The Smartphone: A Lacanian Stain, A Tech Killer, and an Embodiment of
Radical Individualism
alt.chi: Confronting Power in HCI
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Aylett, Matthew P.
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Lawson, Shaun
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2016-05-07
v.2
p.501-511
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: YAFR (Yet another futile rant) presents the smartphone: an unstoppable piece
of technology generated from a perfect storm of commercial, technological,
social and psychological factors. We begin by misquoting Steve Jobs and by
being unfairly rude about the HCI community. We then consider the smartphone's
ability to kill off competing technology and to undermine collectivism. We
argue that its role as a Lacanian stain, an exploitative tool, and as a means
of concentrating power into the hands of the few, make it a technology that
will rival the personal automobile in its effect on modern society.
e-Seesaw: A Tangible, Ludic, Parent-child, Awareness System
Late-Breaking Works: Games & Playful Interaction
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Sun, Yingze
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Aylett, Matthew P.
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Vazquez-Alvarez, Yolanda
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2016-05-07
v.2
p.1821-1827
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: In modern China, the pace of life is becoming faster and working pressure is
increasing often leading to pressure on families and family interaction. 23
pairs of working parents and their children were asked what they saw as their
main communication challenges and how they currently used communication
technology to stay in touch. The mobile phone was the dominant form of
communication despite being poorly rated by children as a way of enhancing a
sense of connection and love. Parents and children were presented with a series
of design probes to investigate how current communication technology might be
supported or enhanced with a tangible and playful awareness system. One of the
designs, the e-Seesaw, was selected and evaluated in a lab and home setting.
Participant reaction was positive with the design provoking a novel perspective
on remote parent-child interaction allowing even very young children to both
initiate and control communication.
My Life On Film
Workshop Summaries
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Aylett, Matthew P.
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Thomas, Lisa
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Green, David P.
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Shamma, David A.
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Briggs, Pam
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Kerrigan, Finola
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2016-05-07
v.2
p.3379-3386
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: Social media has begun to migrate from a predominantly text-based medium,
through photography and into cinematography and edited video. Film is a vital
medium through which we not only capture our world, but also seek to understand
it. This workshop explores an emerging area of research within the CHI
community that focuses on applying filmic techniques in two different ways; 1)
to automatically interpret personal data and to allow users to interact with
personal data, and 2) to explore film as a vehicle for the personal curation of
digital identity. This multidisciplinary, one-day workshop will bring together
social scientists, cinematography experts, ethnographers, semantic and graphics
engineers together with general HCI practitioners to explore and evaluate
individual and community representations on film, new ways of translating
traditional social media data into film, the engineering challenges of
automatically rendering filmic media, and the critical role such automatic and
semi-automatic systems can play in persuasion, understanding, and empowerment.
Designing Speech and Multimodal Interactions for Mobile, Wearable, and
Pervasive Applications
Workshop Summaries
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Munteanu, Cosmin
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Irani, Pourang
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Oviatt, Sharon
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Aylett, Matthew
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Penn, Gerald
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Pan, Shimei
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Sharma, Nikhil
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Rudzicz, Frank
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Gomez, Randy
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Nakamura, Keisuke
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Nakadai, Kazuhiro
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2016-05-07
v.2
p.3612-3619
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: Traditional interfaces are continuously being replaced by mobile, wearable,
or pervasive interfaces. Yet when it comes to the input and output modalities
enabling our interactions, we have yet to fully embrace some of the most
natural forms of communication and information processing that humans possess:
speech, language, gestures, thoughts. Very little HCI attention has been
dedicated to designing and developing spoken language and multimodal
interaction techniques, especially for mobile and wearable devices. In addition
to the enormous, recent engineering progress in processing such modalities,
there is now sufficient evidence that many real-life applications do not
require 100% accuracy of processing multimodal input to be useful, particularly
if such modalities complement each other. This multidisciplinary, two-day
workshop will bring together interaction designers, usability researchers, and
general HCI practitioners to analyze the opportunities and directions to take
in designing more natural interactions with mobile and wearable devices, and to
look at how we can leverage recent advances in speech and multimodal
processing.
