The North House is a proof-of-concept prefabricated solar-powered home designed for northern climates, and intended for the research and promotion of high-performance sustainable architecture. Led by faculty at the University of Waterloo, the project was undertaken by Team North a broad collaboration between faculty and students at the Universities of Waterloo, Ryerson and Simon Fraser. In October 2009, the North House prototype competed in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon, where it placed fourth overall. The North House addresses the urgent environmental imperative to dramatically reduce energy consumed by the built environment. It does so, in part by employing two primary technological systems which make use of feedback and response mechanisms; the Distributed Responsive System of Skins (DReSS) reconfigures the envelope in response to changing weather conditions, while the Adaptive Living Interface System (ALIS) provides detailed performance feedback to the inhabitant, equipping them with informed control of their home. This thesis recognizes energy consumption as a socio-technical problem that implicates building inhabitants as much as buildings themselves. It also recognizes the particular potency of the ‘house’ as a building type that touches a broad population in a profoundly personal way; and is thus an apt testing ground for technologies that conserve energy, and those that teach occupants to do the same. With these ideas in mind, the thesis looks to Interactive Architecture - a practice that considers buildings and their inhabitants as an integrated system - as a promising conceptual framework for synthesizing the social and technical aspects of energy conservation in the home.

The concept of tinkering is a central practice within research in the field of Human Computer Interaction, dealing with new interactive forms and technologies. In this thesis, tinkering is discussed not only as a practice for interaction design in general, but as an attitude that calls for a deeper reflection over research practices, knowledge generation and the recent movements in the direction of materials and materiality within the field. The presented research exemplifies practices and studies in relation to interactive technology through a number of projects, all revolving around the design and interaction with physical interactive artifacts. In particular, nearly all projects are focused around robotic artifacts for consumer settings. Three main contributions are presented in terms of studies, prototypes and concepts, together with a conceptual discussion around tinkering framed as an attitude within interaction design. The results from this research revolve around how grounding is achieved, partly through studies of existing interaction and partly through how tinkering-oriented activities generates knowledge in relation to design concepts, built prototypes and real world interaction. / <p>QC 20131203</p>

This thesis explores the relationship between usability and persuasion in the design of the interface for a smart-phone application. Using a usability study of an I-phone app combined with interviews with users and the designers, the roles of usability and persuasion in the design of the app and their influence on each other as design goals is discussed from both the users’ and designers’ perspectives. The application’s purpose is to support behavior change in users by giving them feedback on their electricity use in order to encourage them to switch their pattern of usage to reduce CO² emissions. This thesis should be of interest to interaction designers faced with the challenge of designing interfaces that are simultaneously both user-friendly and persuasive. While it is generally accepted that usability has a positive effect on the potential of a design to be persuasive little is known about the effects, if any, of persuasion on usability. This thesis proposes that the relationship between these two design principles is more complex than is generally assumed and that in certain situations they may even be traded off against one another.  This trade-off could be useful for designers framing design challenges involving usability and persuasion.

'Complex sociotechnical systems' are systems made up of numerous interacting parts, both human and non-human, operating in dynamic, ambiguous and safety critical domains. The system design, and representation, has significant implications for the usability of the system, its performance, errors and reliability. Due to its formative constraint-based approach, Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) has been frequently proposed as a framework for modelling these complex systems, further it is contended that the approach can be extended to design for interaction without significant deviation from the accepted framework. This thesis presents a number of applications in complex military domains to explore and develop the benefits of CWA. Unlike much of the previous literature, particular attention is placed on exploring the CWA framework in its entirety. This holistic approach focuses on the system environment, the activity that takes place within it, the strategies used to conduct this activity, the way in which the constituent parts of the system (both human and non-human) interact and the behaviour required. Each stage of this analysis identifies the constraints governing the system; it is contended that through this holistic understanding of constraints, recommendations can be made for the design of system interaction; increasing the ability of users to cope with unanticipated, unexpected situations. This thesis discusses the applicability of the approach in system analysis, development and evaluation. It provides process to what was previously a loosely defined framework.

