DGPis40 Abigail Sellen talk

This is the second talk that I attended at the DGPis40 reunion conference which was by Abigail Sellen, Senior Researcher and Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Abigail talked about her stints at DGP as a post-doc where in the early '80s and '90s, she worked on Bill Buxton's Ontario Telepresence project. She is now at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK working on socio-digital systems and her talk is "Being Human in the Digital Age". Her research deals with how to bring humans into the loop of computer technologies and assist the human, a human-centered approach to computing which I think is much needed in our industry. She has 23 patents and she says that we have to think and change our methodologies towards HCI. We need to put a humanistic agenda in research.

In the past, the origins of HCI was about thinking the brain as an information processing system and using cognitive psychology (in the '70s and '80s) and human factors engineering. Then in the early '80s, Don Norman talked about HCI and Card, Moran and Newell (1984) wrote a book called the Psychology of HCI. The idea here was to use cognitive psychological models to improve the use of computers. These led to the following contributions to HCI: User-centered design, user-testing and modelling.

Now, we are in the age of ubiquitous computing as visioned by the late Mark Weiser from PARC. An example of this is the Augmented Reality kitchen from the MIT Media Lab. The problem with HCI is that we need a view of the user and understand users as cognitive machines, therefore we need to have multi-disciplinary terms and design goals for rich evolving ecosystems and practices. As a result of this, Abigail and her colleagues created a Whereabouts clock which allows each member of the family to see where others are (either work, school, or out) based on their location. They conducted a user study that showed that family members got reassurance of where everyone was.



In their research, they have opened up the view of the user and thought of new information appliances that they would have not thought before if there was not any user testing. Opening up to the user can lead to invention. Another example that they created is the digital postcard where people can send SMS of pictures and text and it will show on the postcard.



Another example is the kitchen postcard which they created which becomes an ambient display and blog space. Think of it like a digital version of putting stuff on the fridge.



They also created a visual answering machine called Bubbleboard where the size of the bubbles indicates the length of the message.



According to Abigail, long term studies in real homes can give new insight into value of technologies for people. Abigail says that we need to redefine the H,C and I in HCI. Can technologies help us to switch off, forget, be isolated, be engaged (the opposite of what technologies do for us but thinking about what it means to be human). We are so increasingly connected, but sometimes we just need to unwind and not be connected, we need a break. So this raises new questions for research and development. Therefore, we need an HCI based on human values.

Abigail and a bunch of other researchers explore this reincarnation of HCI (in my opinion) with their published document from their workshop called Being Human:Human Computer Interaction in the Year 2020 which can be downloaded. I'll for sure be reading this because my research is very much into this area with social networks and how we can bring social networks to mobile and ubiquitous computing.

Tom Rodden talk at U of T

Tom Rodden from the University of Nottingham in the UK who spoke on Interacting in Ubiquitous Computing Environments at the Pervasive conference a couple of weeks ago in Toronto, is speaking at U of T today. So, I'm in this talk right now which is on Ubiquitous Computing in the Real World. There are many synonyms for ubiquitous computing, such as pervasive computing, smart artefacts, smart spaces. A lot of the vision of ubiquitous computing is technical, but according to Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, "what matters is not technology, but its relationship to us" (Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown from PARC). However, since ubiquitous computing involves having technology embedded in the environment, is the future of ubiquitous computing mean that every device has a user manual? How many of you read the user manual for every new gadget that you get (well, I usually don't, cause I just want to use it, and I feel stupid if I have to look at a manual). He gave an example of a picture of a faucet in a US airport where there is an instruction manual that explains how to operate the faucet. You go near the faucet to turn it on, and you walk away to turn it off. If you wear black clothing, then the faucet does not work.

Tom is the director of the Equator project. One of the research works he is explaining is an online game that incorporates location and mixed reality called Can You See Me Now. In this game, players use a PDA and run to catch other players in different cities, and online players can see the interactions happening online. Visualizations can be used to show the coverage of Wi-Fi and GPS, which exposes the gaps within the technology to seamlessly integrate with the real world. What needs to happen is to reveal and make the infrastructure a resource for interaction. One of the games they created involves exploiting the wireless access points as resources within the game.

In order to have ubiquitous computing in the real world, Tom says that we need to expose the invisible. For developers, what gets in the way of creating location-based applications is the infrastructure. Content triggering does not depend on just the location but also the infrastructure. Another neat application they created is Savannah, in which they used a playing field to make a virtual savannah. Children used PDAs to look at a savannah based on where they are positioned in the playing field. But the problem was that the children started to stop and form a circle. The hidden features of the technology need to be revealed to designers, researchers and individuals.

One thing that really struck me and is really true is that the more intelligent the technologies, the more they will frustrate. If we look at the original definition of ubiquitous computing, it is not the technology that is important, but its social effect on people. I think this is where social context needs to be exploited.

I asked a question to Tom after he finished his talk about the option for opting out of the ubiquitous computing system. This comes from what Adam Greenfield talked about in his keynote to the Pervasive conference, about having users be able to abort or revert back away from the system because sometimes the user may not want to conform or follow the ubiquitous computing system. Tom's answer was yes for sure, there needs to be a way for the user to opt out. He even elaborated further that there should be a method for a user to counter-act what the ubiquitous computing system does. This then reminded me of hacking, cause isn't that what hacking is, to counter-act the system and break in?

Nonetheless, it was a great talk and inspiring, a great perspective on ubiquitous computing from someone who is not just building the ubiquitous computing systems because they're cool, but for a purpose and demonstrating that in real life.

On Technorati: pervasive computing, Tom Rodden, ubiquitous computing