Outdoor mobility project
People spend 5% of their time outdoors. This statistic from my Living Green Page-A-Day calendar struck me as awfully low. Per day, it translates to 1.2 hours of being outside, which may seem high or low depending on where you live. I’m currently working on a survey to better understand the activities people do indoors and outdoors, how their home and work lives play a part in indoor/outdoor habits, and the reasons why we are not spending more time outdoors. There is a lot of research on how physical activity, being outdoors, and nature have positive effects on physical and mental health, the factors that promote popularity of certain urban areas, and literature that focuses on specific populations: children, particularly overweight children, the elderly, and the mobility impaired.

Along with the broad survey I’m conducting to get a better idea of this area (and hope to find some interesting correlations), I’m also designing a second survey based on the literature on outdoor mobility and social interaction for the elderly. I hope to create an intervention for the home that brings the outdoors to those who are mobility impaired and might not be able to go out often. More to come on that soon.

Current: IRB undergoing review
Next: Hope to deploy by the end of the week

References I’ve collected:
- Outdoor mobility, urban and public spaces
- Outdoor mobility and social interaction for the elderly and mobility impaired

Pachuino
Meanwhile, I’m continuing building simple sensors using the Arduino as part of my engagement in public spaces research. I’m currently working on combining an RFID reader with a WiShield to upload tagged items to Pachube. I built this with logging elevator data in mind: the probe would be placed unobtrusively near an elevator door, and whenever it reaches a new floor, the RFID reader will read that floor’s tag and uploaded it to the Pachube server. The idea is that manually logging elevator activity for observation in public spaces is very time consuming, and this is one way to automate it.

I’m currently in the process of getting the WiShield to communicate with Pachube, but it’s a little harder than I thought. The tutorial on Pachube for connecting WiShield to Pachube is incomplete, and seems to be missing a chunk of code that’s present in the Arduino Ethernet to Pachube tutorial.

Current: Connecting WiShield to Pachube
Next: Create casing for probe, deploy in elevators

That’s all for this week. I’ll be visiting family in China for 2 weeks and will be back in early July. Will post later this week an update on some things related to public spaces.

Earlier today, I watched Objectified, a great documentary about industrial design.  It reminded me of how permanently-built and unsustainable many material things are, and how easy it is for us to form emotional attachments to objects with personal stories that we then are reluctant to part with.  At the same time, I was thinking about different signs I could create for my public spaces project, signs that would tailor to people’s emotions in hopes of changing their behavior.  For example, an elevator will have a speech bubble sign on it that says “I’m feeling tired today. Please take the stairs!”  I started thinking about what the world would look like if our environment “spoke” back to us, even through inanimate signs. If we are taken off guard by a new friendly “Good morning!” thought-bubble-shaped sign on the door when we go to work, would our initial reaction be to say “Good morning!” back, before realizing that we were just about to talk to a door? Would we start noticing more things around us, and could we become more appreciative of them?

I applied the same idea to daily material things often taken for granted.  What if your toaster told you when your bread was done, and when you said “thank you,” it replied “you’re welcome”? I’m not talking about creating robot appliances that will chat with you about your day and the daily news, but simple conversation pieces that made you feel like you were interacting with someone who just did you a nice favor. Not everyone can say “ah yes, this [insert thing] was passed down by my grandma and has considerable sentimental value to me,” but what if by giving certain products simple voices, you will form an emotional attachment to them and are less likely to replace them when something shinier comes along? (Come on, do you really need this muffin toaster that cooks your eggs too?)

In this age, we are constantly making things faster, smarter, smaller, bigger, better, building more and more until you walk into a Walmart Supercenter and suddenly you’re dizzy thinking about how much stuff there is. Some people don’t think twice about replacing a 1-year old digital camera when a newer model arrives, or even a 1-month old bag for another bag (of course, this one is absolutely perfect and you will never ever have to buy another bag ever again). Instead of designing new products that come equipped with these voices, we could build our own little toaster soul and equip it to our toaster, adding another kind of “creator bond” to our new relationship with the toaster. These low resolution social-emotional interfaces have the potential to increase awareness of our surroundings and make people more appreciative of what they have.