With the emergence of flexible display technologies, graphical user interfaces will no longer be limited to flat surfaces. As such, it will become necessary for interface designers to move beyond flat display designs, contextualizing interaction in an object’s physical shape. Grounded in early explorations of Organic User Interfaces (OUIs), this thesis examines the evolving relationship between industrial and interaction design and argues that not only what, but how we design is changing. To understand how to better design OUIs, we report on an empirical study of pointing behavior that shows how Fitts’ law can model movement time on an extremely convex surface. We also show that touch sensing technology can be repurposed for the OUI design process by making it possible to tape, draw, or paint touch sensing directly on a physical prototype. We then discuss how supporting sketching, a fundamental activity of many design fields, is increasingly critical for the interactive three-dimensional forms in OUI and that a ‘hypercontextualized’ approach to their design can reduce the drawbacks met when everyday objects become interactive. Finally, we discuss that when interactive hardware is seamlessly melded into an object’s shape, the ‘computer’ disappears. When designing OUIs, it is better seen as a basic material, like the clay, foam core, or plastics used by an industrial designer, and one that happens to have interactive potential. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2014-01-23 12:00:08.953

Software products are tools that find more uses in the society every day, both professionally and in daily lives of members of the society. This thesis focuses on the problems and possibilities related to current software products. By analysis of the problems and current issues in the software field, possible contribution of a design-oriented approach to software products is explored. The thesis is supported by a study in the form of a semi-structured observation.

Playing Nine to Five is a project that aims to raise awareness of the presence of objects in everyday situations. We always surround ourselves with objects, some of them we touch and use everyday, and some of them we barely notice until they stop working. But are we always aware of our relations with them, or have we slightly taken them for granted? While our life quality has moved forward and our living pace has sped up, we tend to lose more of our attentions and sensitivities to things around us. During the design process, I used office space as a canvas to discuss and challenge our daily norms, where objects exist mainly as tools. I looked into our ‘unconscious behavior’ with objects, such as habits or recurring actions. In our everyday lives, these repetitions and rhythmic movements with objects are often being unnoticed or considered as ‘normal’. In this project, I worked with two office objects, a pen and a clock. Respectively, they represent different ways of exploring our present relations with objects. Pen is an object we use and carry with almost everyday. It is personal and close to our body. Clock, on the other hand, is an object that we barley touch, but constantly look at or search for. It shows the information of time. Both proposals are designed to bring attention to what we are using, when, and how, to create space for discussion and reflection. The purpose of this project is to tweak the way we interact with objects and explore our relations with objects through playfulness and curiosity. I see this project as an ongoing exploration and a potential development in the future.

Playing Nine to Five is a project that aims to raise awareness of the presence of objects in everyday situations. We often surround ourselves with objects. Some of them we touch and use everyday, and some of them we barely notice until they stop working. But are we always aware of our relations with them, or have we slightly taken them for granted? While our life quality has moved forward and our living pace has sped up, we tend to lose more of our attentions and sensitivities to things around us. During the design process, I used office space as a canvas to discuss and challenge our daily norms, where objects exist mainly as tools. I looked into our ‘unconscious behavior’ with objects, such as habits or recurring actions. In our everyday lives, these repetitions and rhythmic movements with objects are often being unnoticed or considered as ‘normal’.  In this project, I worked with two office objects, a pen and a clock. Respectively, they represent different ways of exploring our present relations with objects. Pen is an object we use and carry with almost everyday. It is personal and close to our body. Clock, on the other hand, is an object that we barley touch, but constantly look at or search for. It shows the information of time. Both proposals are designed to bring attention to what we are using, when, and how, to create space for discussion and reflection. The purpose of this project is to tweak the way we interact with objects and explore our relations with objects through playfulness and curiosity. I see this project as an ongoing exploration and a potential development in the future.

