are an emerging phenomena across a wide range of digital games. The bastion of the movement, Starcraft, has millions of fans and the top players garner extraordinary salaries and sponsorship deals. This paper presents the results of a study into the officially organised eSports that occur alongside the EVE Online MMOG; a notoriously difficult and ruthless space-themed multiplayer game. Characteristic of EVE Online, EVE eSports involve ruthless spying, espionage and inventive meta-game tactics, and the live-streamed matches frequently go awry with mid-match bribes and thrown tournament finals. In this paper, I discuss the way in which this transgressive spirit informs the enjoyment of sport and through doing so, glean insight into the nature of eSports, sports and spectatorship.

2 - The Demarcation Problem in MMOGs: Using Boundary-Work to Understand the Development and Disputations of Informal Game Rules
Following on from this study of EVE Online's eSport, this paper employs boundary-work to provide a theoretical framework for understanding the process by which players develop, dispute and maintain the informal social rules of multiplayer games. Boundary-work is a theory developed by the sociologist Thomas F. Geiryn to account for the process of demarcation of intellectual activity as being scientific or non-scientific. I emphasize the applicability of this theory to game studies through examining the rhetoric of the debate surrounding a thrown tournament final in EVE Online's eSport.

3 - Vile Rat: Spontaneous Shrines in EVE Online
Separately from these accounts of skulduggery, malfeasance and bastardry in the EVE Online MMOG I will be discussing the virtual memorials created within EVE Online to commemorate the life of Sean Smith (known in-game as Vile Rat), a US foreign service officer killed in the terrorist attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya.

About the presenter

Marcus Carter is a PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction at The University of Melbourne. His background is in the history and philosophy of science and the related field of science and technology studies. His PhD focuses on ruthless conduct in gaming contexts – e.g., stealing, spying and espionage.

Details to be confirmed.

Researching The Lab: a technology club for young people with High-Functioning Autism/Asperger's Syndrome

The Lab (www.thelab.org.au) is a network of technology clubs for young people with High-Functioning Autism/Asperger’s Syndrome, as well as their parents and carers. Founded in Melbourne in 2010, The Lab currently caters for 60 families in Melbourne, 30 families in Sydney (Hornsby) and 30 families in Geelong.

The Lab combines social and technology skill development through the provision of a relaxed, non-judgmental setting where young people can follow their interests and receive assistance from expert technology mentors, who work on the premises during the day as computer programmers and designers. Software used at The Lab includes Minecraft, RPG Maker, Game Maker, CuteHTML, Comic Life and Arduino hardware kits, and activities are supported by 34 readily available online lessons in programming and design. Parents also meet in a separate room to exchange knowledge and provide mutual support and friendship.

The Lab is a partnership involving Victoria University, the Oztron software development consultancy and the Just Better Care agency.

This presentation will provide an overview of the Lab, and will outline research challenges and opportunities in working with young people on the autism spectrum who love technology.

About the presenter

Dr Stefan Schutt is a Research Program Leader at the Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University. Stefan's research interests revolve around digital technologies and how people interact with them. He is particularly interested in young people's use of technology, and the intersection of technology, narrative and identity. Since 2001 Stefan has run virtual world, games, mobile phone and web projects for VU. Stefan is the co-founder of The Lab (www.thelab.org.au) a technology club for young people with Asperger's Syndrome, and creator of the Lewis & Skinner online signwriting document archive (www.lewisandskinner.com).

Dale Linegar is the owner of the Oztron software development consultancy, which specialises in 3D simulations for education, as well as web, games and mobile project development. Dale is co-founder of The Lab, whose Melbourne activities take place at Dale’s business premises, and which involves Oztron’s programmes as Lab mentors.

http://www.thelab.org.au http://blog.oztron.com

Seminar By Bjorn Nansen

Pointy Versus Soft: lessons from HealthMap, reducing chronic disease risk for people living with HIV

HealthMap is a NHMRC funded project run by the Alfred Hospital Infectious Diseases Unit in conjunction with Monash University. The average age of Australians living with HIV is now over 45 years and the number over 60 years has been increasing at 12% per year since 1995. People living with HIV experience earlier onset of the chronic diseases associated with ageing and the presence of these chronic co-morbidities makes caring for their HIV more complex and problematic. HIV care in Australia is transitioning from a primary care model to a chronic disease care model and needs systems to prevent and manage these chronic co-morbidities. Crucially, self-management support is integral to the large-scale practice change in chronic care management being driven by the National Primary Care Collaboratives and is a specific focus of the national Sharing Health Care Initiative. HealthMap is a technology-based intervention designed to support patient self-management, it is currently in development. It will be evaluated in a cluster radomised trial in early 2014. The HealthMap design team includes HIV clinicians, social researchers, self-management researchers, design researchers and practising designers.

About the presenter

Irith Williams joined the HealthMap team mid 2012 as a Design Intern. As a consequence she commenced a Masters in Interaction Design through Professor Margot Brereton (HCI and Participatory Design at QUT) who was a member of the Project Team. An abstract introducing HealthMap was presented to the OzCHI 2012 Smart Health workshop. Irith has spent most of the past twelve months immersed in HealthMap Design and Development activities and is now taking time out to plan and write her Research Papers. This seminar is a introduction to the HealthMap project, exploring in particular the role of the institutional Healthcare context and its impact on Design practice and Design decisions.

Irith also facilitates the UX Book Club for the UX Melbourne community and is an avid tweeter, @irithwilliams.