Update 1/19 – Suggested readings (thanks to all those who contacted me and suggested the following)

Cziksentimihalyi, M. 1991. Design and Order in Everyday Life. Design Issues, vol. 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1991), MIT Press, 26-34. (Works that have cited this paper)

Alex Taylor, Microsoft Researcher.

Blevis, E. 2007. Sustainable interaction design: invention & disposal, renewal & reuse. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA, April 28 – May 03, 2007). CHI ’07. ACM, New York, NY, 503-512. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240705

Lim, Y., Donaldson, J., Jung, H., Kunz, B., Royer, D., Ramalingam, S., Thirumaran, S., and Stolterman, E. 2008. Emotional Experience and Interaction Design. In Affect and Emotion in Human-Computer interaction: From theory To Applications, C. Peter and R. Beale, Eds. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 4868. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 116-129. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85099-1_10

Norman, D. A. 2004. Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. Basic Books, NY.

[Door picture from ArchiExpo]

- How can we encourage people to approach and engage with technology in public spaces?
- How can ambient technology in public spaces help us be more aware of 1) our environment, 2) our automatic behaviors in public?
- How can ambient technology in public spaces encourage us to make positive choices?
- How can ubiquitous computing affect our outdoors experience by tailoring to our emotions?

Although these questions mostly focus on the outdoors/public spaces, particularly cities and towns, some of them can also apply to private spaces such as offices or homes.

Also, here are a few research questions I had been thinking about social interaction in public spaces, as a follow up to an old blog post.  These questions were inspired by a visit to NYC as well as One in 8 Million, a collection of short documentaries about people in New York.

- How can collective public storytelling improve social interactions between strangers, particularly in waiting spaces?
- What’s the best way to share and display your own stories with others?
- How can we use design to address some of the privacy concerns?

I’m working on a few projects dealing with the first set of questions right now. I’ve chosen to look specifically at: stairs, trees, umbrellas, and maybe bike racks. I’m still thinking of ways that I can tie both sets of questions together, and to refine these questions further as I gain more experience with research.

For those of you who have it, what do you think of it so far?

Summer:
I worked with Orit Shaer on a Microsoft Surface project. Along with Catherine Grevet, Sarah Elfenbein, and Megan Strait, we created G-Nome Surfer, a genome browser for biology researchers. We interviewed many biologists and researchers to find out their work flow, collaboration tools and needs, and existing methods of browsing genomic data. Catherine and I familiarized ourselves with coding in XAML and C#, while Megan and Sarah worked out all the biological details — finding ontology information, gene and chromosome information, etc.

I also got some tiny experience working with Jmol (chemistry molecule viewer) and was able to export molecules into .dae format suitable for 3D printing. I got the molecule into Papervision 3D and hooked it up with a Wiimote. This side project didn’t get very far, but the idea was to play around with a new way of interacting with 3D scientific models by using Wiimotes for more intuitive navigation. I have lots of ideas about other ways we can accomplish this, to be saved for a different blog post.

In August, after the summer research program, I moved and settled in to my new home in Pittsburgh and started classes and research at CMU. I love it here! Getting used to a research environment definitely has its challenges, especially coming from undergrad with little research experience, but I’m slowly getting the hang of it.

That’s it for now. More blog posts to come related to current research I’m working on, and some new ideas I’ve been thinking about. This blog and my portfolio are undergoing a (much-needed) redesign this week, integrating the two together. The design is ready to be uploaded, but first I need to migrate my portfolio from the current site to WordPress for easier management. If you see some weird things around the site, or if it looks broken or something, chances are that I’m working on it. Please check back next week for the new site!

This Saturday is NEUCS where I’ll be displaying my poster and giving a presentation on WiiPaint.  The same poster will be presented at next weekend’s CCSCNE in Plattsburgh, NY, and WiiPaint will be showcased (in a gallery setting!) at Wellesley for the Boston CyberArts Festival.  The honors thesis paper is due on the Tuesday after that (4/28), immediately followed by another presentation at Wellesley’s Ruhlman conference (4/29). My thesis defense will be on May 15 at 11am.

Whew! I’m very fortunate to be working on something that I’m so excited and proud of I wish I could perfect it some more, but new adventures await me this summer and beyond! I will be staying at Wellesley to do research on supporting scientific discoveries using reality-based interaction (Android! MS Surface!), and this fall I will be joining Carnegie Mellon’s HCII.

