Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics – serie

This book introduces Participatory Design to researchers and students in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI). Grounded in four strong commitments, the book discusses why and how Participatory Design is important today. The book aims to provide readers with a practical resource, introducing them to the central practices of Participatory Design research as well as to key references. This is done from the perspective of Scandinavian Participatory Design. The book is meant for students, researchers, and practitioners who are interested in Participatory Design for research studies, assignments in HCI classes, or as part of an industry project. It is structured around 11 questions arranged in 3 main parts that provide the knowledge needed to get started with practicing Participatory Design. Each chapter responds to a question about defining, conducting, or the results of carrying out Participatory Design. The authors share their extensive experience of Participatory Design processes and thinking by combining historical accounts, cases, how-to process descriptions, and reading lists to guide further readings so as to grasp the many nuances of Participatory Design as it is practiced across sectors, countries, and industries.

Technologies that electronically mediate conversation, such as text-based chat or desktop video conferencing, draw on theories of human−human interaction to make predictions about the effects of design decisions. This lecture reviews the theory that has been most influential in this area: Clark's theory of language use. The key concept in Clark's theory is that of common ground. Language is viewed as a collaborative activity that uses existing common ground to develop further common ground and, hence, to communicate efficiently. The theory (a) defines different kinds of common ground, (b) formalizes the notion of collaborative activity as a “joint action,” and (c) describes the processes by which common ground is developed through joint action. Chapter 1 explains why a purely cognitive model of communication is not enough and what is meant by the phrase “collaborative activity.” Chapter 2 introduces the idea of common ground and how it is used in language through an example of two people conversing over a video link. Chapter 3 indicates where the interested reader can find out about the antecedents to Clark's theory. Chapter 4 sets out the fundamental concepts in Clark's theory. Chapter 5 uses five published case studies of electronically mediated communication to illustrate the value of the theory. These include studies of a computer-supported meeting room (Cognoter), a video tunnel that supports gaze awareness, video conferencing in medical consultation, and text chat. Table of Contents: Motivation - Conversation as a Collaborative Activity / Overview - Developing Common Ground, An Example / Scientific Foundations / The Theory in More Detail / Case Studies - Applying the Theory to Electronically Mediated Communication / Current Status

Semiotic engineering was originally proposed as a semiotic approach to designing user interface languages. Over the years, with research done at the Department of Informatics of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, it evolved into a semiotic theory of human-computer interaction (HCI). It views HCI as computer-mediated communication between designers and users at interaction time. The system speaks for its designers in various types of conversations specified at design time. These conversations communicate the designers' understanding of who the users are, what they know the users want or need to do, in which preferred ways, and why. The designers' message to users includes even the interactive language in which users will have to communicate back with the system in order to achieve their specific goals. Hence, the process is, in fact, one of communication about communication, or metacommunication. Semiotic engineering has two methods to evaluate the quality of metacommunication in HCI: the semiotic inspection method (SIM) and the communicability evaluation method (CEM). Up to now, they have been mainly used and discussed in technical contexts, focusing on how to detect problems and how to improve the metacommunication of specific systems. In this book, Clarisse de Souza and Carla Leitão discuss how SIM and CEM, which are both qualitative methods, can also be used in scientific contexts to generate new knowledge about HCI. The discussion goes into deep considerations about scientific methodology, calling the reader's attention to the essence of qualitative methods in research and the kinds of results they can produce. To illustrate their points, the authors present an extensive case study with a free open-source digital audio editor called Audacity. They show how the results obtained with a triangulation of SIM and CEM point at new research avenues not only for semiotic engineering and HCI but also for other areas of computer science such as softwareengineering and programming. Table of Contents: Introduction / Essence of Semiotic Engineering / Semiotic Engineering Methods / Case Study with Audacity / Lessons Learned with Semiotic Engineering Methods / The Near Future of Semiotic Engineering

This book has two purposes. First, to introduce the study of work and the workplace as a method for informing the design of computer systems to be used at work. We primarily focus on the predominant way in which the organization of work has been approached within the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), which is from the perspective of ethnomethodology. We locate studies of work in HCI within its intellectual antecedents, and describe paradigmatic examples and case studies. Second, we hope to provide those who are intending to conduct the type of fieldwork that studies of work and the workplace draw off with suggestions as to how they can go about their own work of developing observations about the settings they encounter. These suggestions take the form of a set of maxims that we have found useful while conducting the studies we have been involved in. We draw from our own fieldwork notes in order to illustrate these maxims. In addition we also offer some homilies about how to make observations; again, these are ones we have found useful in our own work. Table of Contents: Motivation / Overview: A Paradigmatic Case / Scientific Foundations / Detailed Description / Case Study / How to Conduct Ethnomethodological Studies of Work / Making Observations / Current Status

