One of the most promising possibilities for supporting user interaction with public displays is the use of personal mobile phones. Furthermore, by utilising Bluetooth users should have the capability to interact with displays without incurring personal financial connectivity costs. However, despite the relative maturity of Bluetooth as a standard and its widespread adoption in today's mobile phones, little exploration seems to have taken place in this area -despite its apparent significant potential. This paper describe the findings of an exploratory study involving our Hermes Photo Display which has been extended to enable users with a suitable phone to both send and receive pictures over Bluetooth. We present both the technical challenges of working with Bluetooth and, through our user study, we present initial insights into general user acceptability issues and the potential for such a display to facilitate notions of community.
It is important that systems that exhibit proactive behaviour do so in a way that does not surprise or frustrate the user. Consequently, it is desirable for such systems to be both personalised and designed in such a way as to enable the user to scrutinise her user model (part of which should hold the rules describing the behaviour of the system). This article describes on-going work to investigate the design of a prototype system that can learn a given user's behaviour in an office environment in order to use the inferred rules to populate a user model and support appropriate proactive behaviour (e.g. turning on the user's fan under appropriate conditions). We explore the tension between user control and proactive services and consider issues related to the design of appropriate transparency with a view to supporting user comprehensibility of system behaviour. To this end, our system enables the user to scrutinise and possibly over-ride the 'IF-THEN' rules held in her user model. The system infers these rules from the context history (effectively a data set generated using a variety of sensors) associated with the user by using a fuzzy-decisiontree-based algorithm that can provide a confidence level for each rule in the user model. The evolution of the system has been guided by feedback from a number of real-life users in a university department. A questionnaire study has yielded supplementary results concerning the extent to which the approach taken meets users' expectations and requirements.
This paper describes how initial principles for the designs of an interactive application were informed from a study of 'coolness' with two different ages of teenagers. The study used drawings to examine how teenagers might design their environments and these were then analysed by the research team based on a set of characteristics of cool that were drawn from the literature. Results from the teenagers' drawings demonstrate some change in emphasis between the younger and older age groups and between the genders. A design space around innovation and rebellion is implicated in the findings.
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