Onward!

WiiPaint demonstration 2 from Chloe Fan on Vimeo.

It was clear that if I wanted users to be more natural and fluid with their body movements, I had to do something about the Wiimotes’ affordances. How can we change the look and feel of the Wiimote so that users will approach them a different way? One thought that came up during my weekly thesis meeting was that perhaps the flat front of the Wiimote (where the IR camera is) gave it too much of a point and click remote feel, and that the solution was to create something round that would imply more of a rolling and fluid motion.

We played around with some old Mac speakers, taking out the speakers and wires and putting the clear casing on either end of a Wiimote. The result was a 3-4lb dumbbell-shaped object that was throwable and kickable, but most importantly, made the Wiimote a friendlier device that allowed for more naturally fluid movements and elicited no urge to press the buttons!

I didn’t quite like the weight of the Mac speakers, and they had to be taped together, which made reconnecting the Wiimote/changing its batteries difficult. It was “clunky.” So I went to PetSmart and bought a 7″ hamster ball and crafted a “booster stand” out of foam so that the Wiimote fit snugly inside the ball. I also created a Wiimote coffin — a case for the Wiimote that covered the buttons. It is currently shaped like a brick but I plan to sculpt it wand-shaped.

In addition, I finally put together some parts I ordered from RadioShack.com onto a small breadboard to create an IR LED light array. Each LED can be turned on/off with a switch, and controls a differently-colored dot in a rough IR interface within WiiPaint.

I plan to be finished with WiiPaint by the end of spring break (3/29). After that, I will run some more studies, hopefully in a gallery setting, and start writing the thesis. Next month, I’ll be preparing for the following conferences:
NEUCS
CCSCNE
CHI 2009
ACM Creativity & Cognition
Wellesley Ruhlman
Boston CyberArts

Onward!

At the Cirque, I informally tested WiiPaint with everyone from kids to students to parents, observed their interactions, and marked down some of their suggestions.

- B button to toggle is drawing. Users naturally place fingers on trigger button.
- Confusion as to which dot is whose. Need to find a way to either make it obvious, or remove any distinction to add to the “wholeness” of the application.
- Questions about what the buttons do — should brainstorm ways to make a case for the Wiimotes. Perhaps they can be colored differently to match their respective drawing dots on the screen.
- Unless they are told what to do, users first experiment with xy-plane movements (point and click type movements), but when initially told how to interact, they get it almost right away. Likewise, when told what it does and why, users seem to like it a lot more than just exploring with it.
- Kids love shaking the Wiimote
- It would be cool to add in interaction between Wiimote circles, for example when two streams collide, they will merge colors, or, as one video-game fan suggested, “battle” each other. (Cool idea, but that probably won’t happen ;))

Anyways, stay tuned for some more video clips next week! In the meantime, I’ve created my first Youtube video of a screen capture of WiiPaint

- Wiimote response is slow right now. The bomomo circles are following a tiny dot that rolls around the screen according to the Wiimote’s accelerometer values. This can be easily fixed by increasing the speed of the dot and circles, and will allow users to make more dramatic gestures.

- We want to see support for bigger gestures and features (visual/aural cues) that encourage the creation of these gestures. What will encourage users to “dance” and make other full-body movements? Brainstorm movement qualities we want to capture, such as waving, dancing, throwing, etc.

- Visual effects similar to the iPhone app Spawn Illuminati’s double-tap fireworks effect. Implement similar effects for certain types of gestures. Encourage users to want to try out different things to explore these effects.

- Music is also a powerful tool if we want to influence users’ interaction with WiiPaint, i.e. soothing music will probably encourage slower movements. At the very least, I have found an instrumental music loop that I can use, but it would be nice if I could find one that can be overlapped over it to create another dimension.

- Create a tighter border so that the Wiimote dot pointer will not seem to stray away from the screen. Add interactivity to the dot, such as bouncing off the border, so that it does not stay at the edge of the screen.

- Add some fun physics metaphors, such as ball simulation, to make idle states more interesting. On a similar note, implement animation such as fading when idle so that users will want to continue using it.

These are some great suggestions and I can’t wait to implement them!