In this article, we report on one lab study and seven follow-up studies on a crowdsourcing platform designed to investigate the potential of animation cues to influence users’ perception of two smart systems: a handwriting recognition and a part-of-speech tagging system. Results from the first three studies indicate that animation cues can influence a participant’s perception of both systems’ performance. The subsequent three studies, designed to try and identify an explanation for this effect, suggest that this effect is related to the participants’ mental model of the smart system. The last two studies were designed to characterize the effect more in detail, and they revealed that different amounts of animation do not seem to create substantial differences and that the effect persists even when the system’s performance decreases, but only when the difference in performance level between the systems being compared is small.

Increasing sophistication and ubiquity of digital devices is creating potential for the development of new kinds of actuated interfaces. In this paper, we explore the design space around movement as a form of gestural communication for information output, in simple actuated desktop devices. We were curious as to how people might envision interacting with autonomous technology in the office. Accordingly, we focused our attentions on one prevalent desktop object, an interactive lamp, with three actuated joints, which allowed us to explore the interaction space of such devices. We invited 13 participants to design and enact movements with the lamp to communicate 20 simple messages. We explored a subset of these generated gestures, using the lamp as a personal cueing device in an office setting with 14 new participants. We present our qualitative findings from both studies that let users imagine the usage of an interactive desktop lamp through actuation.

This paper describes the challenges and lessons learned in the experience-centered design (ECD) of the Spheres of Wellbeing, a technology to promote the mental health and wellbeing of a group of women, suffering from significant mental health problems and living in a medium secure hospital unit. First, we describe how our relationship with mental health professionals at the hospital and the aspirations for person-centric care that we shared with them enabled us, in the design of the Spheres, to innovate outside traditional healthcare procedures. We then provide insights into the challenges presented by the particular care culture and existing services and practices in the secure hospital unit that were revealed through our technology deployment. In discussing these challenges, our design enquiry opens up a space to make sense of experience living with complex mental health conditions in highly constrained contexts within which the deployment of the Spheres becomes an opportunity to think about wellbeing in similar contexts.

Research on actuated interfaces has shown that people respond in certain socialized ways to interfaces that exhibit autonomous behaviours. We wished to explore the elements of design that drive people to regard an autonomous, interactive system as a social agent. To explore perceptions of autonomous behaviour in interfaces we created Diri - an autonomous helium balloon, used to document activity in spaces. We implemented two different technological sophistications of Diri, to compare the outcomes of our design decisions. We present our design process, technical details and evaluation workshops, concluding with implications for designing for autonomous behaviour in interfaces.

We present a novel approach to the construction of electronic prototypes which can support a variety of interactive devices. Our technique, which we call circuit stickers, involves adhering physical interface elements such as LEDs, sounders, buttons and sensors onto a cheap and easy-to-make substrate which provides electrical connectivity. This assembly may include control electronics and a battery for standalone operation, or it can be interfaced to a microcontroller or PC. In this paper we illustrate different points in the design space and demonstrate the technical feasibility of our approach. We have found circuit stickers to be versatile and low-cost, supporting quick and easy construction of physically flexible interactive prototypes. Building extra copies of a device is straightforward. We believe this technology has potential for design exploration, research proto-typing, education and for hobbyist projects.

In this paper I want to express my ideas of using autonomous behaviour in Tangible User Interfaces to create a compelling and new kind of interaction between humans and computers. I motivate this approach by reviewing related research, which indicates that people are fascinated by autonomous tangible objects and apply rules of social behaviours towards these objects. The intention is to gain from this effect to leverage human-computer interaction. The idea is not necessary to improve the user performance or results, but to create a more believable and enjoyable smart object interaction. In this work I try to find key concepts and characteristics which are important while designing and implementing such systems.

The use of autonomous behaviour in Tangible User Interfaces can potentially create a compelling and new kind of interaction between humans and computers. We motivate this argument by reviewing related research, which indicates that people are engaged by apparently autonomous behaviours in tangible objects and apply rules of social behaviour towards these smart objects. Our intention is to leverage this effect in support of human-computer interaction. Rather than aiming to improve user performance, we argue that such interfaces can offer a richer and more enjoyable autonomous interface interaction. Herein we present a framework highlighting key concepts and characteristics which are important while designing and implementing Tangible Autonomous Interfaces.

We present a novel approach to graspable interfaces using Touchbugs, actuated physical objects for interacting with interactive surface computing applications. Touchbugs are active tangibles that are able to move across surfaces by employing vibrating motors and can communicate with camera based multi-touch surfaces using infrared LEDs. Touchbug's embedded inertial sensors and computational capabilities open a new interaction space by providing autonomous capabilities for tangibles that allow goal directed behavior.