CHI + MED - Making Medical Devices Safer

Medical device interactions are now emerging as a major issue in overall medical safety. Mis-programming of devices is relatively rare, but the sheer number of millions of dosages and interventions each day means that the total number of events is in fact considerable. US government statistics now suggest that deaths due to misprogramming of infusion pumps and other critical mechanisms are leading to more total deaths than car crashes each year. The 6-year CHI-MED project, now at its mid-way point, is endeavouring to improve the design of medical device interfaces, using techniques from human-computer interaction, computer science and psychology. The talk will give some examples of misprogramming events and a scientific diagnosis of the failures in design and function that contributed to failure. Solutions that mitigate the worst risks will be demonstrated.

About the presenter

Dr. George Buchanan is a Reader in Human Computer Interaction, specialising in device design and information seeking. Following a BSc in Computer Science at the University of York, George ran an independent software house for nine years before selling it to return to academic research. Dr. Buchanan studied his PhD at Middlesex University and UCL, and has subsequently worked at UCL, Swansea and, now, City University London. George is currently Research Chair of the British Computer Society Interactions SIG, and has received many best paper and other awards, including a rare Honorary Life Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts.

Pretence Awareness Contexts and 'Everyone's a Winner'!

In this seminar Mitchell will be presenting the work of two recently accepted conference papers which were co-authored with Martin Gibbs and Marcus Carter.

1. Drawing on data from three studies, this paper argues that the learning and teaching of player coaching is an important frame of temporary motivation for players during gameplay. Furthermore, play framed temporarily as a coaching experience exhibits what Fine (1983) called the oscillating nature of engrossment and operates under the same kind of pretence awareness context (Glaser & Strauss, 1964) that he described in relation to role-playing games. We argue the teaching of a new game, or parts of a game, is a fleeting yet recurring experience, with participants oscillating between regular mundane everyday play and coaching new players. The coach and other players are often expected to continue play as if they had not seen any strategically important information during their time coaching and learning. This is of course a pretence, the implications of which are explored.

2. Warhammer 40,000 (W40K) is a non-digital strategy war-game involving the tactical manoeuvring of miniature figurines on a 6' by 4' tabletop. These figurines are painstakingly assembled, painted and often modified by players to accord with the game's backstory. Our research explores the ongoing success of W40K in the face of ubiquitous and pervasive computer technologies and presents the results of post-match interviews with players. One element of the W40K experience that we found striking was the capacity for players who lost matches to rationalise their failures into a narrative of success, one that underplays the importance of winning and prioritizes other aspects of the W40K experience. Drawing on Paul’s (2012) notion of rhetoric, wordplay and games, we argue that the modelling and painting, time and money constraints, engagement with W40K's themes and narratives, and the battle itself can be linked to the post-match accounts given by players in which they construct narratives of success and portray themselves as ‘winners’ even though they lost the battle.

About the presenter

Mitchell Harrop is a PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction at The University of Melbourne.

Understanding the Role of Technology in Parent-Child Reunion

The Symmetry of Human and Non-Human in Interfaces

The presentation in this seminar will offer a novel view of technological interfaces. It will demonstrate the human-centric nature of conventional conceptions of modern machines and propose the movement of focus from the user to the sensing qualities of interfaces. This approach has been significantly influenced by the relatively new field of object-oriented ontology (OOO), which will be addressed. The proposed theoretical framework is an extended postphenomenology that acknowledges the sensation, semiosis and agency of non-humans as well as humans, and analyses the bidirectional nature of human-machine relationships. The philosophical discussion will be illuminated by references to interactive media. The presentation is of a work in progress.

About the presenter

Tessa Leach is a Masters student at the University of Melbourne in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies.

virtuose Zufälle - virtuoso chances : virtuoso realtime processes and improvisation

The presentation deals with algorithms and random operations in the live performance on the example of audiovisual interactive concerts by Andreas Weixler and Se-Lien Chuang. Limited random processes represent the compositional concept and a special kind of real-time virtuoso performer. Attention is given to real-time processes and virtuoso improvisation interplay, the computer as a tool in terms of machine musicianship and interaction between image and sound as well as between improvisation and composition for soloist and ensemble.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Se-Lien Chuang, composer, pianist, media artist, 1965 born in Taiwan, since 1991 residence in Austria. The artistic, compositional emphases range from contemporary instrumental composition/improvisation, computer music to audiovisual interactivity. Studies in composition (Beat Furrer), music and media technology (Karlheinz Essl), piano/recorder, electro-acoustic music in Austria. International research stays, lectures and numerous representations of compositions in Europe, Asia, North- and South America: ICMC Ljubljana/Huddersfield/NYC/Belfast/Copenhagen, SICMF Seoul, NIME New York, ISEA Singapore/Nagoya, Ars Electronica Linz, Sumida Triphony Hall Tokio, National Theater Concert Hall Taipeh, Computermusik Festival Montreal, among others.

Andreas Weixler born 1963 in Graz, Austria, is a composer for contemporary instrumental composition, computer music with an special emphasis on audiovisual realtime processes and interactive score. He studied contemporary composition at the University of Arts in Graz, Austria with diploma by Beat Furrer. Performances at ICMC´s 2013 (Perth), 2012 (Ljubjana), 2011 Huddersfield, 2010 (New York), 2008 (Belfast), 2007 (Kopenhagen), NIME 2007 New York, ISEA (2002 Japan, 2008 Singapore) among others. Teaching as an associate university professor at Bruckner-University (computer music, music and media technology) and a lecturer at InterfaceCulture (audiovisual interactive projects) of the University of Arts in Linz, Austria. Curating concert series Sonic Intermedia (ars electronic center Linz). Running Atelier Avant Austria together with Se-Lien Chuang.

The Moral Life of Skype

What is the relevance of Science and Technology Studies to Human Computer Interaction and the design of devices and software? Does theory add unnecessary complexity, or can it be put to use in ways that may usefully inform design? In this talk I will explore these question through a report on the internship project I have just completed with Alex Taylor and Kenton O’Hara at Microsoft Research Cambridge. The focus of the project was a series of interviews with individuals and families about their use of Skype to connect with distant family members. Using examples from these interviews, I will argue that STS is useful in enabling us to see and describe the moral work that is being engaged in by people and technologies in practices of video chat with family, and that in turn, this may foster a sensitivity that can aid design.

