Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2011
Over the past several years, people have increasingly acquired virtual possessions. We consider t... more Over the past several years, people have increasingly acquired virtual possessions. We consider these things to include artifacts that are increasingly becoming immaterial (e.g. books, photos, music, movies) and things that have never traditionally had a lasting material form (e.g. SMS archives, social networking profiles, personal behavior logs). To date, little research exists about how people value and form attachments to virtual possessions. To investigate, we conducted a study with 21 teenagers exploring the perceived value of their virtual possessions, and the comparative similarities and differences with their material things. Findings are interpreted to detail design and research opportunities and issues in this emerging space.
While the user-centered design methods we bring from humancomputer interaction to ubicomp help sk... more While the user-centered design methods we bring from humancomputer interaction to ubicomp help sketch ideas and refine prototypes, few tools or techniques help explore divergent design concepts, reflect on their merits, and come to a new understanding of design opportunities and ways to address them. We present Speed Dating, a design method for rapidly exploring application concepts and their interactions and contextual dimensions without requiring any technology implementation. Situated between sketching and prototyping, Speed Dating structures comparison of concepts, helping identify and understand contextual risk factors and develop approaches to address them. We illustrate how to use Speed Dating by applying it to our research on the smart home and dual-income families, and highlight our findings from using this method.
Abstract. Much smart home research has produced work that chooses to enhance the home experience ... more Abstract. Much smart home research has produced work that chooses to enhance the home experience by providing more control over domestic devices. Our work with dual-income families suggests that more than devices, families want more control over their lives. We argue that a smart home might help provide that assistance to families in two ways:(1) by helping families navigate the complex network of activities in which they participate; and (2) by providing families more emotional satisfaction from the things they value–their time, ...
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Intelligent Environments, 2006
The majority of smart home research has focused on novel technical artifacts, but has overlooked ... more The majority of smart home research has focused on novel technical artifacts, but has overlooked the issues surrounding social relationships in the home. We argue in favor of research that is sensitive to and functions within the social constraints of dual income family homes. This paper describes our grounded contextual fieldwork with real families in their homes, and identifies socially-aware concepts smart home systems will need to address.
Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Designing pleasurable products and interfaces - DPPI '07, 2007
Dual-income families experience stress as they attempt to manage the conflicting responsibilities... more Dual-income families experience stress as they attempt to manage the conflicting responsibilities of work, school, home, and enrichment activities. Opportunities exist for technology to provide support in managing their children's activities, helping parents feel more in control of their lives. In this paper, we explore opportunities to support children's activities. Based on our contextual fieldwork with dual-income families, we suggest a concept of the Smart Bag, which addresses two design opportunities: (i) a reminder system that helps people remember their schedules and what they need to take, and (ii) a reminder system that allows parents to engage in parenting.
Seeking to be sensitive to users, smart home researchers have focused on the concept of control. ... more Seeking to be sensitive to users, smart home researchers have focused on the concept of control. They attempt to allow users to gain control over their lives by framing the problem as one of end-user programming. But families are not users as we typically conceive them, and a large body of ethnographic research shows how their activities and routines do not map well to programming tasks. End-user programming ultimately provides control of devices. But families want more control of their lives. In this paper, we explore this disconnect. Using grounded contextual fieldwork with dual-income families, we describe the control that families want, and suggest seven design principles that will help end-user programming systems deliver that control.
Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference on - DIS '12, 2012
Designing radically new technology systems that people will want to use is complex. Design teams ... more Designing radically new technology systems that people will want to use is complex. Design teams must draw on knowledge related to people's current values and desires to envision a preferred yet plausible future. However, the introduction of new technology can shape people's values and practices, and what-we-know-now about them does not always translate to an effective guess of what the future could, or should, be. New products and systems typically exist outside of current understandings of technology and use paradigms; they often have few interaction and social conventions to guide the design process, making efforts to pursue them complex and risky. User Enactments (UEs) have been developed as a design approach that aids design teams in more successfully investigate radical alterations to technologies' roles, forms, and behaviors in uncharted design spaces. In this paper, we reflect on our repeated use of UE over the past five years to unpack lessons learned and further specify how and when to use it. We conclude with a reflection on how UE can function as a boundary object and implications for future work.
As the fields of interaction and service design heavily rely on motion and interaction as their m... more As the fields of interaction and service design heavily rely on motion and interaction as their material, there is a substantial need to address the nature of such materiality, and to develop methods and tools to work and communicate with its immateriality. In order to further investigate the nature of the immateriality and how the future tools and methods can help designers to design expressive interfaces and interactions, we propose a 6- hour workshop with design professionals in interaction and service design fields, professionals working in teams, and educators teaching interaction and service design. Our eventual goal is to investigate features of a novel tool to enable designers to more easily explore immaterial material for creativity and effectiveness in their designs, and enable them to seed expressions for emotional and felt-life qualities in interactive products and services. Crafting immaterial materiality effectively will also lead designers to grow better communication...
We present a novel interface design for MyInfo, a personal news application that processes and co... more We present a novel interface design for MyInfo, a personal news application that processes and combines content from TV and the web. MyInfo provides personalized content selectable by topic such as weather or traffic. In addition, users can play back a personal news program as a TV show, leaving themselves free to complete tasks such as making breakfast. We detail our design process from concept generation to focus group exploration to final design. The main design challenges include (i) understanding what kinds of TV/Web applications people want, and (ii) developing an interface that fits people's lifestyles.
