This paper introduces a novel methodological approach for surfacing the acceptability and adoption challenges that confront future and emerging technologies from the perspective of mundane action, in which they will ultimately be embedded and used. This novel approach configures design fiction as a breaching experiment to surface taken for granted background expectancies that are fateful for acceptability and adoption. We explain the logic of this new interdisciplinary method and present a concrete case to demonstrate its viability: a design fiction called Experiencing the Future Mundane (EFM), which depicts a future world in which watching TV is driven by smart adaptive media. We explicate the design of the EFM, how it was configured to breach common sense knowledge and surface taken for granted background expectancies concerning how watching TV works and is expected to work, the acceptability and adoption challenges that emerge from user engagement with the experience, and how this novel approach may be adopted more broadly.

1. A key tenet to this paper’s contribution is the assertion that while there are many specialized terminologies relating to more-than-human design – terms including but not limited to posthumanism...

As novel media experiences turn towards audience personal data for enhancement, a range of socio-technical challenges that confront their adoption into the everyday lives of audiences are simultaneously surfaced. Podcasts, being the latest member of this emergent phenomena help present the next generation of challenges here like the management of trust within scenarios of implicit (audio-based experiences’) data collection and the consideration for real world social scenarios where these media experiences are shared. This paper reports the conceptualisation and design phase of the first adaptive podcast that seeks to explore these questions of management of trust and sociality of data through the application of the principles of Human Data Interaction, particularly the provision of scope for user data negotiations.

Everyday interactions with computers are increasingly likely to involve elements of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Encompassing a broad spectrum of technologies and applications, AI poses many challenges for HCI and design. One such challenge is the need to make AI's role in a given system legible to the user in a meaningful way. In this paper we employ a Research through Design (RtD) approach to explore how this might be achieved. Building on contemporary concerns and a thorough exploration of related research, our RtD process reflects on designing imagery intended to help increase AI legibility for users. The paper makes three contributions. First, we thoroughly explore prior research in order to critically unpack the AI legibility problem space. Second, we respond with design proposals whose aim is to enhance the legibility, to users, of systems using AI. Third, we explore the role of design-led enquiry as a tool for critically exploring the intersection between HCI and AI research.

Digital-augmentation of print-media can provide contextually relevant audio, visual, or haptic content to supplement the static text and images. The design of such augmentation--its medium, quantity, frequency, content, and access technique--can have a significant impact on the reading experience. In the worst case, such as where children are learning to read, the print medium can become a proxy for accessing digital content only, and the textual content is avoided. In this work, we examine how augmented content can change the reader's behaviour with a comic book. We first report on the usage of a commercially available augmented comic for children, providing evidence that a third of all readers converted to simply viewing the digital media when printed content is duplicated. Second, we explore the design space for digital content augmentation in print media. Third, we report a user study with 136 children that examined the impact of both content length and presentation in a digitally-augmented comic book. From this, we report a series of design guidelines to assist designers and editors in the development of digitally-augmented print media.

In this paper we explore the motivations for, and practicalities of, incorporating "implications for adoption" into HCI research practice. Implications for adoption are speculations which may be used in research projects to scrutinize and explore the implications and requirements associated with a technology's potential adoption in the future. There is a rich tradition within the HCI community of implementing, demonstrating, and testing new interactions or technologies by building prototypes. User-centered design methods help us to develop prototypes to and move toward designs that are validated, efficient, and rewarding to use. However, these studies rarely shift their temporal focus to consider, in any significant detail, what it would mean for a technology to exist beyond its prototypical implementation, in other words how these prototypes might ultimately be adopted. Given the CHI community's increasing interest in technology-related human and social effects, the lack of attention paid to adoption represents a significant and relevant gap in current practices. It is this gap that the paper addresses and in doing so offers three contributions: (1) exploring and unpacking different notions of adoption from varying disciplinary perspectives; (2) discussing why considering adoption is relevant and useful, specifically in HCI research; (3) discussing methods for addressing this need, specifically design fiction, and understanding how utilizing these methods may provide researchers with means to better understand the myriad of nuanced, situated, and technologically-mediated relationships that innovative designs facilitate.