SNS Search in Developing Countries: A Pathway to End Digital Division in Information Retrieval

Using Social Network Sites (SNS) as an information source has drawn the attention of the researchers for a while now. There have been many works that analysed the types and topics of questions people ask in these networks and why. Topics like what motivate people to answer such queries, how to integrate the traditional search engines and SNS together are also well investigated. In this paper, we focus on a relevant but different issue - how SNS search varies in developed and developing regions of the world and why. Analysing 880 status messages collected from a widely used SNS, we have observed that, unavailability and inadequacy of information on web in developing countries play a significant role to motivate users using SNS for information retrieval. With established statistics of Internet usage, e-Governance, and our experimental data analysis, we have tried to emphasize the differences between social search and traditional web-search and provided insight that one might require to consider while developing any application for SNS based searching.

About the presenter

I have completed my BSc in CSE from the Department of CSE, BUET, Bangladesh in 2007 and Masters by Research degree from Monash University, Australia in the year 2010. I have been working as a faculty member at the Dept of CSE, BUET since 2008 and now appointed as an Assistant Professor (on study leave). I have leaded the Human Technology Interaction (HTI) research group at BUET and the OpenStreetMap community there. My current research is on Social Natural User Interface, and I am working under the supervision of Dr. Frank Vetere and Dr. Bernd Ploderer.

Bringing Crotty, Lowgren and Stolterman Together: Social Research and Thoughtful Interaction Design

One of the fundamental goals of Interaction Design (IxD) is the construction and communication of knowledge that is created throughout IxD. In what Lowgren and Stolterman term as ‘Thoughtful’ Interaction Design (2004), it is important for the designer to comprehend the significance of the thinking process that undergoes in the design of digital artefacts. This presentation will explore the concept of ‘Thoughtful Interaction Design’ from a social research angle inspired by the latest book of Crotty (1998). In particular, I will investigate the importance of different theoretical perspectives in establishing an extended understanding of the value of ‘thoughtfulness’ within Interaction Design.

About the presenter

Kostas is a final year PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Melbourne. His current research interests focus on the role of technology within the family and health domain. One of his current dreams is to traverse the African continent on a motorbike.

Audience Experiences in Physical Social Videogaming

Videogames are often played socially, with both co-players and audiences. The experience of being an audience member is not well understood, nor are the factors of a videogaming session that influence their experience. In this seminar I will discuss a recent experimental study that examined the effects of game physicality and turn anticipation on audience members’ experiences in social videogaming sessions. I'll describe the experiment background, methods and results, and argue that as audience members become more active within a session their experience changes, suggesting there are design opportunities between purely active ‘players’ and passive ‘audience members’.

About the presenter

John is a PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction at The University of Melbourne. John has a background in computer science and psychology, and an MSc in human-computer interaction from The University of Auckland in New Zealand. His PhD work is looking at the social experience of physical videogaming, and specifically at the experiences of those people who are watching and not actively playing.

Seminar by International Students: Social networks and Information Seeking Behaviour

Being Chased by Zombies! Understanding the Experience of Mixed Reality Quests (OzCHI Presentation Rehearsal)

Both researchers and practitioners show increasing interest in exploring mixed reality games: games, where physical environments blend together with digital technologies. In this study we have extended earlier work by bringing attention to the role of narrative in mixed reality games. For our case study we chose a mobile phone application Zombies Run!, which is designed to support actual running. This application contains a fictional story about a zombie apocalypse and provides runners with various quests (in the form of missions) to complete during their run. We investigated different aspects of participants’ experience with the application and how it changed their running. Our findings show how the app changed running in three major ways. Firstly, it changed the way runs were organised. Secondly, it shook up established running routines. And lastly, it shaped the meanings associated with running.

About the presenter

Alexander completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Moscow State Institute of Radioengineering, Electronics and Automatics (Technical University). In Moscow he also worked part-time as an interaction designer at Russian design bureau. His research interests lie at the intersection of HCI, narrative and game studies.

Integration by the Quantified Self

People are increasingly collecting and integrating personal data in an effort to increase their self-knowledge, using emerging technologies known as personal informatics systems, e.g. FitBit. These emerging technologies are enabling people to track various aspects of their lives including, fitness, health, financial and dietary data to name a few. The Quantified Self is a group of early adopters who run local show and tell meetings across the world, including a group in Melbourne held in the IDL lab. In this seminar will take you through some publically accessible videos I used as my primary source of data to understand how users were integrating multiple sources of data. I will discuss my findings and suggest that there are further avenues for exploration on the fringes of the Quantified Self movement.

About the presenter

Mark is completing a Master of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne and due to graduate in December. After this he intends to apply for PhD and is particularly interested in how people will interact with pervasive technologies in the future. His work with the Quantified Self and Personal Informatics Systems over the past few months has heightened his interest in application of new technologies particularly in the health domain.

Exploring persuasive technology for smoking cessation

In recent years there has been increasing interest in using digital technologies to support smoking cessation. In this study we extend earlier work by trailing different forms of persuasive technology to explore its influence on helping people change their smoking habits. We have developed a mobile phone application which supports users with three types of content: Tips, Stories and Motivators. These can be recommended by either of two persuasive sources: Experts or the User Community. This design allows us to explore how source of recommendation influences users' perception of the three different types of content. A usability test was conducted and results from this will be presented. The project has just begin to recruit participants to use the application in a period of 3 weeks.