As we can interact with other people through various social applications, we have acquired increa... more As we can interact with other people through various social applications, we have acquired increasing amounts of virtual possessions that have both personal and social meanings. Unlike material possessions that usually have a clear ownership to a person, the emerging virtual possessions are often created by and shared with multiple people. Thus, the values of such virtual possessions are not only personally, but also socially constructed and cherished. As it becomes important to understand and support the interpersonal contexts where people encounter and acquire various virtual possessions, the present study investigated how people attach personal and social meanings to their virtual possessions. In this paper, we introduce such meaning-making activities with two foci: i) curation activities of creating social meanings of personal virtual possessions, ii) curation activities of creating personal meanings of social virtual possessions. The results of this study will be helpful to con...
Look! Our baby is taking her first steps!" Parents with a newborn baby are enthusiastic about rec... more Look! Our baby is taking her first steps!" Parents with a newborn baby are enthusiastic about recording every "moment" of their baby's development: when they first roll over, the first words of babbling, the first steps, the first cold, the first solid food, etc. Recording with video is one of the best ways to capture the vivid moments of a baby's growth. Parents have a desire to document these moments so that they and the baby might reminisce in the future; in addition, they also want to share their baby's amazing moment with family. The new parents' parents and siblings also have a desire to see and get to know this new family member. This desire that parents have to share and the extended family's wish to consume video moments supports the construction of family and creates a sense of togetherness for extended families, particularly those who live far apart. We see this desire as an opportunity for new products and services that help families embrace their newest members through electronic sharing. We initiated a user-centered design project to investigate the opportunities to support the new parents and their sibling for better sharing and access to baby videos. To meet their desire of sharing baby videos, we have designed "BaVio"-a new video platform that integrated into the mobile, web and TV system providing better access to their baby videos at home and outdoors. A BaVio service provides reliable web space for parents to upload videos and distribute to the registered families. Also supporting TV system to watch and create comments especially for the new parents' parents. This design solution will support them to enrich the emotional connection and togetherness with the newest members by convenient sharing, commenting and accessing to videos.
Crowd-sourcing social computing systems represent a new material for HCI designers. However, thes... more Crowd-sourcing social computing systems represent a new material for HCI designers. However, these systems are difficult to work with and to prototype, because they require a critical mass of participants to investigate social behavior. Service design is an emerging research area that focuses on how customers co-produce the services that they use, and thus it appears to be a great domain to apply this new material. To investigate this relationship, we developed Tiramisu, a transit information system where commuters share GPS traces and submit problem reports. Tiramisu processes incoming traces and generates real-time arrival time predictions for buses. We conducted a field trial with 28 participants. In this paper we report on the results and reflect on the use of field trials to evaluate crowd-sourcing prototypes and on how crowd sourcing can generate coproduction between citizens and public services.
This paper describes MyInfo, a novel interface for a personal news demonstrator that processes an... more This paper describes MyInfo, a novel interface for a personal news demonstrator that processes and combines content from TV and the web. We detail our design process from concept generation to focus group exploration to final design. Our design focuses on three issues: (i) ease-of-use, (ii) video summarization, and (iii) news personalization. With a single button press on the remote control, users access specific topics such as weather or traffic. In addition, users can play back personalized news content as a TV show, leaving themselves free to complete other tasks in their homes, while consuming the news.
One of the challenges in conducting research on the intersection of the CHI and Human-Robot Inter... more One of the challenges in conducting research on the intersection of the CHI and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) communities is in addressing the gap of acceptable design research methods between the two. While HRI is focused on interaction with robots and includes design research in its scope, the community is not as accustomed to exploratory design methods as the CHI community. This workshop paper argues for bringing exploratory design, and specifically Research through Design (RtD) methods that have been established in CHI for the past decade to the foreground of HRI. RtD can enable design researchers in the field of HRI to conduct exploratory design work that asks what is the right thing to design and share it within the community.
In this position paper I address issues with the integration of design, an intuitive and craft ba... more In this position paper I address issues with the integration of design, an intuitive and craft based discipline, into the scientific based disciplines of computer science and behavioural science that traditionally make up HCI education. These issues include (i) clearly defining and communicating the purpose for design in HCI education, (ii) measuring the value of interdisciplinary classes, and (iii) the role and value of qualitative evaluation for students who come from a quantitative background. While no solutions for these issues are presented, I do indicate some directions for advancement.
Teaching Assistants (TAs) play a major role in higher education; however, they receive little if ... more Teaching Assistants (TAs) play a major role in higher education; however, they receive little if any training on how to teach. Quality training requires access to grounded feedback and relevant suggestions for improvement. We developed a framework for using features of a smart classroom. This work reframes the instructor as the learner. It provides training on discursive practices with feedback based on the instructor’s in-class behaviors. We built and deployed a system based on this framework to five STEM TAs as part of a larger study. This paper: discusses the action-reflection-planning framework we used, provides evidence for how the framework addresses TA learning goals, and discusses how other researchers might make use of the framework.
19 Extensive interviews with riders of the Pittsburgh bus system revealed that, as the top 20 pri... more 19 Extensive interviews with riders of the Pittsburgh bus system revealed that, as the top 20 priority, riders want to know the current location of buses. Using a universal design 21 methodology, we designed a system, named Tiramisu, to foster a greater sense of community 22 between riders and transit bus service providers. Our design focuses on crowd-sourcing 23 acquisition of information about bus location and fullness, predicting the arrival time of buses, 24 and providing a convenient platform for reporting problems and positive experiences within the 25 transit system. This will create a user community of riders that are participating in the delivery of 26 service. Tiramisu also supports specific information and reporting needs for riders with 27 disabilities, thereby providing greater independent mobility around the community. Early field 28 testing of Tiramisu suggests our approach is both feasible and potentially viable. In summary, 29 Tiramisu is valuable enough for riders ...
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Papers by John Zimmerman