The integration of ubiquitous mobile computing resources into physical spaces can potentially affect the development, maintenance, and transformation of communities and social interactions and relations within a particular context or location. Ubiquitous mobile computing allows users to engage in activities in diverse physical locations, to access resources specific to the location, and to communicate directly or indirectly with others. Mobile technologies can potentially enhance social interactions and users' experiences, extend both social and informational resources available in context, and greatly alter the nature and quality of our interactions. Activities using mobile devices in context generate complex systems of interactions, and the benefits of ubiquity and mobility can be easily lost if that complexity is not appreciated and understood. This monograph attempts to address issues of using and designing location-based computing systems and the use of these tools to enhance social awareness, navigate in spaces, extend interactions, and influence others. Table of Contents: Introduction / Space, Place, and Context / Creating a Sense of Presence and Awareness with Mobile Tools / Mobile Computing: A Tool for Social Influence to Change Behavior / Ethical Issues and Final Thoughts

This book explores the design process for user experience and engagement, which expands the traditional concept of usability and utility in design to include aesthetics, fun and excitement. User experience has evolved as a new area of Human Computer Interaction research, motivated by non-work oriented applications such as games, education and emerging interactive Web 2.0. The chapter starts by examining the phenomena of user engagement and experience and setting them in the perspective of cognitive psychology, in particular motivation, emotion and mood. The perspective of aesthetics is expanded towards interaction and engagement to propose design treatments, metaphors, and interactive techniques which can promote user interest, excitement and satisfying experiences. This is followed by reviewing the design process and design treatments which can promote aesthetic perception and engaging interaction. The final part of the chapter provides design guidelines and principles drawn from theinteraction and graphical design literature which are cross-referenced to issues in the design process. Examples of designs and design treatments are given to illustrate principles and advice, accompanied by critical reflection. Table of Contents: Introduction / Psychology of User Engagement / UE Design Process / Design Principles and Guidelines / Perspectives and Conclusions

We live in an "information age," but information is only useful when it is interpreted by people and applied in the context of their goals and activities. The volume of information to which people have access is growing at an incredible rate, vastly outstripping people's ability to assimilate and manage it. In order to design technologies that better support information work, it is necessary to better understand the details of that work. In this lecture, we review the situations (physical, social and temporal) in which people interact with information. We also discuss how people interact with information in terms of an "information journey," in which people, iteratively, do the following: recognise a need for information, find information, interpret and evaluate that information in the context of their goals, and use the interpretation to support their broader activities. People's information needs may be explicit and clearly articulated but, conversely, may be tacit, exploratory and evolving. Widely used tools supporting information access, such as searching on the Web and in digital libraries, support clearly defined information requirements well, but they provide limited support for other information needs. Most other stages of the information journey are poorly supported at present. Novel design solutions are unlikely to be purely digital, but to exploit the rich variety of information resources, digital, physical and social, that are available. Theories of information interaction and sensemaking can highlight new design possibilities that augment human capabilities. We review relevant theories and findings for understanding information behaviours, and we review methods for evaluating information working tools, to both assess existing tools and identify requirements for the future. Table of Contents: Introduction: Pervasive Information Interactions / Background: Information Interaction at the Crossroads of Research Traditions / The Situations: Physical, Social and Temporal / The Behaviors: Understanding the "Information Journey" / The Technologies: Supporting the Information Journey / Studying User Behaviors and Needs for Information Interaction / Looking to the Future / Further Reading

This book is about HCI research in an industrial research setting. It is based on the experiences of two researchers at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Over the last two decades, Drs. John and Clare-Marie Karat have conducted HCI research to create innovative usable technology for users across a variety of domains. We begin the book by introducing the reader to the context of industrial research as well as a set of common themes or guidelines to consider in conducting HCI research in practice. Then case study examples of HCI approaches to the design and evaluation of usable solutions for people are presented and discussed in three domain areas: - item Conversational speech technologies, - item Personalization in eCommerce, and - item Security and privacy policy management technologies In each of the case studies, the authors illustrate and discuss examples of HCI approaches to design and evaluation that worked well and those that did not. They discuss what was learned over time about different HCI methods in practice, and changes that were made to the HCI tools used over time. The Karats discuss trade-offs and issues related to time, resources, and money and the value derived from different HCI methods in practice. These decisions are ones that need to be made regularly in the industrial sector. Similarities and differences with the types of decisions made in this regard in academia will be discussed. The authors then use the context of the three case studies in the three research domains to draw insights and conclusions about the themes that were introduced in the beginning of the book. The Karats conclude with their perspective about the future of HCI industrial research. Table of Contents: Introduction: Themes and Structure of the Book / Case Study 1: Conversational Speech Technologies: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) / Case Study 2: Personalization in eCommerce / Case Study 3: Security and Privacy Policy Management Technologies / Insights and Conclusions / The Future of Industrial HCI Research

