MCI Paper Session 7 – Interaction Design & Techniques

Interacting with a novel technology or a known technology in a novel context can influence a user’s interaction with said technology in both a positive or negative way. Research is often primarily interested in capturing interaction under regular conditions, rendering such influences less desirable. Depending on the actual novelty of any given technology, such halo or novelty effects might be weaker or stronger, and thereby more difficult to mitigate. In this paper, we want to share a number of experiences related to participant curiosity and technology novelty in interaction with automated vehicles. We intend to use our experiences from several studies to open the discussion on a potential underestimation of technology novelty and its effects on user research in vehicle automation technology and want to particularly highlight the role, researchers, manufacturers, and media play in shaping such effects.

Affinity for Technology Interaction (ATI) describes whether a person approaches or avoids interaction with technology [1], making it an important variable in human-centered design.

To determine whether ATI will likely remain an important variable in the future, we compared the ATI scores of those who will develop applications (students of media and computer science) with those who will use them in a specific context (students of public administration). We also looked for possible selection biases when conducting online samples regarding technology, by comparing a self-selected online sample of public administration employees with a sample of students of public administration conducted in a classroom, in which no selection biases should have had occurred. To locate the samples in the general population we also compared them with a quota sample of the German population.

Results indicate markedly different approaches to technology interaction between the student samples and the online sample being more similar to the media and computer science students. We discuss consequences for the human-centered design process, especially for understanding the users.

Unter dem Begriff Innovation Enabling wird im Folgenden ein Konzept für die ganzheitliche Unterstützung interdisziplinärer Teams beim kreativen und innovativen Problemlösen vorgestellt. Dieses Konzept unterstützt Moderatoren und Teilnehmer gleichermaßen und ein damit realisiertes System bleibt durch die implizite Interaktion für den Nutzer im Hintergrund. Eine zentrale Rolle spielt das Konzept der Awareness Pipeline zur Implementation einer impliziten Interaktion auf Basis eines Sensor-Aktor-Systems, welches in diesem Artikel vorgestellt wird. Die Unterstützung der begleitenden Moderations- und Administrationsaufgaben, wie beispielsweise der automatisierten Dokumentation der Sitzung, sollen in Zukunft einen deutlichen Mehrwert gegenüber einer klassischen Brainstorming-Sitzung bieten.

In this paper, we report the results from the `Human-God Interfaces’ project, which aimed to redesign traditional Catholic rituals, based on the principles of Tangible Interaction. Seven prototypes are presented. We discuss our learnings from the design process, highlighting how all prototypes follow the same recipe of incorporating a Catholic belief into a well-known everyday object and adding an `unknowable’ element.

Embedding computational capabilities in everyday objects enables novel interaction concepts that are seamlessly integrated in users’ everyday tasks. We conducted an elicitation study to investigate how subjects use a pan to control functions related to cooking. The primary focus of the study was to identify whether the elicited proposals tend towards tangible (i.e. moving or rotating the pan) or gestural (i.e. tapping or swiping on the pan handle) interactions. We present an analysis of over 500 interaction proposals from 20 subjects. While priming and used pan handle did not affect the amount or type of elicited interactions, we found statistically significant differences for different types of task. While pan interaction is suitable for controlling cook top temperature, subjects have a rejecting attitude towards using a pan to interact with the cooker hood or a digital cookbook.We derive recommendations for when and how to interact with a pan during the cooking process.

Rapid prototyping of interactive textiles is still challenging, since manual skills, several processing steps, and expert knowledge are involved. We present Rapid Iron-On User Interfaces, a novel fabrication approach for empowering designers and makers to enhance fabrics with interactive functionalities. It builds on heat-activated adhesive materials consisting of smart textiles and printed electronics, which can be flexibly ironed onto the fabric to create custom interface functionality. To support rapid fabrication in a sketching-like fashion, we developed a handheld dispenser tool for directly applying continuous functional tapes of desired length as well as discrete patches. We introduce versatile compositions techniques that allow for creating complex circuits, utilizing commodity textile accessories and sketching custom-shaped I/O modules. We further contribute a comprehensive library of components for input, output, wiring and computing. Three example applications, results from technical experiments and expert reviews demonstrate the functionality, versatility and potential of this approach.

Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) has been gaining increasing attention in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), owing to its potential to generate more expressive haptic feedback. Despite many hardware and software prototypes developed to study specific interaction aspects, designing EMS-based actuated gestures remains a complex endeavor. In this work, we present a design process for actuated gestures and a mobile app to support researchers and gesture designers during EMS-based gesture creation. The app covers the individual calibration of muscles, the composition of single movements into more complex gestures, and the playback of the pre-calibrated gestures. A user study with 12 participants, mostly non-familiar with EMS, has shown that the app was successful in supporting participants test actuated gestures. Our main contributions include a design process for actuated gestures, as well as an open-source app to support the approach and its first evaluation.

Despite the extensive analysis of the consequences of interruptions caused by smartphone notifications, research on the effects on users has so far been sparse. Therefore, in this work we (1) explore concepts on preventing interruptions elicited by notification delay in a focus group; (2) implement a smartphone application manipulating the notification delay in three distinct ways varying in the degree of user-control; (3) evaluate all three concepts with 13 users in a four-week field trial. We thereby gather qualitative feedback in 52 semi-structured interviews, one per participant after each mode and an additional control week. The results show that through the intensive preoccupation with their notification management, users reflect critically about advantages and disadvantages of their continuous reachability. Based on the results from the focus group and field trial, we derive four design implications summarizing the users’ experiences and suggestions on notification delay mechanisms.

We describe the results of a design project about making scarce resources perceptible: a router, a campfire-inspired lamp and a knife block. All three are ‘designed for discomfort’ and intended to serve as thought-provoking objects.

Group awareness is a prominent challenge in the field of co-located collaboration in Multi-display Environments (MDE), where several personal and shared devices are operated simultaneously by multiple users. With a focus on Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS) and particularly different levels of information sharing, our overall goal is to investigate aspects that influence this group awareness as well as the general group performance in such MDE. In this work, we present the conceptual foundation and approach of a research tool, called CoFind. Developed as a lightweight web browser plugin, which connects collaborators by sharing information resources, it provides comprehensive data and activity logging in the context of user studies and their evaluation. Based on an initial lab experiment, we also present first insights on the feasibility of our approach and the utility of our developed tool, allowing to plan and carry out further user studies in this challenging research field.