Interaction Design Group

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

Paul Dourish is professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. His research interest lies at the intersection of computer science and social science, with a particular interest in ubiquitous and mobile computing and the practices surrounding new media.
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Sex toys and their precursors are not a product genre you will find mentioned in the canons of design history and theory. In fact, as a field of research, they appear infrequently in any field of study. Yet they are manufactured and consumed in their millions year after year and have done so for decades in their modern form. There is evidence they have been manufactured for thousands of years and Victorian England and America supported a thriving vibrator industry treating middle class women for hysteria. As mass produced objects they are embedded with the socio-cultural meanings of constructed gender ideology and sexual control. As technological objects they are as complicated and harmless as an electric toothbrush. So, 30 years after the sexual revolution, why are they still socially taboo? What if they weren’t and what if they were designed using the innovation methods and strategies of industrial, product, multimedia, interface and HCI designers?

Judith Glover is a lecturer in Industrial Design and Product Design Engineering at Swinburne University. Her PhD topic investigates the taboo nature of the sex toy industry and argues industrial design methods are central to bringing this product genre into mainstream commerce through appropriate female-centric design.
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The aim of this project is to investigate how students informally interact across hybrid learning spaces, with a particular consideration for the qualities of co-presence and proximity. A hybrid learning space describes a convergent physical and virtual environment that can facilitate learning-related events and behaviours. For example, when a student is talking to other individuals or group members in a room (physical), while simultaneously using an instant messaging client or sending a text message (virtual). The informal interactions that occur here may have both social outcomes, such as strengthening social bonds between students, and learning related outcomes, such as unexpected information transfer that contribute towards informal learning. In this presentation, I will outline the background to the project and the proposed research methodology. It is hoped that this research will lead to the design of a prototype or other technology that can build on our understanding of how co-presence impacts on informal interaction in hybrid learning spaces. The ultimate goal would be to have a prototype design that could be adopted for use in higher education to better support student learning experiences.

Kate Goodwin is a first-year Master of Science (Information Systems) student in the Department of Information Systems (DIS), University of Melbourne. Her main research interests are learning technologies, ubiquitous computing and HCI. Her supervisors are Dr Frank Vetere (DIS) and Dr Gregor Kennedy (Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry & Health Sciences). Kate has worked in the education software industry for over 4 years, and prior to this was a freelance multimedia designer focusing on interface design for educational applications.
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Primarily an installation artist, Georgie Roxby Smith challenges the relationship between analogue and digital systems, questioning materiality and exploring new possibilities of virtual reality software. Her practice is engaged with the themes of digital and global systems and the glitches created when these systems meet with the analogue or the everyday. Through extracting and reinjecting her Second Life avatar into physical space, her work exists on a kaleidoscope of planes - "in world", within a body of physical sculptures, as ephemeral projections in space and as recreated performances by both humans and avatars. Forming a virtual hall of mirrors, these realities bleedthrough and overlap into each other, creating an indeterminate state where audiences are in two, three, four realities at once.

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

Georgie Roxby Smith is an artist and production manager and is currently completing her Master of Visual Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts.
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The Blended Interaction Space (BIS) concept combines video conferencing elements and distributed shared interactive digital screen elements to support distributed hands-on collaboration in the workplace in a way that participants feel as if they are together. This feeling is achieved by a "blending" of the two spaces, which allows participants of a meeting to communicate and interact as they would if they were located face-to-face.

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

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

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

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

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

Nilma Perera is a PhD student at the Department of Information Systems (DIS) and the Biomedical Multimedia Unit (BMU). Her research interests are Affective Computing, Emotions and Flow theory. Nilma is supervised by Jon Pearce (DIS) and Gregor Kennedy (BMU).
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In this presentation I talk about current work seeking to introduce insights from ethnography and social studies of medical technology into practices of measuring effects of IT in the health care sector. Presently, there is much frustration among vendors and users of of health care IT around precisely this issue. In the talk I hypothesize that the understanding of IT-effects is largely influenced by an evidence-based medicine approach to effects. I argue that this is problematic for a number of reasons having to do with the unruliness of both IT and disease and propose and alternative approach. The alternative approach ­ comparative ethnography ­ is practice-based and compares the effect of IT in different sociotechnical configurations. It uses contrast and continuous analytical provocation as its working tool.

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

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