Figure 1
Infrastructure Awareness’ awareness model. (The circle represents the object’s nimbus. The cone represents the object’s focus and its orientation.)
Source publication
Infrastructure awareness systems reveal invisible aspects of infrastructures to their existing or potential users. Design- ing such systems is challenging as it requires making visible the hidden activity of infrastructures while providing information of interest to the users. To address this challenge we introduce the AMC technique (for Awareness...
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Citations
... All logs and previous location markers on the map are color coded with the remaining charging level at that particular point. The prototype also displays all available charging stations in Scandinavia to provide infrastructural awareness [13]. ...
Energy and design of energy-feedback are becoming increasingly important in the mobile HCI community. Our application area concerns electric vehicles, we thus depart from home and workplace appliances and address range and energy anxiety caused by short driving distance capabilities and long charging times in mobile settings. Meanwhile some research has been done on energy management of mobile devices, less has been done on mobility devices like electric vehicles. We explore this topic by letting conventional fuel car drivers reflect on their current driving habits through an exploration tool that we developed. Our results demonstrate three dimensions related to energy availability to consider for design of energy dependent mobility devices and provide explanations on how these dimensions could be utilize in our design through energy visualizations. With this we contributed not only by demonstrating aspects of energy availability and mobility, but also through opening up for new interesting possibilities and inquires in our and possibly other domains.
... Designing digital tools for biology lab-work requires understanding a setting of a very different nature than office work. For the past two years, we have been working with molecular biologists from Aarhus University [6, 5]. We studied their work practices, conducting task-centered observations of biology work; place-centered observations of work in the laboratory and in the office; and artifact-centered observations focusing on the use of digital and physical research re- sources [7]. ...
We present theeLabBench– a tabletop system supporting experimental research in the biology laboratory. TheeLabBench allows biologists to organize their experiments around the notions of activities and resources, and seamlessly roam in- formation between their office computer and the digital laboratory bench. At the bench, biologists can pull digital re- sources, annotate them, and interact with hybrid (tangible + digital) objects such as racks of test tubes. This paper focuses on the eLabBench’s design, and presents three main contributions: First, based on observations we highlight a set of characteristics digital benches should support in a laboratory. Second, we describe the eLabBench, including a simple implementation of activity-based computing for tabletop environments, with support for activity roaming, note-taking, and hybrid objects. Third, we present preliminary feedback of the eLabBench based on a ongoing deployment in a bio- logy laboratory, and propose a design space definition for the design of single-user, work-oriented, tabletop systems.
This article explores the related issues of invisibility and material in interaction design, and argues that there is a need to consider 'immaterials' as a frame to explore and mediate invisible technological systems. Contemporary visions of technological development often focus on invisibility and 'seamlessness' in interface technologies, while the methods of building knowledge about designing with these technologies or issues of agency and control over these invisible interfaces are overlooked. I approach this in two related ways. First, I investigate the context of invisible interfaces and the issues of immateriality in computing, and argue for a renewed investigation of materials in interaction design. Second, I present an exploratory design research enquiry in which an invisible interface technology called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) was discursively revealed. Drawing on these foundations, I show how design approaches can create new material knowledge by making technical exploration apparent through visualisation, photography, animation, and filmmaking. Overall, this enquiry illustrates a communicative, mediational design research practice that I call discursive design, that constructs language, new narratives, and communicative material that may translate between complex technical subjects and broader audiences and discourses.
Energy and design of energy-feedback are becoming increasingly important in the HCI community. Our application area concerns electric vehicles, we thus depart from home and workplace appliances and address range and energy anxiety caused by short driving distance capabilities and long charging times in mobile settings. We explore this topic by letting conventional fuel car drivers reflect on their current driving habits through an exploration tool that we use as a technology probe. Our preliminary results demonstrate the educational values of the energy representations in the tool, and we also identify a design tension for map-related energy representations.
The success of a volunteer computing infrastructure depends on the contributions of its users. An example of such an infrastructure is the Mini-Grid, a local peer-to-peer system used for computational analysis of DNA. The speed of analysis increases as more users join the Mini-Grid. However, the invisible nature of such an infrastructure hinders adoption, as it is difficult for users to participate in an infrastructure they are not aware of. This paper introduces GridOrbit, a system designed to increase user awareness, fostering con- tributions to this infrastructure. We designed GridOrbit us- ing a participatory design process with biologists, and sub- sequently deployed it for use in a biology laboratory. Our results indicate that the number of contributors to the Mini- Grid increased with the use of awareness technologies. In addition, our analysis presents their motives and behaviors. Finally, a characterization of user interaction with GridOrbit emerged, which enabled us to understand how awareness systems can be better designed. We see GridOrbit as an ex- ample of a broader class of technologies designed to create ‘Infrastructure Awareness’ as a means to increase the contributions to technological infrastructures.
