This thesis contributes with insights into how aspects of the surrounding physical and social context can be exploited in the design of mobile media applications for playful use. In this work, context refers to aspects of the immediate surroundings – outside of the device – that can be identified and measured by sensors; for instance environmental aspects like sound, and social aspects like co-located people. Two extensive case studies explore the interplay between users, mobile media, and aspects of context in different ways, and how it can invite playful use. The first case study, Context Photography, uses sensor-based information about the immediate physical surroundings to affect images in real time in a novel digital camera application for everyday creativity. The second, Push!Music, makes it possible to share music both manually and autonomously between co-located people, based on so-called media context, for spontaneous music sharing. The insights gained from the designs, prototypes, and user studies, point at the value of combining explicit and implicit interaction – essentially, the expected and unexpected – to open for playful use. The explicit interaction encouraged users to be active, exploratory, and creative. The implicit interaction let users embrace and exploit dynamic qualities of the surroundings, contributing to making the systems fun, exciting, magical, ‘live’, and real. This combination was facilitated through our approach to context, where sensor-based information was mostly open in use and interpretation, ambiguous, visible, and possible to override for users, and through giving the systems a degree of agency and autonomy. A key insight is that the combination of explicit and implicit interaction allowed both control and a sense of magic in the interaction with the mobile media applications, which together seems to encourage play and playfulness.

It is difficult for designers to explain what they do. In addition,those unfamiliar with design do not understand the rigor and logic of design thinking and process .We can’t formulate pre defined model for design process because every design situation is unique and new situation. But I tried to formulate my own model for design process as common with Inspirations from my supervisors/Lectures. I tried to describe what is design? And what is design process? In this paper.This personal position paper explores the personal improvement throughout the course work and what I learnt though out the course work.

This thesis explores the design and evaluation of human-robot communication for service robots that use natural language to interact with people.  The research is centred around three themes: design of human-robot communication; evaluation of miscommunication in human-robot communication; and the analysis of spatial influence as empiric phenomenon and design element.  The method has been to put users in situations of future use through means of Hi-fi simulation. Several scenarios were enacted using the Wizard-of-Oz technique: a robot intended for fetch- and carry services in an office environment; and a robot acting in what can be characterised as a home tour, where the user teaches objects and locations to the robot. Using these scenarios a corpus of human-robot communication was developed and analysed.  The analysis of the communicative behaviours led to the following observations: the users communicate with the robot in order to solve a main task goal. In order to fulfil this goal they overtake service actions that the robot is incapable of. Once users have understood that the robot is capable of performing actions, they explore its capabilities.  During the interactions the users continuously monitor the behaviour of the robot, attempting to elicit feedback or to draw its perceptual attention to the users’ communicative behaviour. Information related to the communicative status of the robot seems to have a fundamental impact on the quality of interaction. Large portions of the miscommunication that occurs in the analysed scenarios can be attributed to ill-timed, lacking or irrelevant feedback from the robot.  The analysis of the corpus data also showed that the users’ spatial behaviour seemed to be influenced by the robot’s communicative behaviour, embodiment and positioning. This means that we in robot design can consider the use strategies for spatial prompting to influence the users’ spatial behaviour.  The understanding of the importance of continuously providing information of the communicative status of the robot to it’s users leaves us with an intriguing design challenge for the future: When designing communication for a service robot we need to design communication for the robot work tasks; and simultaneously, provide information based on the systems communicative status to continuously make users aware of the robots communicative capability. / QC 20100714

This study targets assembly industry, which deals with varying businesses that require any product assembly. It reflects on the challenges of the current production lines at assembly industry regarding the trends of both the consumer and the industrial developments on technology investigated which aspects can be improved or re-designed under the given delimitations. Moreover further consideration is done on human operators’ role in the assembly line and their future role in correlation with their current challenges and expectations. Results and further analysis are done from the drift of the R&D on future assembly environment by considering interconnected software-hardware-human sides of the interaction, the change in the balance of products and also to point out new areas of research to Marketing and R&D Departments.

