We have designed a stress management biofeedback mobile service for everyday use, aiding users to reflect on both positive and negative patterns in their behavior. To do so, we embarked on a complex multidisciplinary design journey, learning that: detrimental stress results from complex processes related to e.g. the subjective experience of being able to cope (or not) and can therefore not be measured and diagnosed solely as a bodily state. We learnt that it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to make a robust analysis of stress symptoms based on biosensors worn outside the laboratory environment they were designed for. We learnt that rather than trying to diagnose stress, it is better to mirror short-term stress reactions back to them, inviting their own interpretations and reflections. Finally, we identified several experiential qualities that such an interface should entail: ambiguity and openness to interpretation, interactive history of prior states, fluency and aliveness.
The Ubiquitous Interactor (UBI) addresses the problems of design and development that arise around services that need to be accessed from many different devices. In UBI, the same service can present itself with different user interfaces on different devices. This is done by separating interaction between users and services from presentation. The interaction is kept the same for all devices, and different presentation information is provided for different devices. This way, tailored user interfaces for many different devices can be created without multiplying development and maintenance work. In this paper we describe the system design of UBI, the system implementation, and two services implemented for the system: a calendar service and a stockbroker service.
Abstract-In research and development of information and communication technologies for sustainability, there is a strong belief that human behaviour can be monitored at the individual level to generate different signals, and that these signals can be used to influence individuals to behave differently. We analyse Seventh Framework Programme policy documents published by the European Commission, and descriptions of research projects granted funding from it, to highlight the uncritical development and application of surveillance technologies to change human behaviour. We argue that EU-financed projects dealing with sustainability and information and communication technology use models of social change that have been widely criticised as unlikely to lead to substantial changes in resource consumption. Additionally, we show that these texts discuss only the potential positive effects of technological surveillance, but neither acknowledge nor require the handling of the potential negative effects of surveillance.
People want user interfaces to services that are functional and well suited to the device they choose for access. To provide this, services must be able to offer device specific user interfaces for the wide range of devices available today. We propose to combine the two dominant approaches to platform independence, "Write Once, Run Every-where™" and "different version for each device", to create multiple device specific user interfaces for mobile services. This gives possibilities to minimize the work with development and maintenance, while still keeping the control of how the user interface is presented to the end user. A calendar service has been implemented with user interfaces for Java Swing, HTML and std I/O. This report is a shortened and improved version of the SICS technical report T2002-02.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.