<div>We have never felt so connected with the surrounding social and physical environment, thanks to the increasingly populating mobile computing devices and rapidly developing high-speed network. These technologies transform the everyday objects into smart-things and make us accessible to a large amount of digital information and intelligence relating closely to the physical reality. To bridge the gap between the digital interface and physical smart-thing, Augmented Reality (AR) has become a promising media that allows users to visually link the digital content to its physical target, with spatial and contextual awareness. Thanks to the vast improvement to the personal computing devices, AR technologies are emerging to popular realistic scenarios empowered by commercially available software development kits (SDKs) and hardware platforms, which makes it easier for human users to interact with the surrounding smart-things. </div><div><br></div><div>Due to the scope of this thesis, we are interested in exploring for the smart-things that have physical interaction capabilities with the reality world, such as Machines, Robots, and IoTs. Our overarching goal is to create better experience for users to interact with these smart-things, that is visual, spatial, contextual, and embodied, and we try to achieve this goal through novel augmented reality system workflow/framework design. </div><div><br></div><div>This thesis is based on our four published conference papers (Ani-Bot, V.Ra, GhostAR, Avatutar-study), which are described in chapters 3-6 respectively. On a broader level, our works in this thesis focus on exploring spatially situated visual programming techniques for human smart-thing interaction. In particular, we leverage contextual awareness in the AR environment with the interactivity of physical smart-things. We explore (1) spatial and visual input techniques and modalities for users to intuitively interact with the physical smart-things through interaction and interface design, and (2) the ecology of human smart-thing through system workflow design corresponding to the contextual awareness powered by the AR interface. In this thesis, we mainly study the following spatial aware AR interactions with our completed work: (i) Ani-Bot demonstrates Mixed-Reality (MR) interaction for tangible modular robotics through a Head-Mounted Device (HMD) with mid-air gestures, (ii) V.Ra describes spatially situated visual programming for Robot-IoT task planning, (iii) GhostAR has presented a time-space editor for Human-Robot Collaborative (HRC) task authoring. (iv) while AvaTutAR-study has presented an exploratory study that provided valuable design guidance for future AR avatar-based tutoring systems. </div><div><br></div><div>We further develop the enabling techniques including a modular robotics kit with assembly awareness and the corresponding MR features for the major phases of its lifecycle; a lightweight and coherent ecosystem design that enables spatial and visual programming as well as IoT interactive and navigatory task execution with a single AR-SLAM mobile device; and a novel HRC task authoring workflow using robot programming by human demonstration method within AR scene with avatar reference and motion mapping with dynamic time warping (DTW). Primarily, we design system workflows and develop applications for increasing the flexibility of AR content manipulation, creation, authoring, and intuitively interacting with the smart environment visually and pervasively. </div><div><br></div><div>Based on our completed projects, we conclude this thesis by summarizing the overall contributions of my Ph.D. works, and briefly providing my humble vision for the future of AR. </div>

Simulation-based tools are complex and obscure software. However, a company may benefit from using such tools, as they provide more precise and accurate information. Ericsson has developed a RAN simulator that allows to model cellular networks taking into account even their smallest aspects. This allows to compare di↵erent solutions for particular case and select the best one. Therefore, Ericsson can propose better, i. e. most e cient and less cost, solutions to its customers. However, the RAN simulator is developed in MATLAB and does not have any graphical user interface. Therefore, it is not possible for people who manage sales at Ericsson to use it, because they have no skills for it. This, in fact, raises the need of development of a tool that will provide sales people with a convenient way to access the RAN simulator. This research describes a process of prototyping three simulation-based tools for Ericsson. It covers a process of providing interaction designers with the knowledge about simulations. The research gives insights on important details of the simulations that are needed to be delivered to the designers, as well as aspects of developing simulation-based tools within multidisciplinary team. Moreover, the research introduces a “mediator person” who can significantly help and improve the process of the development of simulation-based tools. / Simuleringsbaserade verktyg är komplex programvara. Dock kan ett företag tjäna på att använda sådana verktyg, eftersom de kan ge tydlig och korrekt information. Ericsson har utvecklat en RAN-simulator som gör det möjligt att detaljerat modellera mobilnät. Simulatorn gör det möjligt att jämföra lösningar för specifika fall och därmed välja den bästa lösningen. Utifrån detta kan Ericsson sedan föreslå effektiva lösningar till lägre kostnad till sina kunder. RAN simulatorn är utvecklad i MATLAB och har inte har något grafiskt användargränssnitt. Av denna anledning är det svårt för försäljare utan MATLAB-kunskaper att använda simulatorn. Detta har gjort att det finns ett behov att utveckla ett grafiskt verktyg som gör det tillgängligt och enkelt att använda RAN-simulatorn. Denna forskningsstudie beskriver en process för att skapa tre simuleringsprototyper. Det omfattar en process för att tillhandahålla kunskaper om simuleringar till interaktionsdesigners för att de ska kunna utveckla användargränssnittet. Forskningen ger insikter om vilka kunskaper interaktionsdesigners behöver, samt aspekter för att kunna arbeta med utvecklingen av simuleringsverktyg i ett multidisciplinärt team. Resultatet visar på behovet av en medlar-roll  - någon som kan stödja och förbättra utvecklingsprocessen av komplexa simuleringsverktyg.