In his In the blink of an eye, Walter Murch, the Oscar-awarded editor of The English Patient, Apocalypse Now, and many other outstanding movies, devises the Rule of Six -- six criteria for what makes a good cut. On top of his list is "to be true to the emotion of the moment," a quality more important than advancing the story or being rhythmically interesting. The cut has to deliver a meaningful, compelling, and emotion-rich "experience" to the audience. Because, "what they finally remember is not the editing, not the camerawork, not the performances, not even the story---it's how they felt." Technology for all the right reasons applies this insight to the design of interactive products and technologies -- the domain of Human-Computer Interaction, Usability Engineering, and Interaction Design. It takes an experiential approach, putting experience before functionality and leaving behind oversimplified calls for ease, efficiency, and automation or shallow beautification. Instead, it explores what really matters to humans and what it needs to make technology more meaningful. The book clarifies what experience is, and highlights five crucial aspects and their implications for the design of interactive products. It provides reasons why we should bother with an experiential approach, and presents a detailed working model of experience useful for practitioners and academics alike. It closes with the particular challenges of an experiential approach for design. The book presents its view as a comprehensive, yet entertaining blend of scientific findings, design examples, and personal anecdotes. Table of Contents: Follow me! / Crucial Properties of Experience / Three Good Reasons to Consider Experience / A Model of Experience / Reflections on Experience Design

Experience-centered design, experience-based design, experience design, designing for experience, user experience design. All of these terms have emerged and gained acceptance in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design relatively recently. In this book, we set out our understanding of experience-centered design as a humanistic approach to designing digital technologies and media that enhance lived experience. The book is divided into three sections. In Section 1, we outline the historical origins and basic concepts that led into and flow out from our understanding of experience as the heart of people's interactions with digital technology. In Section 2, we describe three examples of experience-centered projects and use them to illustrate and explain our dialogical approach. In Section 3, we recapitulate some of the main ideas and themes of the book and discuss the potential of experience-centered design to continue the humanist agenda by giving a voice to those whomight otherwise be excluded from design and by creating opportunities for people to enrich their lived experience with and through technology. Table of Contents: How Did We Get Here? / Some Key Ideas Behind Experience-Centered Design / Making Sense of Experience in Experience-Centered Design / Experience-Centered Design as Dialogue / What do We Mean by Dialogue? / Valuing Experience-Centered Design / Where Do We Go from Here?

Activity theory -- a conceptual framework originally developed by Aleksei Leontiev -- has its roots in the socio-cultural tradition in Russian psychology. The foundational concept of the theory is human activity, which is understood as purposeful, mediated, and transformative interaction between human beings and the world. Since the early 1990s, activity theory has been a visible landmark in the theoretical landscape of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Along with some other frameworks, such as distributed cognition and phenomenology, it established itself as a leading post-cognitivist approach in HCI and interaction design. In this book we discuss the conceptual foundations of activity theory and its contribution to HCI research. After making the case for theory in HCI and briefly discussing the contribution of activity theory to the field (Chapter One) we introduce the historical roots, main ideas, and principles of activity theory (Chapter Two). After that we present in-depth analyses of three issues which we consider of special importance to current developments in HCI and interaction design, namely: agency (Chapter Three), experience (Chapter Four), and activity-centric computing (Chapter Five). We conclude the book with reflections on challenges and prospects for further development of activity theory in HCI (Chapter Six). Table of Contents: Introduction: Activity theory and the changing face of HCI / Basic concepts and principles of activity theory / Agency / Activity and experience / Activity-centric computing / Activity theory and the development of HCI