About the presenter

Umachanger, Nirojan, Stephan and Lars are from the Department of Computer Science at Aalborg University in Aalborg, Denmark. They are currently doing their 9th semester of Informatics. This project will serve as the basis of their Masters thesis. Their research interests are HCI and persuasive technologies.

Treacherous Play

Games enable players to simulate engagement in a broad variety of activities that may otherwise be impossible or condemned in non-game contexts. In Dungeons and Dragons, players can simulate slaying monsters and casting spells. One of the most commercially successful genres of digital games is the ‘first-person shooter’ (FPS), in which players simulate the killing of other players with guns, explosives and close-combat weapons. As mundane as it sounds, The Sims simulates furnishing houses and going to work (you can even simulate playing The Sims). Yet, treachery - betrayals of trust - remains a type of play broadly treated as ‘off-limits’ for online multiplayer game-play. Where it is not possible to design against it, strictly enforced formal rules are put in place to restrict treacherous play.

A long-standing exception to this paradigm is the sci-fi online game EVE Online, first released in 2003. In accordance with EVE’s dystopic and hyper-capitalistic narrative, CCP have designed a virtual world in which pervasive treachery has emerged. In this talk, I report the results of two studies that have explored the appeal and experience of treacherousness in EVE Online and its eSport through the lens of scamming, espionage, match-throwing and bribery.

About the presenter

Marcus is a PhD Candidate with the Human-Computer Interaction at The University of Melbourne. The studies presented in this talk form the basis of the first two studies of his PhD.

Interactive technology, connected communities and A1:E31 sustainability: designing for grassroots urban food-growing communities

A 2001 report of The World Health Organisation found that the ways in which the residents of London feed themselves are fundamentally socially, economically and environmentally unsustainable. My PhD research looks at how digital technology can be used in urban food growing communities to support social and environmental practices that are more sustainable. In this presentation I will describe two case studies of participatory design with Spitalfields City Farm, a community farm in inner east London. The first describes the Talking Plants project, that uses an augmented watering-can to tell stories of plants, such as who grew them, where they came from, as well as medicinal and health properties and advice on caring for and eating them. The second case study describes the development of an elaborate high-tech bug hotel which functions simultaneously as a habitat for beneficial insects, a sound sculpture, and educational resource for the farm. I report on initial findings from the participatory design process as well as initial insights from user studies.

About the presenter

I am an artist, writer and researcher whose practice involves sonic art, performance, creative writing and critical design. I have a BSc in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. In 2008 I won a UNESCO Digital Arts Award for the project Privileged Tactics II about environmental sustainability (together with Franc Purg). I am currently a PhD candidate in Media and Arts Technology, at Queen Mary University of London, where I am researching designing interactive systems to support grassroots urban food growing communities.

JuxtaPinch: Collocated Photo Sharing on Multiple Devices

Collocated photo sharing is an important social activity that promotes and stimulates relationships within social groups. We developed an application called JuxtaPinch that allows users to share photos while being collocated using several different devices, i.e. mobile phones and tablets, at the same time. The application employs pinching to connect devices and it enables flexible physical positioning of devices and supports partial viewing of photos. Our evaluation showed that JuxtaPinch enabled participants to experience their own familiar photos in new ways known as defamiliarization. It further enabled participants to engage jointly in playful interaction with the photos and with each other. However, we also found that multiple device collocated photo sharing challenges aspects of synchronization and coordination.

About the presenter

Miael B. Skov is an associate professor at the Centre for Socio-Interactive Design at Aalborg University, Denmark. Mikael completed his PhD in 2002 at Aalborg University on design of interactive narratives. He teaches interaction design to graduate student in computer science and informatics students as well as advanced human-computer interaction. Mikael has supervised more than 45 Masters students on various topics within interaction design or human-computer interaction. His research interests are human-computer interaction and interaction design especially within mobile, pervasive, and ubiquitous computing. Mikael is currently involved in a major Danish research project on sustainability within electricity consumption in private Danish households. Mikael has several times visited the Interaction Design Group as a guest researcher.

Completion Seminar: Designing online memorials to commemorate tragedy: A Black Saturday bushfire case study

Online memorials including tribute pages and social networking pages are used heavily in the aftermath of large-scale tragedies like natural disasters. There are opportunities for people to offer their support to the bereaved, but it also brings potential issues with respect to inappropriate or insensitive messaging. HCI researchers are beginning to explore the ways that online memorials are used. There is, however, limited research into how online memorials should be designed such that the needs of the bereaved are accounted for when memorials might be used by large numbers of people. In my PhD work, I use the aftermath of the Black Saturday bushfires to explore how online memorials might be designed with these considerations in mind. A prototype was developed as part of this study and deployed on the fourth anniversary of the fires. This thesis provides an account of how the prototype was received by bereaved community members, and is intended to be useful to both researchers and designers interested in online memorials used after tragedy.

About the presenter

Joji Mori is a PhD candidate in the Human-Computer Interaction at The University of Melbourne supervised by Martin Gibbs and Wally Smith. Joji’s background is as an interaction designer and user experience professional. His current academic research however, focuses on the design of online memorials used after large-scale tragedies.

Socio-technical innovation in digital media

Designed artifacts always have a backstory. Such backstories reveal the methodological and motivational orientation of designers and design teams. In this talk I will introduce two new-media artifacts designed at Digital World Research Centre: a digital storytelling app, and a cheap overhead projector for a TV. The backstory for each artifact will told in order to convey the sociotechnical approach to innovation applied in our Centre and some associated design values.