Adapting and changing the systems and technologies involved in civic engagement with local government is among the key challenges of collaborative technologies for political participation. In such contexts, both existing sets of technologies and ingrained, often formalised practices, the ‘rules of the game’, constrain any opportunity for intervention. Additionally, ‘civic’ and expert groups with conflicting agendas and divergent demands on public choices assert their influence in these transformation programmes. The article argues that established methods in collaborative systems design have thus far overlooked the role of recurring actions involved in public participation as well as the formal rules and ingrained practices that construct them. Yet, such patterns present a valuable resource for design interventions. Thus, based on an institutional approach, the article outlines a methodology for requirement gathering by mapping the relations of actors, software and their use along identifiable action situations. The method called for a dialogue between socio-technical-spatial contexts of public service and specific actions taking place within it. Drawing on a case of organising civic engagement in urban planning, the article discusses how to find and trace existing practices across social settings, information technologies and material contexts where engagements take place. The approach underscores the existing institutional contexts in inspiring, opening and constraining the opportunities to support ‘civics’.

This paper considers how design fictions in the form of 'imaginary abstracts' can be extended into complete 'fictional papers'. Imaginary abstracts are a type of design fiction that are usually included within the content of 'real' research papers, they comprise brief accounts of fictional problem frames, prototypes, user studies and findings. Design fiction abstracts have been proposed as a means to move beyond solutionism to explore the potential societal value and consequences of new HCI concepts. In this paper we contrast the properties of imaginary abstracts, with the properties of a published paper that presents fictional research, Game of Drones. Extending the notion of imaginary abstracts so that rather than including fictional abstracts within a 'non-fiction' research paper, Game of Drones is fiction from start to finish (except for the concluding paragraph where the fictional nature of the paper is revealed). In this paper we review the scope of design fiction in HCI research before contrasting the properties of imaginary abstracts with the properties of our example fictional research paper. We argue that there are clear merits and weaknesses to both approaches, but when used tactfully and carefully fictional research papers may further empower HCI's burgeoning design discourse with compelling new methods.

The widespread use of the desktop metaphor during the early adoption of computers has promoted the utilization of files and folders. However many people have use cases that are not well suited to the strict nature of these systems. As a result, alternative file system paradigms are being explored by the research community, and by leading software vendors. Tangible interactions for exploring these alternative file systems have largely been unexplored, despite the many benefits that tangible interfaces could bring to such systems. Those that do explore this area are limited in information bandwidth by the number of feedback channels used to represent this information. Therefore, in this paper we introduce two associated works in progress: one that explores the design of a tag based file system affording tangible interaction; and a second that initiates the consideration of ways that we can increase the information bandwidth of such systems using physically embodied files. We believe this research identifies an important area that tangible interaction designers should explore given the dominance of file systems in computing tasks.

Whilst empathy is considered an essential component of what it means to be human, it is frequently absent as a design objective when creating modern communication systems. This paper presents an approach to designing for, as opposed to with, empathy using the example of two design interventions to create embodied rituals reflecting prayers and worries of individuals within a church community. The aim of these interventions is to facilitate conversation and support within the community, thus generating empathy between community members, and inciting prosocial behaviour through embodied cognition.

Research into the values motivating unsustainable behavior has generated unique insight into how NGOs and environmental campaigns contribute toward successfully fostering significant and long-term behavior change, yet thus far this research has not been applied to the domain of sustainable HCI. We explore the implications of this research as it relates to the potential limitations of current approaches to persuasive technology, and what it means for designing higher impact interventions. As a means of communicating these implications to be readily understandable and implementable, we develop a set of antipatterns to describe persuasive technology approaches that values research suggests are unlikely to yield significant sustainability wins, and a complementary set of patterns to describe new guidelines for what may become persuasive technology best practice.

This paper challenges the sustainable HCI community to move away from a focus on demand and instead address climate change as a supply problem. We identify a new route to impact, namely addressing the psychological barriers that interfere with political mobilization toward limiting the use of fossil fuels. Five barriers are explored as a means of re-focusing research objectives for the community.

The magic lens paradigm, a commonly used descriptor for handheld Augmented Reality (AR), presents the user with dual views: the augmented view (magic lens) that appears on the device, and the real view of the surroundings (what the user can see around the perimeter of the device). The augmented view is typically implemented by rendering the video captured by the rear-facing camera directly onto the device's screen. This results in dual perspectives - the real world being captured from the device's perspective rather than the user's perspective (what an observer would see looking through a transparent glass pane). These differences manifest themselves in misaligned and/or incorrectly scaled transparency resulting in the dual-view problem.

Typically handheld AR systems utilize a single back-facing camera and the screen in order to implement device transparency. This creates the dual-view problem a consequence of virtual transparency which does not match true transparency - what the user would see looking through a transparent glass pane. The dual-view problem affects usability of handheld AR systems and is commonly addressed though user-perspective rendering solutions. Whilst such approach produces promising results, the complexity of implementing user-perspective rendering and the fact it does not solve all sources that produce the dual-view problem, means it only ever addresses part of the problem. This paper seeks to create a more complete solution for the dual-view problem that will be applicable to readily available handheld-device. We pursue this goal by designing, implementing and evaluating a novel interaction paradigm we call `contact-view'. By utilizing the back and front-facing camera and the environment base-plane texture - predefined or incrementally created on the fly, we enable placing the device directly on top of the base-plane. As long as the position of the phone in relation to the base-plane is known, appropriate segment of the occluded base-plane can be rendered on the device screen, result of which is transparency in which dual-view problem is eliminated.

