Leisure activities are a source of meaning and enjoyment for individuals across the lifespan. In this study, we conducted interviews with twenty-four older adults living in four different independent living communities. We present societal and ecological factors and motivations that influenced the way people participated in and decided what constitutes leisure activities. The goal of maintaining physical and cognitive health was often intertwined with motivations to engage in leisure activities. We discuss how this fits into the broader framework of successful aging and implications for technology design. We also provide an example of how findings from this study can be applied to a specific leisure activity: watching television.

Smart devices are becoming increasingly commercially available. However, uptake of these devices has been slow and abandonment swift, which indicates that smart devices may not currently meet the needs of users. To advance an understanding of the ways users benefit from, are challenged by, and abandon smart devices, we asked a group of users to purchase smart sensing devices to advance themselves towards a personal, self-defined goal. We found that participants abandoned devices because they did not fit with the their conceptions of themselves, the data collected by devices were perceived to not be useful, and device maintenance became unmanageable. Participants used devices because they had developed routines and because devices were useful, satisfied curiosity, and held hope for potential benefit to them. We propose ways to reduce barriers, motivate use, and argue for envisioning an additional function of these devices for short-term interventions, in addition to standard long-term use.

Loupe is a novel interactive device with a near-eye virtual display similar to head-up display glasses that retains a handheld form factor. We present our hardware implementation and discuss our user interface that leverages Loupe's unique combination of properties. In particular, we present our input capabilities, spatial metaphor, opportunities for using the round aspect of Loupe, and our use of focal depth. We demonstrate how those capabilities come together in an example application designed to allow quick access to information feeds.

MOSOCO is a mobile assistive application that uses augmented reality and the visual supports of a validated curriculum, the Social Compass, to help children with autism practice social skills in real-life situations. In this paper, we present the results of a seven-week deployment study of MOSOCO in a public school in Southern California with both students with autism and neurotypical students. The results of our study demonstrate that MOSOCO facilitates practicing and learning social skills, increases both quantity and quality of social interactions, reduces social and behavioral missteps, and enables the integration of children with autism in social groups of neurotypical children. The findings from this study reveal emergent practices of the uses of mobile assistive technologies in real-life situations.

We present Facet, a multi-display wrist worn system consisting of multiple independent touch-sensitive segments joined into a bracelet. Facet automatically determines the pose of the system as a whole and of each segment individually. It further supports multi-segment touch, yielding a rich set of touch input techniques. Our work builds on these two primitives to allow the user to control how applications use segments alone and in coordination. Applications can expand to use more segments, collapses to encompass fewer, and be swapped with other segments. We also explore how the concepts from Facet could apply to other devices in this design space.

In this paper, we present the results of an empirical study of perceptions towards pervasive video recording. We describe a commonly used model for understanding information privacy, the Concern for Information Privacy (CFIP) model, and present the ways that this model and its associated questionnaire can shed light on information privacy concerns about pervasive and ubiquitous computing technologies. Specifically, the CFIP model encourages analysis of data across four facets of experience: the collection of personal data, the risk of improper access, the potential for unauthorized secondary use, and the challenge of preventing or correcting errors in the data. We further identify areas not well handled by this model of information privacy and suggest avenues for future work, including research on how and when to notify people about recording technologies, awareness of data provenance and leakage, and understanding of and access to the data assemblage being created about individuals.

Visual schedules--the use of symbols to represent a series of activities or steps--have been successfully used by caregivers to help children with autism to understand, structure, and predict activities in their daily lives. Building from in-depth fieldwork and participatory design sessions, we developed vSked, an interactive and collaborative visual scheduling system designed for elementary school classrooms. We evaluated vSked in situ in one autism-specific classroom over three weeks. In this paper, we present the design principles, technical solution, and results from this successful deployment. Use of vSked resulted in reductions in staff effort required to use visual supports. vSked also resulted in improvements in the perceived quality and quantity of communication and social interactions in the classroom.

Interventions to support children with autism often include the use of visual supports, which are cognitive tools to enable learning and the production of language. Although visual supports are effective in helping to diminish many of the challenges of autism, they are difficult and time-consuming to create, distribute, and use. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study focused on uncovering design guidelines for interactive visual supports that would address the many challenges inherent to current tools and practices. We present three prototype systems that address these design challenges with the use of large group displays, mobile personal devices, and personal recording technologies. We also describe the interventions associated with these prototypes along with the results from two focus group discussions around the interventions. We present further design guidance for visual supports and discuss tensions inherent to their design.

This paper presents an analysis of attitudes towards everyday tracking and recording technologies (e.g., credit cards, store loyalty cards, store video cameras). This work focuses on both institutional and end-user tracking and recording technologies. In particular, this paper describes (1) an empirical interview and survey study of everyday institutional tracking and recording technologies and (2) an analysis of these empirical data against a framework originally used to describe tension points for end-user tracking and recording technologies. Results from the study demonstrate that people can be highly concerned with information privacy while simultaneously reporting significantly less concern regarding the use of everyday technologies that have the capabilities to collect, process, and disseminate personal information. The empirical results and theoretical analysis identify and begin to explain this dissonance. Furthermore, we provide extensions to the analytic framework for capture and access technologies to address differences, similarities, and interplay between institutional and end-user tracking and recording technologies. The results of this paper contribute to the fields of personal and ubiquitous computing by providing significant insight relevant to the evaluation, design, deployment, and adoption of new tracking and recording technologies.

