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>

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In this thesis a study of computing systems that use time as the primary method of organising electronic documents, and versions of electronic documents, is presented. Such systems should be useful and usable because they exploit people's intuitive understanding of temporal order. In addition, the systems are worthy of investigation because they have received little attention, yet they may provide enormous benefits to users with little cost, as the temporal information is easy for systems to record. Temporal document organisation systems have the potential of alleviating many of the problems that traditional systems have had for decades. Throughout this thesis, user-interface guidelines for the implementation of temporal document-organisation systems are presented. The guidelines are based on empirical and theoretical evaluations that I have conducted, and studies of other's work. By using theses guidelines, designers should be able to create interfaces that are liked by users, and provide good support for the user's tasks. The first set of guidelines are based on an investigation of the human factors of temporal document-organisation, specifically looking at memory and temporal awareness. These human factors are related to the user's tasks with documents and document versions: finding, reminding, error-recovery and system exploration. Another set of guidelines, based on a study of how existing document-organisation systems support the user's tasks, are then presented. My first empirical evaluation looks at history lists, which are some of the most common temporal document-organisation interfaces that are found today. In the study it was found that participants are slower at retrieving Web pages when using an interface that broke the history into non-temporal categories than with the other three interfaces that were tested. In addition the participants preferred the interface that broke the history into 'temporal chunks'. Following on from the history-list evaluation, a theoretical and empirical evaluation of version retrieval systems, including undo, is presented. It was found that, in a text-editing environment, there is sufficient mechanical reason son for forward error-correction to be favoured over undo when correcting small and simple errors. For more complex errors, it was found that a visualisation of the prior document versions is better than forward error-correction and undo. In a similar evaluation of error recovery in a drawing editor, undo was found to be the quickest method of recovering from simple errors, while a visualisation of the prior document versions allowed for faster recovery from more complex errors. Having looked at the retrieval of documents and document-versions separately, my final study looks at a system that combines them both. The system that I developed organises documents without the need for file names and folders, which are used in most document organisation systems. In the formative study I found that the system that combines the retrieval of documents and document versions is useful and usable, and the organisation of the data did not confuse the participants. After each of the evaluations, I provide guidelines that should be applicable not only to the interfaces that were studied, but to temporal document organisation interfaces in general.

The smart bookshelf serves as a test-bed to study environments that are intelligently augmented by projector-camera devices. The system utilizes a camera pair and a projector coupled with an RFID reader to monitor and maintain the state of a real world library shelf. Using a simple calibration scheme, the homography induced by the world plane in which book spines approximately lie is estimated. As books are added to the shelf, a foreground detection algorithm which takes into account the projected information yields new pixels in each view that are then verified using a planar parallax constraint across both cameras to yield the precise location of the book spine. The system allows users to query for the presence of a books through a user interface, highlighting the spines of present book using the known locations obtained through foreground detection and transforming image pixels to their corresponding points in the projectors frame via a derived homography. The system also can display the state of the bookshelf at any time in the past. Utilizing RFID tags increases robustness and usefulness of the application. Tags encode information about a book such as the title, author, etc, that can be used to query the system. It is used in conjunction with the visual system to infer the state of the shelf. This work provides a novel foreground detection algorithm that works across views, using loose geometric constraints instead pixel color similarity to robustly isolate foreground pixels. The system also takes into account projected information which if not handled would be detrimental to the system. The intent of this work was to study the feasibility of an augmented reality system and use this application as a testbed to study the issues of building such a system.

We explore the integration of projected imagery with a physical book that acts as a tangible interface to multimedia data. Using a camera and projector pair, a tracking framework is presented wherein the 3D position of planar pages are monitored as they are turned back and forth by a user, and data is correctly warped and projected onto each page at interactive rates to provide the user with an intuitive mixed-reality experience. The book pages are blank, so traditional camera-based approaches to tracking physical features on the display surface do not apply. Instead, in each frame, feature points are independently extracted from the camera and projector images, and matched to recover the geometry of the pages in motion. The book can be loaded with multimedia content, including images and videos. In addition, volumetric datasets can be explored by removing a page from the book and using it as a tool to navigate through a virtual 3D volume.

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Given the proliferation of new-generation internet capable devices in our society, they are now commonly used for a variety of purposes and by a variety of ages, including young children. The vast amount of new media content, available through these devices, cause parents to worry about what their children have access to. In this thesis we investigated how parents and children can work together towards the goal of content control and filtering. One problem to the current content control filtering tools and approaches is that they do not involve children in the filtering process, thus missing an opportunity of educating children about content appropriateness. Therefore, we propose a kid-in-the-loop approach to content control and filtering where parents and children collaboratively configure restrictions and filters, an approach that focuses on education rather than simple rule setting. We conducted an exploratory qualitative study with results highlighting the importance that parents place on avoiding inappropriate content. Building on these findings, we designed an initial kid-in-the-loop prototype which allows parents to work with their children to select appropriate applications, providing parents with the opportunity to educate their children on what they consider to be appropriate or inappropriate. We further validate our proposed approach by conducting a qualitative study with sets of parents and children in the six to eight year-old age group, which revealed an overwhelmingly favorable response to this approach. We conclude this thesis with a comprehensive analysis of our approach, which can be leveraged in designing content control systems targeting both parents and children.