In Augmented Reality (AR) the real world is enhanced by superimposed digital information commonly visualized through augmented annotations. The visualized data comes from many different data sources. One increasingly important source of data is user generated content. Unfortunately, AR tools that support user generated content are not common hence the majority of augmented data within AR applications is not generated utilizing AR technology. In this paper we discuss the main reasons for this and evaluate how the contact-view paradigm could enhance annotation authoring process within the class of tabletop size AR workspaces. This evaluation is based on a prototype that allows musicians to annotate a music score manuscript utilizing freehand drawing on top of device screen. Experimentation showed the potential of contact-view paradigm as an annotation authoring method that performs well in single and collaborative multi-user situations.

This paper reports on a user study to gauge user interaction with RSS based mobile electronic updates from a Moodle based virtual learning environment. The electronic updates can be received in three dimensions of context: time, location and activity. The study aims to compare and evaluate the effectiveness of these context dimensions by comparing the level of user engagement. The mobile updates relate to teaching material, course work feedback, and general announcements from academic staff across a number of academic departments. As well as user profiling when interacting with the updates, early investigations show that there exists peak times when users interact with these applications. Results also show that time based electronic updates are the most popular, engagement wise, when compared to location and activity.

In handheld Augmented Reality (AR) the magic-lens paradigm is typically implemented by rendering the video stream captured by the back-facing camera onto the device's screen. Unfortunately, such implementations show the real world from the device's perspective rather than the user's perspective. This dual-perspective results in misaligned and incorrectly scaled imagery, a predominate cause for the dual-view problem with potential to distort user's spatial perception. This paper presents a user study that analyzes users' expectations, spatial-perception, and their ability to deal with the dual-view problem, by comparing device-perspective and fixed Point-of-View (POV) user-perspective rendering. The results confirm the existence of the dual-view perceptual issue and that the majority of participants expect user-perspective rendering irrespective of their previous AR experience. Participants also demonstrated significantly better spatial perception and preference of the user-perspective view.

Handheld Augmented Reality (AR) is often presented using the magic-lens paradigm in which a magic-lens is a transparent interface. Such transparency is usually implemented by rendering camera captured video on the device's screen. The transparency quality is limited by the video stream quality which may be affected by: unfocused camera lens, poor lighting conditions and limited video stream resolution. All these factors may reduce the readability of the AR scene. To address quality of rendering and increase scene readability, this paper presents an enhanced virtual transparency solution where segments of the scene are replaced by high definition digital content. The proposed enhanced virtual transparency isdemonstrated through the design of a digital magnifying glass which has been implemented on of-the-shelf mobile phone.

Handheld Augmented Reality (AR) is often presented using the magic-lens paradigm where the handheld device is portrayed as if it was transparent. Such a virtual transparency is usually implemented using video captured by a single camera rendered on the device's screen. This removes binocular-disparity, which may undermine user's ability to correctly estimate depth when seeing the world through the magic-lens. To confirm such an assumption this paper presents a qualitative user study that compares a magic-lens implemented on a mobile phone and a transparent glass replica. Observational results and questionnaire analysis indicate that binocular-disparity may play a significant role in participants' depth perception. These promising results led to the subsequent implementation of a stereoscopic magic-lens prototype on a commercially available mobile device.

The majority of mobile devices nowadays harness location and orientation-sensing capabilities, permitting for sensor based Mixed Reality (MR) gaming experiences such as Augmented Reality (AR) games. Nonetheless, only few entertainment implementations of sensor based AR systems emerged, predominantly due to low precision of sensory information causing crude and jerky augmentation, significantly impacting meaningful augmentation that inevitably affects gameplay experience. In this paper, we present a novel pervasive mobile AR Location Based Game (LBG) named Time-wARpXplorer (TARX) where a seamless design approach is used in order to address the quality of augmentation. TARX comprises of a mobile client and an online authoring tool, created to encourage visitors and locals to explore the city of Lancaster by travelling back in time and space to discover their immediate and distant surroundings. Within the game, time travel is linked to present day through the implementation of Foursquare's checkin platform to further raise awareness of historic sites. This paper focuses on the design considerations implemented through an iterative design process and prototyping of the mobile client, of which a novel interface emerged.