Theory is the bedrock of many sciences, providing a rigorous method to advance knowledge, through testing and falsifying hypotheses about observable phenomena. To begin with, the nascent field of HCI followed the scientific method borrowing theories from cognitive science to test theories about user performance at the interface. But HCI has emerged as an eclectic interdiscipline rather than a well-defined science. It now covers all aspects of human life, from birth to bereavement, through all manner of computing, from device ecologies to nano-technology. It comes as no surprise that the role of theory in HCI has also greatly expanded from the early days of scientific testing to include other functions such as describing, explaining, critiquing, and as the basis for generating new designs. The book charts the theoretical developments in HCI, both past and present, reflecting on how they have shaped the field. It explores both the rhetoric and the reality: how theories have been conceptualized, what was promised, how they have been used and which has made the most impact in the field -- and the reasons for this. Finally, it looks to the future and asks whether theory will continue to have a role, and, if so, what this might be. Table of Contents: Introduction / The Backdrop to HCI Theory / The Role and Contribution of Theory in HCI / Classical Theories / Modern Theories / Contemporary Theory / Discussion / Summary

Human-centered informatics (HCI) is a young discipline that is still defining its core components, with approaches rooted in engineering, science, and creative design. In the spirit of this book series, this book explores HCI as an intersection point for different perspectives of computing and information technology, seeking to understand how groups of designers can communicate with an increasingly diverse set of colleagues on a broadening set of problems. In so doing, this book traces the evolution of claims as a way to capture and share knowledge, particularly in comparison to other approaches like patterns and issues. Claims can be a centrally important aspect in HCI design efforts, either consciously by targeted design techniques or through ingrained habits of experienced designers. An examination of claims, their uses in design, and the possibilities for explicit use in future collaborative design endeavors seeks to inspire their further development use in HCI design. Table of Contents: What are Claims? / Knowing and Sharing / Evolution of Claims / Using Claims / Looking Forward

This lecture describes a theoretical framework for the behavioural sciences that holds high promise for theory-driven research and design in Human-Computer Interaction. The framework is designed to tackle the adaptive, ecological, and bounded nature of human behaviour. It is designed to help scientists and practitioners reason about why people choose to behave as they do and to explain which strategies people choose in response to utility, ecology, and cognitive information processing mechanisms. A key idea is that people choose strategies so as to maximise utility given constraints. The framework is illustrated with a number of examples including pointing, multitasking, skim-reading, online purchasing, Signal Detection Theory and diagnosis, and the influence of reputation on purchasing decisions. Importantly, these examples span from perceptual/motor coordination, through cognition to social interaction. Finally, the lecture discusses the challenging idea that people seek to find optimal strategies and also discusses the implications for behavioral investigation in HCI.

Translating Euclid reports on an effort to transform geometry for students from a stylus-and-clay-tablet corpus of historical theorems to a stimulating computer-supported collaborative-learning inquiry experience. The origin of geometry was a turning point in the pre-history of informatics, literacy, and rational thought. Yet, this triumph of human intellect became ossified through historic layers of systematization, beginning with Euclid’s organization of the Elements of geometry. Often taught by memorization of procedures, theorems, and proofs, geometry in schooling rarely conveys its underlying intellectual excitement. The recent development of dynamic-geometry software offers an opportunity to translate the study of geometry into a contemporary vernacular. However, this involves transformations along multiple dimensions of the conceptual and practical context of learning. Translating Euclid steps through the multiple challenges involved in redesigning geometry education to take advantage of computer support. Networked computers portend an interactive approach to exploring dynamic geometry as well as broadened prospects for collaboration. The proposed conception of geometry emphasizes the central role of the construction of dependencies as a design activity, integrating human creation and mathematical discovery to form a human-centered approach to mathematics. This book chronicles an iterative effort to adapt technology, theory, pedagogy and practice to support this vision of collaborative dynamic geometry and to evolve the approach through on-going cycles of trial with students and refinement of resources. It thereby provides a case study of a design-based research effort in computer-supported collaborative learning from a human-centered informatics perspective.

Digital technology has become a defining characteristic of modern life. Almost everyone uses it, we all rely on it, and many of us own a multitude of devices. What is more, we all expect to be able to use these technologies "straight out the box." This lecture discusses how we are able to do this without apparent problems. We are able to use digital technology because we have learned to cope with it. "To cope" is used in philosophy to mean "absorbed engagement," that is, we use our smart phones and tablet computers with little or no conscious effort. In human-computer interaction this kind of use is more often described as intuitive. While this, of course, is testament to improved design, our interest in this lecture is in the human side of these interactions. We cope with technology because we are familiar with it. We define familiarity as the readiness to engage with technology which arises from being repeatedly exposed to it—often from birth. This exposure involves the frequent useof it and seeing people all around us using it every day. Digital technology has become as common a feature of our everyday lives as the motor car, TV, credit card, cutlery, or a dozen other things which we also use without conscious deliberation. We will argue that we cope with digital technology in the same way as we do these other technologies by means of this everyday familiarity. But this is only half of the story. We also regularly support or scaffold our use of technology. These scaffolding activities are described as "epistemic actions" which we adopt to make it easier for us to accomplish our goals. With digital technology these epistemic actions include appropriating it to more closer meet our needs. In summary, coping is a situated, embodied, and distributed description of how we use digital technology. Table of Contents: Introduction / Familiarity / Coping / Epistemic Scaffolding / Coping in Context / Bibliography / Author Biography

