Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Flexibility is often a keyword for people working in project-oriented organisations. It definitely influences their everyday life, since they are expected to be available and engaged anytime and anywhere and often with different types of obligations. However, there are constraints limiting people’s possibilities in every specific time-space. The time-geographical perspective provides concepts for analysing constraints, by identifying: capacity, coupling, steering or authority constraints. The aim of this paper is to discuss the time-geographical concept of constraints and analyse how they are overcame by a flexible use of time. The paper is based on two field studies. The first was conducted in twelve households and included in-depth interviews at two occasions and in between the household members wrote time-diaries during a week. The second was more extensive. Two focus groups, each with 24 persons, who all had written time-diaries, were interviewed. The conclusion of these studies is that different forms of constraints define the outcome of flexibility and that the use of time can be an expression of power.

Flexibility is often a keyword for people working in project-oriented organisations. It definitely influences their everyday life, since they are expected to be available and engaged anytime and anywhere and often with different types of obligations. However, there are constraints limiting people’s possibilities in every specific time-space. The time-geographical perspective provides concepts for analysing constraints, by identifying: capacity, coupling, steering or authority constraints. The aim of this paper is to discuss the time-geographical concept of constraints and analyse how they are overcame by a flexible use of time. The paper is based on two field studies. The first was conducted in twelve households and included in-depth interviews at two occasions and in between the household members wrote time-diaries during a week. The second was more extensive. Two focus groups, each with 24 persons, who all had written time-diaries, were interviewed. The conclusion of these studies is that different forms of constraints define the outcome of flexibility and that the use of time can be an expression of power.

Many people regularly multitask while cooking at home. Juggling household chores, reusing limited kitchen utensils, and coordinating overlapping cooking times for multiple recipes can cause frequent task switching and simultaneous task monitoring while cooking. As a result, the cook occasionally loses track of his cooking progress especially when determining which ingredients have already been added, counting multiple scoops of an ingredient, and keeping watch of cooking times. People compensate for these memory slips by devising memory strategies or deferring to memory aids with varying degrees of success. In this paper, we present a novel memory aid for cooks called Cook’s Collage. We describe how the system constructs a visual summary of ongoing cooking activity. Then, we report a task simulation study evaluating the effectiveness of Cook’s Collage as a memory aid. We argue that a memory aid is helpful only if it is balanced correctly with a complementary memory strategy and only if the accuracy of the memory aid is trusted. Lastly, we discuss how the six design features of the Cook’s Collage suggest a general framework for memory aids in the home, which we term déjà vu displays.

This paper is based on a study that investigates the self-presentation on homepages on three levels. On the first level we explore the content that was used for presenting oneself on homepages and we examine if certain “dos and don’ts” have been established in the choice of content as well as in the way of presentation. The second level does a reconstruction of the significance of content for the given material within the author’s scope of meaning. On the third level the study tries to find cultural explanations for the “self-representation on personal homepages” phenomenon.

An overall goal of the project is to create design principles for domestic applications of proactive computing in a way that could support existing values of domestic life. During the first year of the project we studied meanings and understandings associated with domestic technologies and their roles in everyday life by applying the probes approach. The focus was on the material environment of the home as well as the social: important things and practices affecting cosiness, domestication of media technologies, and use routines of different kind of domestic devices. One purpose of the project is also to explore how emphatic design methods can be applied to produce understanding of people’s emotional relation to their domestic environment and dynamic use contexts of domestic media and technologies. The starting point was that proactive solutions applied in the homes have to meet high standards in aesthetic and social usability in order to become widely adopted and accepted by the people.

Home-oriented Informatics and Telematics (HOIT) research has a number of challenges in the future. These range from the technical challenge of providing useful solutions through the ubiquitous paradigm to the cultural challenges of the 21 century. While much research focuses on the technical processes of devices, services and systems for the home there is little reflective research that looks into the ethical components of these developments. This paper outlines some of the ethical problems that are faced by developers and researchers in this subject.