Despite the ever expanding forms of digital entertainment, there are still Television (TV, telly) shows and events that create an audience desire to be part of a mass shared experience. In the past direct inter-audience interaction of such events has been restricted to either a shared location at the time of broadcast or later discussions amongst friends and colleagues often described as `water cooler moments'. With the advent of online social networks that facilitate status updates these moments can be instantly shared in real-time, creating a second screen for direct interaction with TV. In this paper we investigate the role of social media as the facilitator of second screen for TV, through the analysis of tweets for weekend primetime UK TV show the X-Factor. The results highlight the rich source of information that can be extracted in real-time and its enormous potential for broadcasters and producers both in terms of reinvigorating live TV viewing and creating new forms of audience interaction.

Trends such as the increasing adoption of smartphones, the development of the service-oriented internet, and diffusion of sensing technologies into cities have the potential to combine in order to form a ubiquitous computing infrastructure. At the same time, as the computer diffuses into the physical world, it loses its location-neutrality, exposing the urgent need for a debate of design choices in ubiquitous computing. In this paper, we discuss the process of urban development as a source of inspiration for such design choices. Looking from the ground up, of particular interest is the opportunity to localize and democratize an emerging ubiquitous computing infrastructure. The design choices we negotiate today will determine the society in which we will live in the future.

Many global internet services today can be thought of as being managed 'top-down' without much appreciation or requirement for local control. New services such as location-based data stores implemented in cities around the world suggest opportunities for novel forms of management of data with relevance to a local context. We argue that such localization of ubiquitous system management provides an opportunity in supporting local off-line interaction and 'community building' and that urban development, which requires interaction between members of different communities, presents an interesting case where such systems could be realised.

This paper proposes a mobile application for retrieving electronic updates from virtual learning environments using dimensions of context. Using automatically generated RSS feeds from a Moodle based virtual learning environment, information can easily be delivered in a concise format through wireless networks directly to the student's device. The paper reports on a pilot study carried out to provide quantitative feedback of students' experiences with electronic updates based on time and location. The design and implementation of the application proposes activity as a third dimension of context as a parameter defined by the user to control the dissemination of information. The development is part of an overall investigation into the role of different dimensions of context when disseminating information from a virtual learning environment to mobile devices.

Free All Monsters! is a novel location based mobile game which incorporates user generated content in an attempt to broaden its appeal by encouraging creativity. An online portal allows participants to create content which is then used to populate the game. The game was recently launched on the iPhone App Store and is aimed and designed to be a family orientated activity.

One of the key challenges of markerless Augmented Reality (AR) systems, where no a priori information of the environment is available, is map and scale initialization. In such systems, the scale is unknown as it is impossible to determine the scale from a sequence of images alone. Implementing scale is vital for ensuring that augmented objects are contextually sensitive to the environment they are projected upon. In this paper we demonstrate a sensor and vision fusion approach for robust and user-friendly initialization of map and scale. The map is initialized, using inbuilt accelerometers, whilst scale is initialized by the camera auto-focusing capability. The later is possible by applying the Depth From Focus (DFF) method, which was, till now, limited to high precision camera systems. The demonstrated illustrates benefits of such a system, which is running on a commercially available mobile phone Nokia N900.

In this paper, we present findings of a research project in which mobile phones were used as part of a multi-methods approach to analyze the effects of air pollution on children's journeys to and from school. In particular, we will present the results from the space-time blogs generated by 30 Year 8 pupils (aged 12--13) on their school journeys during four periods of study across the seasons of a year. The blogs were generated by the teenagers using a specially created application running on a mobile phone linked to a Bluetooth GPS unit and consist of spatially and temporally-referenced texts and images together with a record of their route using GPS coordinates stored at one second intervals. Whilst the blogs generated considerable amounts of quantitative information, particularly when coupled with the pollution profiles of the routes the teenagers travelled, it is the depth of qualitative information revealed in the interviews with the teenagers after each study period, using the routes and blogs as a trigger, that demonstrates the benefits of the multi-methods approach. In particular, we highlight some of the depth of contextual information revealed not only in regard to the use of the phone application and GPS unit but also the complex social factors which contribute to formation of the school journey.

This paper presents MobiToss, a novel application for creating and sharing mobile multimedia art with an off-the-shelf mobile phone equipped with built-in accelerometer sensors allowing gesture control. The user first takes a photo or captures a video with the phone and then using a 'throwing' gesture transfers the clip onto a large public display for instant viewing and manipulation by tilting the phone in different directions. The system augments the user-created clip with other items such as music or brand labels and the encoded clip is automatically sent back to the phone as a personal artefact of the event. The clip is also uploaded to a dedicated community website for sharing the created multimedia art with others. MobiToss could be deployed e.g. in clubs, pubs and concerts as a participatory VJ-tool. In addition to the design the paper presents the results of a preliminary user evaluation, which highlight the novel art experience provided by MobiToss.