Large surface computing devices (wall-mounted or tabletop) with touch interfaces and their application to collaborative data analysis, an increasingly important and prevalent activity, is the primary topic of this book. Our goals are to outline the fundamentals of surface computing (a still maturing technology), review relevant work on collaborative data analysis, describe frameworks for understanding collaborative processes, and provide a better understanding of the opportunities for research and development. We describe surfaces as display technologies with which people can interact directly, and emphasize how interaction design changes when designing for large surfaces. We review efforts to use large displays, surfaces or mixed display environments to enable collaborative analytic activity. Collaborative analysis is important in many domains, but to provide concrete examples and a specific focus, we frequently consider analysis work in the security domain, and in particular the challenges security personnel face in securing networks from attackers, and intelligence analysts encounter when analyzing intelligence data. Both of these activities are becoming increasingly collaborative endeavors, and there are huge opportunities for improving collaboration by leveraging surface computing. This work highlights for interaction designers and software developers the particular challenges and opportunities presented by interaction with surfaces. We have reviewed hundreds of recent research papers, and report on advancements in the fields of surface-enabled collaborative analytic work, interactive techniques for surface technologies, and useful theory that can provide direction to interaction design work. We also offer insight into issues that arise when developing applications for multi-touch surfaces derived from our own experiences creating collaborative applications. We present these insights at a level appropriate for all members of the software design and developmentteam. Table of Contents: List of Figures / Acknowledgments / Figure Credits / Purpose and Direction / Surface Technologies and Collaborative Analysis Systems / Interacting with Surface Technologies / Collaborative Work Enabled by Surfaces / The Theory and the Design of Surface Applications / The Development of Surface Applications / Concluding Comments / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies

Increasingly, teams are working together when they are not in the same location, even though there are many challenges to doing so successfully. Here we review the latest insights into these matters, guided by a framework that we have developed during two decades of research on this topic. This framework organizes a series of factors that we have found to differentiate between successful and unsuccessful distributed collaborations. We then review the kinds of technology options that are available today, focusing more on types of technologies rather than specific instances. We describe a database of geographically distributed projects we have studied and introduce the Collaboration Success Wizard, an online tool for assessing past, present, or planned distributed collaborations. We close with a set of recommendations for individuals, managers, and those higher in the organizations who wish to support distance work.

This book presents a contextual approach to designing contemporary interactive mobile computer systems as integral parts of ubiquitous computing environments. Interactive mobile systems, services, and devices have become functional design objects that we care deeply about. Although their look, feel, and features impact our everyday lives as we orchestrate them in concert with a plethora of other computing technologies, these artifacts are not well understood or created through traditional methods of user-centered design and usability engineering. Contrary to more traditional IT artifacts, they constitute holistic user experiences of value and pleasure that require careful attention to the variety, complexity, and dynamics of their usage. Hence, the design of mobile interactions proposed in this book transcends existing approaches by using the ensemble of form and context as its central unit of analysis. As such, it promotes a designerly way of achieving convergence between form and context through a contextually grounded, wholeness sensitive, and continually unfolding process of design. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments / Introduction / Mobile Computing / Interaction Design / Design Approaches / A Decade of Mobile HCI Research / Toward a Designerly Way / Revisiting User-Centered Design / Continual Convergence of Form and Context / Where to from Here? / References / Author Biography

This book is about how people (we refer to them as practitioners) can help guide participants in creating representations of issues or ideas, such as collaborative diagrams, especially in the context of Participatory Design (PD). At its best, such representations can reach a very high level of expressiveness and usefulness, an ideal we refer to as Knowledge Art. Achieving that level requires effective engagement, often aided by facilitators or other practitioners. Most PD research focuses on tools and methods, or on participant experience. The next source of advantage is to better illuminate the role of practitioners-the people working with participants, tools, and methods in service of a project’s larger goals. Just like participants, practitioners experience challenges, interactions, and setbacks, and come up with creative ways to address them while maintaining their stance of service to participants and stakeholders. Our research interest is in understanding what moves and choices practitioners make that either help or hinder participants’ engagement with representations. We present a theoretical framework that looks at these choices from the experiential perspectives of narrative, aesthetics, ethics, sensemaking and improvisation and apply it to five diverse case studies of actual practice. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments / Introduction / Participatory Design and Representational Practice / Dimensions of Knowledge Art / Case Studies / Discussion and Conclusions / Appendix: Knowledge Art Analytics / Bibliography / Author Biographies