About the presenter

David Frohlich is Director of Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey and Professor of Interaction Design. He joined the Centre in January 2005 to establish a new research agenda on user-centred innovation in digital media technology http://www.dwrc.surrey.ac.uk/. Prior to joining Digital World, David worked for 14 years as a senior research scientist at HP Labs, conducting user studies to identify requirements and test new concepts for mobile, domestic and photographic products. David has a PhD in psychology from the University of Sheffield and post-doctoral training in Conversation Analysis from the University of York. He has also held visiting positions at the Royal College of Art, Universities of York and Manchester and is founding editor of the international journal Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

Completion Seminar: The Role of Visualisation for Understanding Biological Complex Systems

Completion Seminar: Player Negotiated Multiplayer Game Rules

This is a completion seminar for Mitchell's PhD work on the negotiation of rules by players in digital multiplayer games. Individuals frame their game playing experiences in a multitude of ways: serious competitions, casual events and learning experiences to name a few. However, changes to game mechanics influence the manner in which players negotiate how the games ought to be enjoyed - with the technology acting as a muse to their experiences. This is further confounded by the potential for pranks, grief play and farce. But it is not all bad news, with groups of players expecting relatively lighthearted attitudes to play from each other and across the different games they play. Drawing from three studies this seminar aims to explore and understand the negotiation of game rules by extending the Frame Analysis work of Fine (1983) to the domain of digital game studies.

About the presenter

Mitchell Harrop is a PhD candidate in the faculty of Science at The University of Melbourne and a member of the Human-Computer Interaction. He is supervised by Martin Gibbs and Christine Satchell.

Seminar By Kostas Kazakos

Seminar By Pedro Rosas

Introduction Seminar: Jasmin Grosinger

Jasmin Grosinger is a MSc student in Medical Informatics at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria. Jasmine completed her BSc in Medical Informatics with one year of study abroad at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Her masters thesis is based in the Human-Computer Interaction group, Institute for Design and Assessment of Technology in Vienna, and is visiting for 5 months in the Interaction Design lab designing, developing and evaluating persuasive technologies in order to motivate older adults to do physical exercise.

Introduction Seminar: Marcus Carter

Marcus Carter is a PhD student investigating the 'fun' in games. Marcus completed a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) at The University of Melbourne, writing his dissertation on online communities in the Massively Multiplayer game EVE Online. His supervisors are Martin Gibbs (CIS) and Michael Arnold (HPS). Marcus' PhD thesis will perform ethnographic research into the game community of EVE Online to further evaluate, develop and substantiate academic understanding of the role that the 'non-game' plays in enjoying games. This research is supported by the Institute for a Broadband Enabled Society. Marcus is also researching tabletop gaming with Mitchell Harrop and Martin Gibbs, and will soon be travelling to the US to attend the Foundations of Digital Games conference where he will be presenting a paper (co-authored with Martin and Mitchell) on the subject of metagames.

Read about a recent project Marcus has worked on at: Social Gaming Events: Warhammer 40K

How trust is formed in online health forums: a process perspective

As people increasingly search for health-related information on the Internet, online health forums have not only become an important information source but also appear to serve an emotional support role by connecting people who have similar conditions or can otherwise empathize with each others’ experiences. Trust is critical to sustain this form of use and to enhance involvement, because each support consumer is typically identified only by a pseudonym, important personal information is often revealed, and the consequences of acting on incorrect advice can be severe. This study qualitatively explores the trust dehttp://disweb.dis.unimelb.edu.au/student/RHD/moharrop/index.php velopment between users in a non-commercial relationship-orientated context and reveals a three-process framework that conceptualize how users build trust through the text-based medium and how they progress from one process to another.

About the presenter

Hanmei (Sarah) Fan is a PhD candidate in the faculty of Science at The University of Melbourne. Her research interests include how IT artefacts and computer-mediated environment affect end-users’ attitude and perception and in turn influence their behaviours. Specifically, her thesis is to examine trust formation and trust-related behaviours in online health communities.

Introducing the Ambivalent Socialiser

Social interaction can be a powerful strategy for persuasive technology interventions, yet many users are reluctant to engage with others online because they fear pressure, failure and shame. In this talk I will introduce the ‘ambivalent socialiser’, a person who is simultaneously keen but also reluctant to engage with others via social media. Our contribution is to identify four approaches to introducing sociality to ambivalent socialisers: structured socialising, incidental socialising, eavesdropping and trace sensing. We discuss the rationale for these approaches and show how they address recent critiques of persuasive technlogy. Furthermore, we provide actionable insights for designers of persuasive technology by showing how these approaches can be implemented in a social media application.

This is a practice talk for a CHI Note written by Bernd Ploderer, Wally Smith, Steve Howard, Jon Pearce, and Ron Borland. This research has been funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC grant LP110100046) and Quit Victoria.

About the presenter

Bernd Ploderer is a Research Fellow with the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. His research interest lies in the potential of social media to support personal development, reflection, and behaviour change.

Metagames, Paragames and Orthogames: A New Vocabulary for Understanding Games and Gameplay

The term ‘metagaming’ is widely used to describe a variety of conceptually difficult activities associated with game play. This wide use has lead to a conceptual overload of the term, mitigating its potential use for game studies. This talk will present two new terms to use, ‘orthogame and ‘paragame’, in conjunction with a more clearly defined notion of ‘metagame’. We argue that these new terms have the potential to be highly useful for defining and understanding peripheral play activities common in modern digital games. We apply this new vocabulary to a variety of play practices from digital and non-digital games to argue for their strength.

This is a paper co-authored with Martin Gibbs and Mitchell Harrop, also with the Department of Computing and Information Systems.

About the presenter

Marcus Carter is a PhD Student with the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, recently graduated from the History and Philosophy of Science Department in the School of Arts. His supervisors are Martin Gibbs and Michael Arnold. This seminar is based on a paper accepted to the 2012 Foundations of Digital Games conference to be presented in early June."