Devices that enable video and audio media stored on a home computer to be viewed on a television located elsewhere in the house have achieved only marginal penetration into the home market. Interoperability between devices and software systems is seen as a barrier to broader adoption. Three main areas of concern: media library index sharing; network protocols; and media encoding were identified whilst developing server software to allow a third party device to access Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition functionality. This paper introduces a generic software infrastructure to facilitate multiple different devices to access media server functionality. The infrastructure comprises of a driver based interface to multimedia devices, a DirectShow based transcoder, and an interface to media library index. This infrastructure tackled successfully the identified issues.

This paper presents the results of a successful development of an algorithm to reduce processing time for mobile hosted location aware software applications. It starts with a review of location based services and discusses issues surrounding various designs to place the algorithm in context. The algorithm draws on various methodologies pioneered in the high-speed 3D graphics industry to reduce processing time checking for collisions between a user and location aware data points. The algorithm and experiment are presented in a concise manner before the results are shown. The results conclude that the algorithm presents a very significant improvement over brute force methods. With a database of 100,000 data points a 99% reduction in processing time is observed

Wireless hotspots in public venues offer customers the prospect of broadband Internet connectivity that nomadic workers would experience in a corporate environment. Hotspots not only benefit users but also provide opportunities for businesses, such as hotspot wholesalers and telecommunication companies, to enter the market to gain a competitive edge. Many hotspot players are establishing partnership and collaboration, and as a result they have developed business operating models to manage the hotspot effectively. However, we believe that, although these current models to be profitable to some companies, they are likely to be a burden to users and therefore likely to limit growth in this area. The paper identifies the existing hotspot business models and proposes a hybrid hotspot operational model with advertising as the primary feature to encourage a wider deployment of hotspots. A technical implementation of the system software that provides the operational capabilities such that local advertisement can be displayed on a user machine in return for 'free' Internet access is also presented.

We present a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) code-division-multiple-access (CDMA) communication system based on complete complementary (CC) codes (CC-CDMA) in a time-dispersive (i.e. frequency-selective fading) channel. This system utilizes a novel combination, which consists of orthogonal CC codes for data spreading and a suitably designed multiuser-detector (MUD) algorithm, in order to enhance the current 3rd generation (3G) mobile systems. The simulation results for the CC-CDMA system, obtained in a frequency-selective fading channel, reveal significant improvement in bit-error-rate (BER) performance, and consequently the achieved high data rates (HDR) compared with a conventional Walsh codes based MIMO CDMA (Walsh-CDMA) system.

The market for broadband hotspots is expected to grow with the deployment of WiFi technology becoming the standard to access the Internet in a range of mobile settings. Many businesses are entering into the market, looking at the promising prospects and opportunities offered by hotspots. Some companies are investing to become a hotspot venue like Starbucks and McDonalds, while T-Mobile, the telecommunication carrier, is providing WiFi service to hotspot venues. Toshiba and Hewlett Packard are competing to develop inexpensive and deploy systems to be used in hotspots. Despite the rapid development, some analysts are concerned about operation models of hotspots that might affect hotspot businesses in the long term and consequently, limit the growth in this area. The existing models such as the pay-per-use model are not user-friendly in terms of the cost imposed to users. Therefore, we are proposing a new hotspot model developed for local community. This model will be able to drive the deployment of hotspots in favour of the users. This paper discusses the concept of Webring used by the Internet to link Websites that have common interests and applies the framework to create a new hotspot model for local communities called a 'hotring'. The feature and structure of the proposed model enable information sharing, enabling local advertisement and announcement to be displayed on a user machine accessing the hotspots are also presented.

Suitable techniques for high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) services, using wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA), are currently being considered by the third generation partnership project (3GPP). One of the systems currently under consideration is a space-time coding (STC) architecture using the vertical-bell-labs-layered-space-time (V-BLAST) system on the downlink-shared channel (DSCH), which will allow simultaneous transmissions over multiple channels destined for a single user. Although link level results for flat fading channels indicate significant performance advantages over the conventional single antenna systems, it is less successful for frequency-selective fading. Corresponding methods of design implementation are also being developed using techniques such as system-on-a-chip (SoC), digital signal processors (DSPs), and field program gate arrays (FPGA). In this paper, we present a performance comparison for both fixed and floating point DSP implementations for the proposed V-BLAST system.