Spaces of Interaction, Places for Experience is a book about Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), interaction design (ID) and user experience (UX) in the age of ubiquitous computing. The book explores interaction and experience through the different spaces that contribute to interaction until it arrives at an understanding of the rich and complex places for experience that will be the focus of the next period for interaction design. The book begins by looking at the multilayered nature of interaction and UX—not just with new technologies, but with technologies that are embedded in the world. People inhabit a medium, or rather many media, which allow them to extend themselves, physically, mentally, and emotionally in many directions. The medium that people inhabit includes physical and semiotic material that combine to create user experiences. People feel more or less present in these media and more or less engaged with the content of the media. From this understanding of people in media,the book explores some philosophical and practical issues about designing interactions. The book journeys through the design of physical space, digital space, information space, conceptual space and social space. It explores concepts of space and place, digital ecologies, information architecture, conceptual blending and technology spaces at work and in the home. It discusses navigation of spaces and how people explore and find their way through environments. Finally the book arrives at the concept of a blended space where the physical and digital are tightly interwoven and people experience the blended space as a whole. The design of blended spaces needs to be driven by an understanding of the correspondences between the physical and the digital, by an understanding of conceptual blending and by the desire to design at a human scale. There is no doubt that HCI and ID are changing. The design of “microinteractions” remains important, but there is a bigger picture to consider. UX is spread across devices, over time and across physical spaces. The commingling of the physical and the digital in blended spaces leads to new social spaces and new conceptual spaces. UX concerns the navigation of these spaces as much as it concerns the design of buttons and screens for apps. By taking a spatial perspective on interaction, the book provides new insights into the evolving nature of interaction design.

Contextual Design is a user-centered design process that uses in-depth field research to drive innovative design. Contextual Design was first invented in 1988 and has since been used in a wide variety of industries and taught in universities all over the world. It is a complete front-end design process rooted in Contextual Inquiry, the widespread, industry-standard field data gathering technique. Contextual Design adds techniques to analyze and present user data, drive ideation from data, design specific product solutions, and iterate those solutions with customers. In 2013, we overhauled the method to account for the way that technology has radically changed people’s lives since the invention of the touchscreen phones and other always-on, always-connected, and always-carried devices. This book describes the new Contextual Design, evolved to help teams design for the way technology now fits into peoples’ lives. We briefly describe the steps of the latest version of Contextual Design and show how they create a continual immersion in the world of the user for the purpose of innovative product design.

In the everyday world, much of what we do as social beings is dictated by how we perceive and manage our interpersonal space. This is called proxemics. At its simplest, people naturally correlate physical distance to social distance. We believe that people’s expectations of proxemics can be exploited in interaction design to mediate their interactions with devices (phones, tablets, computers, appliances, large displays) contained within a small ubiquitous computing ecology. Just as people expect increasing engagement and intimacy as they approach others, so should they naturally expect increasing connectivity and interaction possibilities as they bring themselves and their devices in close proximity to one another. This is called Proxemic Interactions. This book concerns the design of proxemic interactions within such future proxemic-aware ecologies. It imagines a world of devices that have fine-grained knowledge of nearby people and other devices—how they move into range, their precise distance, their identity, and even their orientation—and how such knowledge can be exploited to design interaction techniques. The first part of this book concerns theory. After introducing proxemics, we operationalize proxemics for ubicomp interaction via the Proxemic Interactions framework that designers can use to mediate people’s interactions with digital devices. The framework, in part, identifies five key dimensions of proxemic measures (distance, orientation, movement, identity, and location) to consider when designing proxemic-aware ubicomp systems. The second part of this book applies this theory to practice via three case studies of proxemic-aware systems that react continuously to people’s and devices’ proxemic relationships. The case studies explore the application of proxemics in small-space ubicomp ecologies by considering first person-to-device, then device-to-device, and finally person-to-person and device-to-device proxemic relationships. We also offer a critical perspective on proxemic interactions in the form of “dark patterns,” where knowledge of proxemics may (and likely will) be easily exploited to the detriment of the user. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments / Videos / Figure Credits / Introduction / Part I / Ubicomp in Brief / Proxemic Interactions Theory / Operationalizing Proxemics for Ubicomp Interaction / Exploiting Proxemics to Address Challenges in Ubicomp Ecologies / Part II: Exploiting Proxemics in Ubicomp Ecologies / Person/Person-to-Device Proxemic Interactions / Device-to-Device Proxemic Interactions / Considering Person-to-Person and Device-to-Device Proxemics / Dark Patterns / Conclusion / References / Author Biographies