Don't Say Yes, Say Yes: Interacting with Synthetic Speech Using Tonetable
Interactivity Demos
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Aylett, Matthew P.
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Pullin, Graham
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Braude, David A.
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Potard, Blaise
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Hennig, Shannon
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Ferreira, Marilia Antunes
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2016-05-07
v.2
p.3643-3646
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: This demo is not about what you say but how you say it. Using a tangible
system, Tonetable, we explore the shades of meaning carried by the same word
said in many different ways. The same word or phrase is synthesised using the
Intel Edison with different expressive techniques. Tonetable allows
participants to play these different tokens and select the manner they should
be synthesised for different contexts. Adopting the visual language of
mid-century modernism, the system provokes participants to think deeply about
how they might want to say yes, oh really, or I see. Designed with the very
serious objective of supporting expressive personalisation of AAC devices, but
with the ability to produce a playful and amusing experience, Tonetable will
change the way you think about speech synthesis and what yes really means.
Generating Narratives from Personal Digital Data: Using Sentiment, Themes,
and Named Entities to Construct Stories
Demonstrations
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Farrow, Elaine
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Dickinson, Thomas
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Aylett, Matthew P.
Proceedings of IFIP INTERACT'15: Human-Computer Interaction, Part IV
2015-09-14
v.4
p.473-477
Keywords: Social media; Narrative; Triptych; Multi-media
© Copyright 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
Summary: As the quantity and variety of personal digital data shared on social media
continues to grow, how can users make sense of it? There is growing interest
among HCI researchers in using narrative techniques to support interpretation
and understanding. This work describes our prototype application, ReelOut,
which uses narrative techniques to allow users to understand their data as more
than just a database. The online service extracts data from multiple social
media sources and augments it with semantic information such as sentiment,
themes, and named entities. The interactive editor automatically constructs a
story by using unit selection to fit data units to a simple narrative
structure. It allows the user to change the story interactively by rejecting
certain units or selecting a new narrative target. Finally, images from the
story can be exported as a video clip or a collage.
The Broken Dream of Pervasive Sentient Ambient Calm Invisible Ubiquitous
Computing
alt.chi: Augmentation
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Aylett, Matthew P.
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Quigley, Aaron J.
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'15 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2015-04-18
v.2
p.425-435
© Copyright 2015 ACM
Summary: We dreamt of technology becoming invisible, for our wants and needs to be
primary and the tools we use for making them a reality to become like a genie,
a snap of the fingers and ta daa, everything is realised. What went wrong? Was
this always an impossible dream? How did we end up with this fetishised
obsession with mobile phones? How did we end up with technology tearing apart
our sense of experience and replacing it with 'Likes'. No one meant this to
happen, not even US Corporates, they just wanted to own us, not diminish our
sense of existing and interacting within the real world. In this paper we
consider how tools took over, and how the dream of ubiquitous (or whatever its
called) computing was destroyed. We rally rebellious forces and consider how we
might fight back, and whether we should even bother trying.
Generating Narratives from Personal Digital Data: Triptychs
WIP Theme: Social Computing
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Aylett, Matthew P.
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Farrow, Elaine
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Pschetz, Larissa
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Dickinson, Thomas
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'15 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2015-04-18
v.2
p.1875-1880
© Copyright 2015 ACM
Summary: The need for users to make sense of their growing mass of personal digital
data presents a challenge to Design and HCI researchers. There is a growing
interest in using narrative techniques to support the interpretation and
understanding of such data. In this early study we explore methods of selecting
images from personal Instagram accounts in the form of a triptych (a sequence
of three images) in order to create a sense of narrative. We present a brief
description of the algorithms behind image selection, evaluate how effective
they are in creating a sense of narrative, and discuss the wider implications
of our work. Results show that semantic tagging, a dynamic programming
algorithm, and a simple narrative structure produced triptychs which were
significantly more story-like, with a significantly more coherent order, than a
random selection, or a neutral sequence of images.
Interactive Radio: A New Platform for Calm Computing
WIP Theme: Ubicomp, Robots and Wearables
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Aylett, Matthew P.