In Stockholm during the years 1999–2002 some residential housing units provided with advanced IT-based functions were developed, also called smart homes systems. The purpose was to offer the residents an augmented living environment mainly regarding security and comfort. Only the IT company that originally developed the basic system fully knows it in depth, a fact which has shown to become very unfavourable for the residents. The running cost, also for minor changes of the functionality of the system, has turned out to be high and prohibiting. Also the contracted regular maintenance requires access to unique competence, which also has become costly. Recently the company has indicated a replacement of the smart homes system with a simpler one based on the Internet. Business models for viable home systems should include the occupancy phase, which to date have been neglected. A crucial issue is who will and can assume long-term responsibility for surveillance, maintenance, and added functionalities over time. This paper will discuss some principal questions and prerequisites regarding business viability in relationship to smart home systems, and its significance for business modelling.

Much of the work in the smart house technology has been done on individual technologies, but little has been done on their integration into a cohesive whole. The Bluetooth house project at Massey University in New Zealand, which was initiated in 2002, embraced a systems engineering approach to design a usable smart house, aiming at a complete and integrated solution, which can be customised, based on individual needs, to give elderly people independence, quality of life, and the safety they require. This paper presents how the Massey Bluetooth smart house design project has been carried out and what the smart home may look like in the near future. Considering current technical feasibility and the advances in other research, it is suggested that for a house to be considered as truly ‘smart’, four levels of smartness are imperative: , and . The Bluetooth house at Massey University incorporates these four smart technologies and allows all these individual technologies to be integrated into a seamless whole. For smart sensing, the project employed Bluetooth technology to connect the whole house, and to locate the user’s position. In order to coordinate all the technologies, a smart management system was developed, that is capable of coordinating the information for commands, feedback from smart appliances, and user’s location information. It can make intelligent decisions on what to do, or relay necessary information to individual intelligent devices throughout the house. In addition, the medium of communication with the house must be as natural as possible, in order to make it as easy as possible for the occupants of the smart house to interact with and the various smart appliances. A voice-activated universal remote control and a new microphone system are being developed to this end. Finally, the smart house has to provide an enjoyable experience that can promote the uptake of smart house technology by users in the future. An interactive TV environment is being developed to this end. The Massey Bluetooth house project is not so much aimed at a cutting-edge technology in smart house design, but at integrating technologies into a seamless, cohesive whole through the application of four levels of smartness.

Smart home systems must be controlled comfortably and securely by a broad range of users and in diverse contexts of use. One possibility to meet the requirements deriving from these diversities is to provide multiple devices to control the system. When a smart home application is used by one person on different devices, the user interface concepts should support an easy transition between devices. This article describes the development and result of a multi-device user interface to control a smart home system with focus on usability issues. The target devices are touch screen display and PDA. The design principles for inter-usability proposed by Denis & Karsenty 2004 are discussed and adapted with respect to a balance of inter-usability and usability of the specific device interface. The refined PDA user interface is described in detail.

There are a number of themes and descriptive categorisations of devices in HCI that act as positive common places. These include portable, wearable, and ubiquitous devices. In the this paper the category ‘loseables’, which includes misplaceables, forgetables and stealables, is offered as an alternative formulation of the self same devices. In a recent keynote address David Benyon proposed that HCI practitioners could utilise their own craft skill and tacit knowledge as users of devices to generate questions about design. He also suggested that there was a place for constructive criticism in relation to design that entails a role similar to that of the literary critic. The critical reflexivity method presented in this paper draws inspiration from these comments, and in combination with Philip Agre’s idea of HCI as a ‘critical technical practice’, offers an exercise in reflective HCI. It explores the essentially contested meaning inherent in devices and, in so doing, presents not only commentary on design itself - along with the simultaneously constructive and constrictive nature of such terms - but also, and more importantly, generates questions, insights and suggestions for design.