There are more than 175 million migrant workers around the world. For example, 25% of the population of Singapore is comprised of migrants. As a result, social alienation arises from the language gap needing to be bridged. This gap oftentimes causes high (and unnecessary) levels of stress in the lives of these migrants.Mentally preparing for such a migration is but one of the steps which can help alleviate the stress cause by acculturation. Learning the local language and cultural mannerisms can help migrants better prepare for moving to a different country. Inspired by an immigrant mother who has learned French in order to adapt to her surroundings and many friends in similar situations, much background research was also performed in order to properly frame such broad language learning service. Testing over 28 existing language learning solutions, performing over 15 interviews and observing many learners in the wild contributed to the construction of many functional language learning prototypes. [Language Acquisition Projects], [Guided Conversation], [Social Profiler], [Lockscreen Flashcards] and even more prototypes were built as quickly as possible and tested with potential learners in order to validate their effectiveness, effectiveness for retention and fun factor. These prototypes were refined and packaged into the lin’guage service, a tool comprised of mobile software, a personal dictionary and language-specific branded objects; all of which could be used anywhere in the world to learn the local language wherever migrants move. The software is made for busy people, presenting fun learning challenges tailor-picked for learners which only take between 1 and 5 minutes to complete. Designed as a framework, lin’guage can be used to learn any language from any language. (A German speaker could learn Korean, or a Swedish speaker could learn Chinese).

Local Roots is a design of a system where local interest circles and study groups share their knowledge and interest in the context of an outdoor museum. Here, museum visitors can get inspired by a first glimpse into the local culture of traditional food production. This thesis project mainly focuses on the introduction experience to this system, on the outdoor museum plant tour "what's my flavor". Interactive plant audio installations of this tour are placed around the territory of the museum. By touching different parts of a plant, museum visitors trigger information about its nutritional and cultural values. They start to see food opportunities in natural ecosystems, gain experience and train watchfulness the same way they would do it for centuries before, by touching, smelling and reading the signs of nature together with the more experienced peers.

Interactive television (iTV) is an umbrella term used to cover the convergence of television with digital media technologies such as computers, personal video recorders, game consoles, and mobile devices, enabling user interactivity. Increasingly, viewers are moving away from a "lean back" model of viewing to a more active "lean forward" one. When fully realized on a widespread scale in the United States, our current experience of watching television will be dramatically transformed. Because iTV is a new medium in its own right, however, standards for iTV programming and interaction in the United States remain undefined. This document identifies and articulates interaction design principles for interactive television programming in the United States. Chapter one presents a brief survey of the field as it stands in 2005. In chapters two and three, I categorize iTV by platforms and by persistent television genres, and present representative examples for each category. In chapter four, I provide an overview of existing design standards in related areas. Insights from chapters two, three, and four all serve to inform chapter five, in which I propose principles for iTV interaction design by looking closely at existing designs (both deployed and prototyped), conventions, and patterns of interaction. My analyses are rooted in visual culture and human-computer interaction design principles, and the design principles I offer are abstracted from the applications I analyze within this framework. Finally, in chapter six, I offer some conclusions and thoughts for future directions.

<p>Ma’at Solution är ett Österrikiskt företag beläget i Linz, som utvecklar affärssystem specialiserade på aktieportföljsoptimering och värdepappers hantering. Företaget önskar komplettera sin nuvarande produkt Ma’at Invest med en Internetversion som delvis ska fungera som substitut men också som komplement till huvudprogrammet.Projektet kallades Ma’at Online. Man vill använda sig av de fördelar som finns i och med det nuvarande Java-utvecklingsverktyget- Eclipse. Exempel på fördelar är möjligheten att förstora och förminska önskade fönster vid behov. Genom det nyutvecklade Adobe (förut Macromedia) Flex är detta nu möjligt även på Internet. Ur denna idé utvecklades ett övergripande mål:</p><p>- Skapa ett användarvänligt gränssnitt för Ma’at Online med hjälp av Adobe Flex.</p><p>Initialt analyserades arbetsflödet i det existerande programmet med hjälp av UMLnotation. På så sätt var det enklare att förstå hur programmet var uppbyggt och vilka funktioner som ansågs nödvändiga. Vidare definierades målgruppen för att förstå hur programmet ska användas och vilka krav som bör ställas. Dessa krav utarbetades ytterligare och användes sedan för att omforma arbetsflödet från den nuvarande applikationen. Därefter utvecklades en alternativ design som mötte de utsatta kraven. Slutligen testades programmet på användarna för att säkerställa användbarheten.</p><p>Ytterligare lades kraft på att skapa ett gränssnitt som tog vara på fördelarna med animation och användarmanipulation för att skapa ett bättre och enklare arbetsflöde som förhindrar frustration och misstag och som istället hjälper användaren vid behov.</p><p>Ur datateknisk synpunkt undersöktes vilka komponenter som borde användas och hur de kunde skapas i Adobe Flex med hjälp av programmeringsspråket ActionScript.</p><p>Projektet resulterade i ett användarvänligt och estetiskt gränssnitt baserad på ny revolutionerande teknik som talar till rätt målgrupp och uppfyller de för programmet uppsatta målen.</p><p>Av utvecklingsarbetet med Adobe Flex har slutsatsen dragits att tekniken fortfarande har komplikationer, men att inom ett par år kommer de funktioner som är vanligt förekommande i standardprogram användas på Internet.</p> / <p>Ma’at Solutions is an Austrian software company located in Linz. The company is specialized in financial business applications such as portfolio management systems.The company wishes to extend its existing product Ma’at Invest with an Internet version that will work as a substitute or complement to the main program. The project is named Ma’at Online. Ma’at Solutions would like to use the advantages in the present program developed in the Java development environment -Eclipse. An example of features that the company would like to transfer to the online version is that the user can enlarge or minimize windows on request. Through the newly released Adobe (former Macromedia) Flex this is possible even on the Internet. From this a general goal was established:</p><p>- Create the Ma’at Online interface with an optimal usability approach in Adobe Flex.</p><p>The workflow in the existing application was analyzed with UML-modeling notation. In this way it was easier to understand the purpose of the program and which functions were required. Furthermore the target user was defined to acquire the needs of the users. These requirements were then developed even more and were used in the remodeling of the workflow to better suit an Internet version. In addition to that, an alternative design was developed, that met the requirements stated in the prior stage. At last an evaluation was performed and a test study of the finished prototype was conducted to make sure that the program meets the requirements.</p><p>During the development process, time was spent on trying to use the advantages of animations and interaction manipulations to create a better and easier workflow that prevents the user from frustration and errors. Instead it is supposed to provide help to the user when needed. The components in the Adobe Flex were investigated and tested to see how they could be created in the scripting language Action Script and if they could fit into the application.</p><p>The result of the project was that the application is user-friendly and has an aesthetic interface based on an edge-cutting technology.</p><p>The conclusion of the development process in Adobe Flex is that the technology still has complications, however in a few years, the eatures used in standalone programs will be used on the Internet.</p>