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Vazquez-Alvarez, Yolanda
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Baillie, Lynne
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'15 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2015-04-18
v.2
p.2085-2090
© Copyright 2015 ACM
Summary: Interactive radio is proposed as a platform for Weiser's calm computing
vision. An evaluation of CereProc's MyMyRadio is presented as a case study to
highlight the potential and challenges of an interactive radio approach: the
difficulty of transitioning between passive and active modes of interaction,
and the challenge of designing such services. The evaluation showed: 1) A
higher workload for MyMyRadio for active tasks compared to default applications
(e.g. Facebook app); 2) No significant difference in workload for passive tasks
(e.g. listening to audio rendered RSS updates vs Browser app); 3) A higher
workload when listening to music within MyMyRadio vs iTunes; and 4) A
preference for RSS feed content compared to content from social media. We
conclude by discussing the potential of interactive radio as a platform for
pervasive eyes-free services.
Designing speech and language interactions
Workshop summaries
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Munteanu, Cosmin
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Jones, Matt
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Whittaker, Steve
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Oviatt, Sharon
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Aylett, Matthew
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Penn, Gerald
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Brewster, Stephen
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d'Alessandro, Nicolas
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2014 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2014-04-26
v.2
p.75-78
© Copyright 2014 ACM
Summary: Speech and natural language remain our most natural forms of interaction;
yet the HCI community have been very timid about focusing their attention on
designing and developing spoken language interaction techniques. While
significant efforts are spent and progress made in speech recognition,
synthesis, and natural language processing, there is now sufficient evidence
that many real-life applications using speech technologies do not require 100%
accuracy to be useful. This is particularly true if such systems are designed
with complementary modalities that better support their users or enhance the
systems' usability. Engaging the CHI community now is timely -- many recent
commercial applications, especially in the mobile space, are already tapping
the increased interest in and need for natural user interfaces (NUIs) by
enabling speech interaction in their products. This multidisciplinary, one-day
workshop will bring together interaction designers, usability researchers, and
general HCI practitioners to analyze the opportunities and directions to take
in designing more natural interactions based on spoken language, and to look at
how we can leverage recent advances in speech processing in order to gain
widespread acceptance of speech and natural language interaction.
None of a CHInd: relationship counselling for HCI and speech technology
alt.chi: limits and futures
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Aylett, Matthew P.
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Kristensson, Per Ola
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Whittaker, Steve
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Vazquez-Alvarez, Yolanda
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2014 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2014-04-26
v.2
p.749-760
© Copyright 2014 ACM
Summary: It's an old story. A relationship built on promises turns to bitterness and
recriminations. But speech technology has changed: Yes, we know we hurt you, we
know things didn't turn out the way we hoped, but can't we put the past behind
us? We need you, we need design. And you? You need us. How can you fulfill a
dream of pervasive technology without us? So let's look at what went wrong.
Let's see how we can fix this thing. For the sake of little Siri, she needs a
family. She needs to grow into more than a piece of PR, and maybe, if we could
only work out our differences, just maybe, think of the magic we might make
together.
Multilevel auditory displays for mobile eyes-free location-based interaction
Works-in-progress
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Vazquez-Alvarez, Yolanda
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Aylett, Matthew P.
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Brewster, Stephen A.
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von Jungenfeld, Rocio
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Virolainen, Antti
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2014 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2014-04-26
v.2
p.1567-1572
© Copyright 2014 ACM
Summary: This paper explores the use of multilevel auditory displays to enable
eyes-free mobile interaction with location-based information in a conceptual
art exhibition space. Multilevel auditory displays enable user interaction with
concentrated areas of information. However, it is necessary to consider how to
present the auditory streams without overloading the user. We present an
initial study in which a top-level exocentric sonification layer was used to
advertise information present in a gallery-like space. Then, in a secondary
interactive layer, three different conditions were evaluated that varied in the
presentation (sequential versus simultaneous) and spatialisation
(non-spatialised versus egocentric spatialisation) of multiple auditory
sources. Results show that 1) participants spent significantly more time
interacting with spatialised displays, 2) there was no evidence that a switch
from an exocentric to an egocentric display increased workload or lowered
satisfaction, and 3) there was no evidence that simultaneous presentation of
spatialised Earcons in the secondary display increased workload.