Confirmation Seminar: Papua New Guinea: Where Language Preservation first met Computer Science

Currently earth is home to about 7000 languages around the world, with Papua New Guinea and Indonesia harboring a fantastic 1500 of them. For a number of reasons, many languages are moribund, the most conservative estimates are set at losing 50% of the languages until the end of this century. Field linguists are currently documenting many languages. However, at the rate they are progressing, we will not be able to preserve all of them. What are we to do? Not all is lost: Developments in technology and connectivity have given rise to new avenues of research. While existing methods of language documentation depend mainly on the work of a lone linguist, we will share a vision of modern language preservation: To make use of cheap, lightweight, and interconnected devices, e.g. mobile phones, and put them, and consequently much of the work of language preservation into the hands of the language community. The presentation will feature videos and photos from the village of Imikori in Papua New Guinea.

About the presenter

Florian Hanke, 35, from Zürich, Switzerland. After receiving his Diploma in Computer Science (Neuroinformatics) in 2004, he lived under the illusion of having to earn a lot of money, developing newfangled UI interfaces, starting up a company and writing an open source search engine, before finally coming to his senses and starting a PhD under Steven Bird at the University of Melbourne in 2011. He lives with his zero cats in Fitzroy, Melbourne, and has given up infiltrating the hipster subculture, mostly due to not being able to enjoy coffee without milk. As a hobby, he tries to conquer Mt. Kosziosco, so far unsuccessfully.

Introduction Seminar: Alexander Kan

About the presenter

Alexander Kan is a new MPhil student striving to understand what makes games engaging and motivating. In his thesis he plans to focus on elderly people and investigate what games mean for them. His supervisors are Steve Howard, Frank Vetere and Bernd Ploderer.

Alexander was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and studied Computer science in Moscow, Russia, where he also worked as an interaction designer at Russian design bureau.

IDL Usability Lab Overview

John Downs will be faciiltaing the second half of this talk which is to provide an IDL usability lab overview (services and equipment)

The IDL has a state-of-the-art usability lab that is available for use by researchers, research students, and commercial organisations. The lab can be used to host and run a variety of types of studies including traditional usability studies, focus groups, interviews, and experiments. The lab also has a wide range of audiovisual, computing and electronics equipment available for use inside and outside the lab. John Downs, the manager of the lab, will briefly discuss the services and equipment the lab can provide and explain the new lab space.

Read about the lab at the following link: /hci/

Ageing in place and technologies of place

This paper explores the varied meanings and lived experiences of older people with dementia, in relation to everyday technologies in public spaces outside of the home, through re-analysis of qualitative data generated from research that focused on the use of technology in supporting people with dementia to carry on with their everyday outside activities. This paper highlights the importance of a neglected space within dementia research, namely the outside public environment. Although the outside environment and activities that take place in that space, for some, are curtailed, for others the physical and social security of familiar environments enables them to carry on with everyday activities in this public realm. Outside space can be both therapeutic and frightening for people with dementia. This paper demonstrates that people with dementia can sometimes feel out of place in public space, however, it also shows the variety of ways people with dementia use everyday technologies to manage ‘feeling out of place’.

About the presenter

I am a social gerontologist and an experienced quantitative and qualitative researcher. My educational background in applied sociology has enabled me to pursue my research interests in the application of these research methods in order to look at the social impact that illness can have on the lives of older people. During my time as a researcher I have researched and published widely around the impact of ill health on older people and carers, particularly with reference to continence management. More recently my work has focused around how aspects of the physical, social and technological environment pose challenges and opportunities for older people and their wider community.

Reunion and Mediated Parent-Child Connection in Periodically Transitioned Families

Reunion is one of the most important facets of periodically transitioned families - families who reunite and separate periodically due to personal or work-related reasons. It is the time when both parents and children can reconstruct and enrich their ties in lieu of another separation. While the proliferation of communication technologies has given unique opportunities to family members to keep connected while apart, there is little understanding of how these technologies influence reunion. In this talk, I will present findings from a study that focuses on exploring the current nature of the relationship between reunion and mediated parent-child connection. I will highlight the problematic nature of this relationship and describe a digital intervention whose aim is to ‘resurface’ the importance of reunion in the contemporary family life. Finally, I will argue for designing technologies that not only mediate parent-child connection but do so in a more ‘meaningful’ manner with a lens to reunion.

About the presenter

Kostas is a member of a periodically transitioned family and a PhD student in the University of Melbourne affiliated with the Human-Computer Interaction. His research focuses on better understanding the relationship between the experience of reunion and the one of technology use while in separation within the domestic domain. He is happy that his life provided inspiration for his PhD.

Citizen science: recruiting residents for studies of tagged black swans

Members of the public with an interest in research on their local wildlife – often referred to as ‘citizen scientists’ are a potentially vast source of information about urban wildlife. In this seminar we discuss a project in which black swans were tagged and public sighting reports were submitted through a website. We find that public reports contribute very substantial and largely accurate data, and consider the potential of other interactive tools to encourage public participation in science.

About the presenter

I completed my BSc at the Australian National University with a major in biochemistry, but decided after a field trip to Kakadu National Park at the end of my degree that I would much rather spend my research career in the field than in the laboratory. My honours and PhD research was carried out under the supervision of Andrew Cockburn, teasing out aspects of the bizarre mating system of superb fairy-wrens. Five years of working on birds in a botanic garden whetted my appetite for wilder places and I embarked in 1992 on a six-month journey to explore Madagascar. I spent a year working as technical advisor to the World Wide Fund for Nature in southern Madagascar, then joined World Learning as academic director of two semester abroad programs, firstly in Botswana and then in Madagascar. I held an ARC postdoctoral fellowship at the ANU from 1996-1998 before joining the Department of Zoology as a lecturer in 1999. I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2004.

