Designing Awareness Systems

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Designing Awareness Systems

• Dhaval Vyas
• Human-Media Interaction
• University of Twente
• D.M.Vyas_at_ewi.utwente.nl

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Awareness

• Awareness involves knowing who is around, what
  activities are occurring, who is talking with
  whom it provides a view of one another in the
  daily work environments. Awareness may lead to
  informal interactions, spontaneous connections,
  and the development of shared cultures all
  important aspects of maintaining working
  relationships which are denied to groups
  distributed across multiple sites.
• Dourish and Bly (1992)

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How to support awareness

• Two (intertwined) issues
• What awareness information needed
• How to represent it
• My Positions
• Ethnomethodological approach
• Understand what practices and methods people
  apply in their everyday lives
• Artefacts-mediated Awareness

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Two Cases

• Playfully-mediated awareness
• Work-practice awareness

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1. Playfully-mediated awareness

• Social Awareness in a Work Environment
• Non-work, non-critical
• Community building, care and belonging
• Engaging and playful experiences

• _at_ VU Amsterdam
• - Dhaval Vyas
• - Anton Eliëns
• - Gerrit van der Veer
• - Marek van de Watering

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1. Playfully-mediated awareness

• Fieldwork
• We sought to understand staff members current
  and aspired practices of being socially aware
  within the department

• Foci
• Forms of awareness
• Activities of awareness
• Agents of awareness
• Places of awareness
• Contents of awareness

Methods 1. Naturalistic observations 2.
Contextual interviews 3. Cultural probes
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1. Playfully-mediated awareness
Self-Reflections

• (a)
  (b) (c)
• Characteristics of awareness information
• representing the personal history of a senior
  researcher,
• representing the professional identity of a
  researcher
• representing a work related activity as a
  research poster

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1. Playfully-mediated awareness

• Casual Encounters

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1. Playfully-mediated awareness
Panorama prototype running on ViP technology
Eliëns 2006
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1. Playfully-mediated awareness
Member A Whose trophy is that? Member B
aaa.I think its Jans. Member A Ohh, I
didnt know he runs marathons. A conversation
of viewers recorded during the installation of
the Panorama prototype
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2. Work-practice awareness (work in progress)

• AMIDA Project
• Awareness system for Industrial Designers
• Ethnomethodologically informed fieldwork
• Methods
• Naturalistic Observations
• Contextual Interviews
• Video Recordings
• User Group
• Two industrial design departments
• Masters students
• Design researchers
• Professional designers

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2. Work-practice awareness (work in progress)

• Some early results
• Workplace Surfaces
• Material Artefacts
• Embodied actions

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References

• AMIDA Project
• Vyas, D. (2009) Artful Surfaces in Design
  Practices. In CHI '09 Extended Abstracts on Human
  Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA,
  April 04 - 9, 2009), ACM SIGCHI. (In Press)
• Vyas, D., Heylen, D., Nijholt, A. and van der
  Veer, G. (2009) Experiential Role of Artefacts in
  Cooperative Design. In Proceedings of 4th
  International Conference on Communities and
  Technologies (CT 2009). Penn State University,
  PA, USA. (ACM Press).
• Vyas, D., Heylen, D., and Nijholt, A. Physicality
  and Cooperative Design. In 5th Joint Workshop on
  Machine Learning and Multimodal Interaction.
  LNCS, (2008) Springer-Verlag.
• Vyas, D. and Dix, A. Artefact Ecologies
  Supporting Embodied Meeting Practices with
  Distance Access. In Ubicomp 2007 Adjunct
  Proceedings. ISBN 978-3-00-022599-4
• Panorama Project
• Vyas, D., van de Watering, M., Eliëns, A. van
  der Veer, G.C. Engineering Social Awareness in
  Work Environments. Universal Access in
  Human-Computer Interaction, HCII2007, LNCS,
  Springer-Heidelberg. 978-3-540-73280-8
• Vyas, D., van de Watering, M., Eliëns, A. van
  der Veer, G.C. Being Social _at_ Work Designing for
  Playfully Mediated Social Awareness in Work
  Environments. Book Chapter in "Home Informatics
  and Telematics ICT for the Next Billion". IFIP,
  Vol. 241, Venkatesh, A. Gonzalves, T. Monk, A.
  Buckner, K. (Eds.) ISBN 978-0-387-73696-9.
• Eliens, A. and Vyas, D. Panorama Explorations
  in the Aesthetics of Social Awareness. In
  Proceedings of GAME-ON 07, Nov 20-22, University
  of Bologna, Marco Roccetti (ed.), p. 71-75,
  EUROSIS-ETI Publication, ISBN 9789077381373
• Vyas, D., Eliëns, A., van de Watering, M. van
  der Veer, G.C. Organizational Probes Exploring
  Playful Interactions in Work Environment. In 15th
  European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics
  (ECCE-2008), Madeira, Portugal. ACM Press NY.

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• Thank You!
• Dhaval Vyas
• Human-Media Interaction
• University of Twente
• D.M.Vyas_at_ewi.utwente.nl