This book explores the possibility for an anthropology of services and outlines a practice approach to designing services. The reader is taken on a journey that Blomberg and Darrah have been on for the better part of a decade from their respective positions helping to establish a services research group within a large global enterprise and an applied anthropology master's program at a Silicon Valley university. They delve into the world of services to understand both how services are being conceptualized today and the possible benefits that might result from taking an anthropological view on services and their design. The authors argue that the anthropological gaze can be useful precisely because it combines attention to details of everyday life with consideration of the larger milieu in which those details make sense. Furthermore, it asks us to reflect upon and assess our own perspectives on that which we hope to understand and change. Central to their exploration is the question of how to conceptualize and engage with the world of services given their heterogeneity, the increasing global importance of the service economy, and the possibilities introduced for an engaged scholarship on service design. While discourse on services and service design can imply something distinctively new, the authors point to parallels with what is known about how humans have engaged with each other and the material world over millennia. Establishing the ubiquity of services as a starting point, the authors go on to consider the limits of design when the boundaries and connections between what can be designed and what can only be performed are complex and deeply mediated. In this regard the authors outline a practice approach to designing that acknowledges that designing involves participating in a social context, that design and use occur in concert, that people populate a world that has been largely built by and with others, and that formal models of services are impoverished representations of human performance. An Anthropology of Services draws attention to the conceptual and methodological messiness of service worlds while providing the reader with strategies for intervening in these worlds for human betterment as complex and challenging as that may be. Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Getting Started / From Services to Service Worlds / The Human Condition / Service Concepts / Design and its Limits / Service Design / An anthropology of Services / References / Author Biographies

People rely on implicit interaction in their everyday interactions with one another to exchange queries, offers, responses, and feedback without explicit communication. A look with the eyes, a wave of the hand, the lift of the door handle—small moves can do a lot to enable joint action with elegance and economy. This work puts forward a theory that these implicit patterns of interaction with one another drive our expectations of how we should interact with devices. I introduce the Implicit Interaction Framework as a tool to map out interaction trajectories, and we use these trajectories to better understand the interactions transpiring around us. By analyzing everyday implicit interactions for patterns and tactics, designers of interactive devices can better understand how to design interactions that work or to remedy interactions that fail. This book looks at the “smart,” “automatic,” and “interactive” devices that increasingly permeate our everyday lives—doors, switches, whiteboards—and provides a close reading of how we interact with them. These vignettes add to the growing body of research targeted at teasing out the factors at play in our interactions. I take a look at current research, which indicates that our reactions to interactions are social, even if the entities we are interacting with are not human. These research insights are applied to allow us to refine and improve interactive devices so that they work better in the context of our day-to-day lives. Finally this book looks to the future, and outlines considerations that need to be taken into account in prototyping and validating devices that employ implicit interaction. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments / Introduction / The Theory and Framework for Implicit Interaction / Opening the Door to Interaction / Light and Dark: Patterns in Interaction / Action and Reaction: The Interaction Design Factory/Driving into the Future, Together / Bibliography / Author Biography

This book focuses on design of work from the human-factors (HF) perspective. In the approach referred to as Core-Task Design (CTD), work is considered practice, composed of human actors, the physical and social environment, and the tools used for reaching the actors’ objectives. This book begins with consideration of an industrial case, the modernization of a nuclear power plant automation system, and the related human-system interfaces in the control room. This case illustrates generic design dilemmas that invite one to revisit human-factors research methodology: Human factors should adopt practice as a new unit of analysis and should accept intervention as an inherent feature of its methodology. These suggestions are put into practice in the CTD approach, according to which three general design functions are performed, those being: • understand-to-generalize—empirical analysis of the work at hand, • foresee-the-promise—creation of concepts for future work, and • intervene-to-develop—participatory development and design of work. For fulfillment fulfillment of each of the design functions, several CTD methods are introduced. The methods are aimed at modeling the core task and analyzing how the actors actually take the core task features into account in order to achieve balance between potentially conflicting demands in action. Thereby, new understanding of the core task is acquired. Further methods focus on projecting the roles and functionality of technologies in the future work and on implementing changes to the work. Specific studies of the nuclear power plant’s control-room renewal constitute an example demonstrating a core task and the associated methods. We argue that the CTD approach offers clear utility for the design of future technology, work, and everyday services and environments. CTD utilizes achievements of practice theory in the social sciences to generate a creative synthesis of Cognitive Work Analysis, semiotic analysis of practice, and the cultural-historical theory of activity. Core-Task Design facilitates dialogue among human-factors experts, design engineers, and end users in their joint development of work. The intended audience of this book is students, researchers, and practitioners of human factors, industrial art and design, and instrumentation and control-system design. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments / Preface / Introduction / Core-Task Design Methodology / Understandings: How to Generalize from Empirical Enquiry about Actual Work / Foreseeing: How to Uncover the Promise of Solutions for Future Work / Intervening: How to Develop the Work System / Core-Task Deign in Broader Perspective / Bibliography / Author Biographies