Joji Mori is a PhD. candidate in the Human-Computer Interaction at The University of Melbourne. He has recently worked in industry as an interaction designer and usability consultant. His research interest is the role of digital technologies in society, with a current focus on community commemoration. Joji’s involvement in this project has primarily been to help design and build the website: http://www.myswan.org.au

C21 teaching and learning principles: the Ultranet in Victorian government primary schools

This research considers the social and cultural impacts of the Ultranet, a $60.5m Victorian government online learning environment. This project seeks to understand how local Ultranet end-users connect to one another in emerging de-localized learning environments. This research also ‘unpacks’ some of the attitudes, values and preconceptions surrounding educational uses of information and communications technologies (ICT) in schools and homes.

The research is an eighteen-month comparative field study in three primary schools and a small number of homes. Observing collaborative relationships and government schools’ actual uses of learning platform technologies is providing many opportunities to analyse web-based interactivity and participation as it unfolds. Together with students and teachers, parents are at a very interesting juncture in digital media and learning. This research contributes to a growing public debate on how this use of media is shaping current and future digital media needs and associated learning patterns in Victoria and beyond.

About the presenter

The researcher completed a Bachelor of Communication in 2006 and an Honours degree of Bachelor of Communications in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies in 2009 at Monash University. Her Honours thesis, ‘Rethinking New Age Spirituality, Web 2.0 and Cyber-community in Contemporary Popular Culture’, analysed mediated spirituality in Oprah Winfrey's online Book Club. Whilst her Honours thesis remains unpublished, her Honours year sparked an interest in Web 2.0 and online communication. That passion drove her to enrol in an interdisciplinary Ph.D. at The University of Melbourne in 2010 where her research focus has moved from celebrity to childhood (sort of).

http://www.broadband.unimelb.edu.au/main.php?id=592

Connecting Hospitalised Children to their Schools and Families

any children in hospital experience dislocation from school and family, especially when frequent or extended visits are required. While the Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) in Melbourne provides an education program, the use of technology to connect hospitalised children to their schools and families is largely under-researched. In this project we investigate how connecting a hospitalised child to their school and family via communication technology may lead to an increased awareness of the absent child and enhance the child’s sense of belonging to their core communities in both the home and the school.

We held workshops with teachers, parents and hospital staff, discovering that while children, their classmates and families desire mediated social connection, concerns with privacy and disruption constrain the use of technology in this context. In response we designed a novel technology informed by prior research into ambient displays and photo-sharing and our earlier implementation of an 'ambient orb’ in classrooms. A user trial is currently in progress, so we will stop short of presenting conclusions, and instead will present the technology, discuss our methods, and welcome your feedback and suggestions.

THE RESEARCHERS

Associate Professor Frank Vetere, Dr Lars Kulik, Dr Greg Wadley - Department of Computing and Information Systems
Dr Tsharni Zazryn, Glenda Strong, Courtney Hempton - The Royal Children’s Hospital Education Institute
Dr Julie Green - Parenting Research Centre
Peter Rossi - Huawei Australia

"You Do the Math": Mathletics and the Play of Online Learning

This case study of the popular Australian educational maths application, Mathletics, is drawn from findings of an ethnographic study of children’s domestic technology use in Melbourne. The study offers insights into the experience and governance of children’s Mathletics use, but also highlights some developing possibilities and challenges in efforts to mobilise online media and digital play to direct children’s learning.

In analysing the interaction between students and software, this paper deploys two key concepts in technology studies – affordance and technicity – to develop a relational understanding of Mathletics play. This relational organisation of Mathletics play, in the sense of the give of a material or technology such as the play of a rope, emerges over time through arrangements of design, operation and use. By combining empirical research with this conceptualisation of play, the paper shows that the play of Mathletics – aesthetics, functionality, and materiality – accommodates the varying uses and values of teachers, parents and students. Yet the playful appropriations also suggest that multiple forms and modes of learning are taking place, which exceed the direct application task or more authorised uses.

About the presenter

Dr Bjorn Nansen is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, working in the Department of Computing and Information Systems and the School of Population Health. He researches the use of digital media and communications technologies in the contexts of household, family and everyday life. He has experience in mixed methods, ethnographic fieldwork and cultural theory, and has published numerous papers on issues relating to media and technology consumption, regulation, inclusion, interaction and mobility. His most recent work has featured in New Media & Society, Journal of Children and Media, Environment and Planning D and the Telecommunications Journal of Australia.

http://www.mccaugheycentre.unimelb.edu.au/research/current/social_inclusion/screen_stories/

Digital dreaming: Exploring the social unconscious online

My Masters research project will explore the inter-connection between information and communications technology and social relations, with an emphasis on the impact of social media. The research will have theoretical and practical components. The theoretical component will contrast the work of communications theorists such as Clay Shirky and Marshall McLuhan, and psychoanalytically-informed organisational theorists such as Wilfred Bion, Elliott Jaques and Isabel Menzies, to develop a hypothesis about what I conceptualise as a ‘social unconscious’. The social unconscious consists of patterns of shared assumptions, values, emotions and attitudes which influence the behaviour and experience of internet users but of which they may not be fully aware. The social unconscious parallels the ‘organisational unconscious’ studied in my PhD research. It has implications for the understanding of online community dynamics, and may also be a predictor of the success or otherwise of social media platforms and other ‘socio-digital’ systems. The practical component of the research will involve development of a prototype web-based application that aims to allow users to explore the social unconscious. The prototype design will be informed by psychoanalytic models for the analysis of group and organisational dynamics, including the study of dreams. The prototype will be tested with participants from the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations (ISPSO), of which I am a member.

About the presenter

David is a consultant in the field of group and organisational dynamics, based in Melbourne. He uses creative and associative techniques to help clients become aware of and manage the underlying pressures that affect how they go about their work.