Collaborative brainstorming can be a challenging but important part of creative group problem solving. Mind-mapping has the potential to enhance the brainstorming process but has its own challenges when used in a group. We introduce GroupMind, a collaborative mind-mapping tool that addresses these challenges and opens new opportunities for creative teamwork, including brainstorming. We present a semi-controlled evaluation of GroupMind and its impact on teamwork, problem solving and collaboration for brainstorming activities. GroupMind performs better than using a traditional whiteboard in both interaction group and nominal group settings for the task involving memory recall. The hierarchical mind-map structure also imposes important framing effects on group dynamics and idea organization during the brainstorming process. We also present design ideas to assist in the development of future tools to support creative problem solving in groups.

In this paper, we present a study of responses to the idea of being recorded by a ubicomp recording technology called SenseCam. This study focused on real-life situations in two North American and two European locations. We present the findings of this study and their implications, specifically how those who might be recorded perceive and react to SenseCam. We describe what system parameters, social processes, and policies are required to meet the needs of both the primary users and these secondary stakeholders and how being situated within a particular locale can influence responses. Our results indicate that people would tolerate potential incursions from SenseCam for particular purposes. Furthermore, they would typically prefer to be informed about and to consent to recording as well as to grant permission before any data is shared. These preferences, however, are unlikely to instigate a request for deletion or other action on their part. These results inform future design of recording technologies like SenseCam and provide a broader understanding of how ubicomp technologies might be taken up across different cultural and political regions.

This paper presents an exploration and analysis of attitudes towards everyday tracking and recording technologies (e. g., credit cards, store loyalty cards, store video cameras). Interview participants reported being highly concerned with information privacy. At the same time, however, they also reported being significantly less concerned regarding the use of everyday technologies that have the capabilities to collect, process, and disseminate personal information. We present results from this study that both identify and begin to explain this discrepancy.

Academic conferences provide a social space for people to present their work and interact with one another. However, opportunities for interaction are unevenly distributed among the attendees. We seek to extend the opportunities for interaction among attendees by using technology to enable them to reveal information about their background and interests in different settings. We evaluate a suite of applications that augment three physical social spaces at an academic conference. The applications were designed to augment formal conference paper sessions and informal breaks. A mixture of qualitative observation and survey response data are used to frame the impacts from both individual and group perspectives. Respondents reported on their interactions and serendipitous findings of shared interests with other attendees. However, some respondents also identify distracting aspects of the augmentation. Our discussion relates these results to existing theory of group behavior in public places and how these social space augmentations relate to awareness as well as the problem of shared interaction models.

The focus of our approach to the usability considerations of privacy and security has been on providing people with information they can use to understand the implications of their interactions with a system, as well as, to assess whether or not a system is secure enough for their immediate needs. To this end, we have been exploring two design principles for secure interaction: visualizing system activity and integrating configuration and action. Here we discuss the results of a user study designed as a broad formative examination of the successes and failures of an initial prototype based around these principles. Our response to the results of this study has been twofold. First, we have fixed a number of implementation and usability problems. Second, we have extended our visualizations to incorporate new considerations regarding the temporal and structural organization of interactions.

Advanced personal wireless mobile devices, such as today's emerging smart phones, are capable computers that have the potential to enable individuals to share personal content, such as photographs, music, and video. Face to face sharing can be a satisfying and even emotional experience, yet it is not well supported by existing digital technologies, which typically isolate media into separate collections or require that they be manually combined into a single collection on a single machine. Federating wireless mobile devices with fixed infrastructure, such as a digital home entertainment center, provides a lightweight, unified, and intuitive way to share media among friends and family. This paper looks at both technological and social issues that surround sharing media using federated devices, considering the relevant emerging technologies, media types, and usage contexts.

Academic conferences provide a social space for people to present their work, learn about others' work, and interact informally with one another. However, opportunities for interaction are unevenly distributed among the attendees. We seek to extend these opportunities by allowing attendees to easily reveal something about their background and interests in different settings through the use of proactive displays: computer displays coupled with sensors that can sense and respond to the people nearby. We designed, implemented and deployed a suite of proactive display applications at a recent academic conference: AutoSpeakerID augmented formal conference paper sessions; Ticket2Talk augmented informal coffee breaks. A mixture of qualitative observation and survey response data are used to frame the impacts of these applications from both individual and group perspectives, highlighting the creation of new opportunities for both interaction and distraction. We end with a discussion of how these social space augmentations relate to the concepts of focus and nimbus as well as the problem of shared interaction models.

In this paper, we describe Augur, a groupware calendar system to support personal calendaring practices, informal workplace communication, and the socio-technical evolution of the calendar system within a workgroup. Successful design and deployment of groupware calendar systems have been shown to depend on several converging, interacting perspectives. We describe calendar-based work practices as viewed from these perspectives, and present the Augur system in support of them. Augur allows users to retain the flexibility of personal calendars by anticipating and compensating for inaccurate calendar entries and idiosyncratic event names. We employ predictive user models of event attendance, intelligent processing of calendar text, and discovery of shared events to drive novel calendar visualizations that facilitate interpersonal communication. In addition, we visualize calendar access to support privacy management and long-term evolution of the calendar system.