In our digital age we can communicate, access, create, and share an abundance of information effortlessly, rapidly, and nearly ubiquitously. The consequence of having so many choices is that they compete for our attention: we continually switch our attention between different types of information while doing different types of tasks--in other words, we multitask. The activity of information workers in particular is characterized by the continual switching of attention throughout the day. In this book, empirical work is presented, based on ethnographic and sensor data collection, which reveals how multitasking affects information workers' activities, mood, and stress in real work environments. Multitasking is discussed from various perspectives: activity switching, interruptions as triggers for activity switching, email as a major source of interruptions, and the converse of distractions: focused attention. All of these factors are components of information work. This book begins by defining multitasking and describing different research approaches used in studying multitasking. It then describes how multiple factors occur to encourage multitasking in the digitally-enabled workplace: the abundance and ease of accessing information, the number of different working spheres, the workplace environment, attentional state, habit, and social norms. Empirical work is presented describing the nature of multitasking, the relationship of different types of interruptions and email with overload and stress, and patterns of attention focus. The final chapter ties these factors together and discusses challenges that information workers in our digital age face.

During the last decade, cell phones with multimodal interfaces based on combined new media have become the dominant computer interface worldwide. Multimodal interfaces support mobility and expand the expressive power of human input to computers. They have shifted the fulcrum of human-computer interaction much closer to the human. This book explains the foundation of human-centered multimodal interaction and interface design, based on the cognitive and neurosciences, as well as the major benefits of multimodal interfaces for human cognition and performance. It describes the data-intensive methodologies used to envision, prototype, and evaluate new multimodal interfaces. From a system development viewpoint, this book outlines major approaches for multimodal signal processing, fusion, architectures, and techniques for robustly interpreting users' meaning. Multimodal interfaces have been commercialized extensively for field and mobile applications during the last decade. Research also is growing rapidly in areas like multimodal data analytics, affect recognition, accessible interfaces, embedded and robotic interfaces, machine learning and new hybrid processing approaches, and similar topics. The expansion of multimodal interfaces is part of the long-term evolution of more expressively powerful input to computers, a trend that will substantially improve support for human cognition and performance. Table of Contents: Preface: Intended Audience and Teaching with this Book / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Definition and Typre of Multimodal Interface / History of Paradigm Shift from Graphical to Multimodal Interfaces / Aims and Advantages of Multimodal Interfaces / Evolutionary, Neuroscience, and Cognitive Foundations of Multimodal Interfaces / Theoretical Foundations of Multimodal Interfaces / Human-Centered Design of Multimodal Interfaces / Multimodal Signal Processing, Fusion, and Architectures / Multimodal Language, Semantic Processing, and Multimodal Integration / Commercialization of Multimodal Interfaces / Emerging Multimodal Research Areas, and Applications / Beyond Multimodality: Designing More Expressively Powerful Interfaces / Conclusions and Future Directions / Bibliography / Author Biographies

Although it has influenced the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) since its origins, humanistic HCI has come into its own since the early 2000s. In that time, it has made substantial contributions to HCI theory and methodologies and also had major influence in user experience (UX) design, aesthetic interaction, and emancipatory/social change-oriented approaches to HCI. This book reintroduces the humanities to a general HCI readership; characterizes its major epistemological and methodological commitments as well as forms of rigor; compares the scientific report vs. the humanistic essay as research products, while offering some practical advice for peer review; and focuses on two major topics where humanistic HCI has had particular influence in the field—user experience and aesthetics and emancipatory approaches to computing. This book argues for a more inclusive and broad reach for humanistic thought within the interdisciplinary field of HCI, and its lively and engaging style will invite readers into that project.