<p>Many interactive products and services have made the move from stationary or desktop applications to dedicated mobile devices. Sonys Playstation has evolved into the PSP (playstation portable), Apples iPod is fully integrated with iTunes, Microsoft’s new media player is rumored to carry the Xbox brand and browsers like Internet Explorer and Opera can be used on pocket PCs, cell phones and Smart Phones. A very interesting example of this development is the global telephony company Skype that offers free calls over the Internet as well as instant messaging, video conferencing among many other things. Skype is making its way from the desktop to a wide array of devices, stressing the need for a unified brand experience. This thesis seeks to explore the different interactive aspects that constitute the user experience of a specific brand. Through listing the use qualities fulfilled by the services in the primary product and examining their requirements and dependencies in the user interface, this thesis proposes a method to foresee potential confinements in the brand experience when distributing an interactive product or service to a new platform. The thesis also aims at examining how the method can be used in the design process.</p>

This thesis is situated in a moment when the theory and practice of inclusive design appears to be significantly implicated in the social and economic response to demographic changes in Western Europe by addressing the need to reconnect older people with technology. In light of claims that cognitive ageing results in an increasing disconnection from novel digital media in old age, inclusive design is apparently trapped in a discourse in which digital media products and interfaces are designed as a response to a deterministic decline in abilities. The thesis proceeds from this context to ask what intellectual moves are required within the discourses of inclusive design so that its community of theorists and practitioners can both comprehend and afford the enaction of cognitive experience in old age? Whilst influential design scholarship actively disregards reductionist cognitive explanations of human and technological relationships, it appears that inclusive design still requires an explanation of temporal changes to human cognition in later life. Whilst there is a burgeoning area of design related research dealing with this issue—an area this thesis defines as ‘cognitively inclusive design’—the underlying assumptions and claims supporting this body of research suggests its theorists and practitioners are struggling to move beyond conceptualising older people as passive consumers suffering a deterioration in key cognitive abilities. The thesis argues that, by revisiting the cognitive sciences for alternative explanations for the basis of human cognition, it is possible to relieve this problem by opening up new spaces for designers to critically reflect upon the manner in which older people interact with digital media. In taking a position that design is required to support human cognitive enactment, the thesis develops a new approach to conceptualising temporal changes in human cognition, defined as ‘senescent cognition’. From this new critical lens, the thesis provides an alternative ‘senescentechnic’ explanation of cognitive disconnections between older people and digital media that eschews reductionism and moves beyond a deterministic process of deterioration. In reassessing what ageing cognition means, new strategies for the future of inclusive design are proposed that emphasise the role of creating space for older people to actively explore, reflect upon and enact their own cognitive couplings with technology.