David has extensive experience in the area of ICT policy and regulation, and as a cultural change specialist working within organisations. He is a qualified engineer and has a PhD in social theory. He was recently awarded the Bridger Memorial Prize for a paper on social media and psychoanalysis presented at the 2011 ISPSO Annual Symposium in San Diego.

Campus Life

Accessing day-to-day information about the university campus is time consuming and difficult. This project will deliver an iPhone application allowing anyone to quickly find locations and events of interest around the Parkville campus.

Leveraging the existing institutional knowledge of the campus’ daily inhabitants, the iOS application will act as a gateway to a crowd-sourced database of university locations and events. Community members will be able to add, edit, rate, share and comment on their favourite on-campus locations and events. This will increase engagement with and discoverability of the Parkville campus, contributing towards a modern interaction between Melbourne University as an institution and its community.

About the presenter

Aidan was a member of the first cohort of students through the University of Melbourne’s new generation Bachelor of Science, starting in 2008. He earned his undergraduate degree, with a major in Computer Science, in 2010 and immediately enrolled in the new Master of Engineering (Software) degree, which he has almost completed. He has been a tutor within the department since 2011 and is keenly interested in the development of software that can be used within the education sector.

Understanding Relationship Between Games and Non-Gaming Activities (Formal Review Seminar)

With the increasing popularity of digital games we now see how they are making their way into other areas rather than entertainment. Games with purpose (gamified applications, serious games, persuasive games, etc) are built to use an encouragement games are famous for to support all kinds of non-gaming activities, from getting fitter to deciphering the structure of a retrovirus protein. Studies have show the potential of this approach along with the backfires it can bring, yet little is known about a relationship between games and these activities.

The aim of this project is to understand ways how games could provide genuine interest in non-gaming activities, if they are able at all.

About the presenter

Alexander Kan is a MPhil candidate in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne. His supervisors are Martin Gibbs and Bernd Ploderer.

Alexander completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Moscow State Institute of Radioengineering, Electroincs and Automatics (Technical University). In Moscow he also worked part-time as an interaction designer at Russian design bureau.

Seminar By Suraya Hamid

Actively engaging older adults in the development and evaluation of tablet technology

Engaging older adults in the design and evaluation of new technologies can be both challenging and rewarding. It is important that effective strategies are used to actively engage older adults in this process, to ensure that new technologies designed to meet the needs of older adults are both usable and useful. This presentation will discuss the strategies used during a trial of a prototype iPad application. This trial was conducted as part of preliminary research for the ARC Linkage project, "Growing Old and Staying Connected: Touch Screen Technology for Ameliorating Older People’s Experience of Social Isolation". The approach used in this trial involved five key elements that helped to actively engage older people in the research process: 1) involving care providers in the research, 2) conducting social events, 3) supporting use through scaffolding, 4) providing multiple channels of communication between participants and researchers, and 5) progressively revealing technology functions. The presentation will describe the findings that emerged from each of these strategies.

About the presenter

Dr. Jenny Waycott is a Research Fellow in the Department of Computing and Information Systems, working on the project ""Growing Old, Staying Connected: Touch-screen Technologies for Ameliorating Older People's Experience of Social Isolation"".

In the past decade, Dr. Waycott has worked on several projects in the fields of human-computer interaction and educational technology. Her research is concerned with understanding the role technologies play in people's learning, work, and social activities.

Designing for Temporality and Scale in Interactive Technologies for Commemoration: A Black Saturday bushfire case study

In this presentation I discuss the design of interactive technologies used in commemorating significant events such as tragedies resulting in loss of life. My case study focuses on commemorative activities relating to the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria after February 2009. Large numbers of people posted messages of grief and condolence on social networking sites and tribute pages directly after the fires. This was by those in affected communities, but also from others who had concern but were not directly affected themselves. Usage of the technology changes over time but the technologies largely remain the same. I argue that technologies currently used in commemoration lack sensitivity to temporality (the passing of time) and scale (numbers of people involved), something which many existing offline commemorative activities and objects embody.

I will present preliminary findings from five design workshops which enabled bushfire affected community members to design interactive technologies for commemoration. Finally, I will present an approach to deploying these technologies as probes to evaluate whether to what extent the designed technologies are sensitive to notions of time and scale.

About the presenter

Joji Mori is a PhD candidate in the Human-Computer Interaction at The University of Melbourne supervised by Steve Howard and Martin Gibbs. Joji’s background is as an interaction designer and consulting in the user experience profession. His current academic research however, focuses on the design of interactive technologies used in commemoration.

Designing for Temporality and Scale in Interactive Technologies for Commemoration: A Black Saturday bushfire case study

We will present some work on the challenges of designing and using mobile apps to interface people's engagement with place. This has been carried out in the Human-Computer Interaction in collaboration with academics in various fields of architecture, including landscape, physical environment and architectural history. First will be an update of a completed project to design a mobile guide for the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. Next we will describe three ongoing studies of fieldwork exercise carried out by students of architecture to learn about: the physical environment, historical buildings in Collins St, and the historical landscape of the Royal Botanic Gardens. In the seminar we will demo the apps we have developed (or downloaded) and talk about the design questions that we are facing along the way. Issues around how to theorise and how to evaluate the fieldwork exercises and the mobile apps will be central points of discussion.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Assoc Prof Wally Smith is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne, with interests in interaction design and the social aspect of technology.

Dr Dora Constantinidis is a researcher on the 'New Tools and Techniques of Fieldwork' project in the Human-Computer Interaction, with interests in how ICT, and in particular geo-spatial systems, can be applied to assist research for archaeology and cultural heritage.

Read more about the project here: http://mobilefieldworklearning.wordpress.com/

OZCHI Practice Talks

Tuck Leong

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.