Things

FeedFinder

Madeline Balaam, Selina Sutton, and Andrew Garbett
Things |


We have been working with local women and community breastfeeding groups to create a breastfeeding mapping mobile application called FeedFinder. In our initial design work we found that women had felt trapped in their house in the early days of having a baby partly because they were unsure where had good facilities for breastfeeding when they were out and about in the city centre. We’re aiming to try and improve women’s early experiences of breastfeeding through an android-based map application which we have designed in collaboration with breastfeeding women.

The app works much like Trip Advisor, or Urban Spoon. It allows women to search for breastfeeding places near to their current location, access other mother’s reviews of these breastfeeding places, as well as add their own review or even add a new breastfeeding place to the map. 

Each place can be rated from 1 to 5 stars (5 being the best) for how comfortable, clean and private the place is as well as the quality of the baby facilities. In addition, the amount spent during a visit can also be entered. 

FeedFinder will be released to the general public at the end of May 2013. We’re fascinated to find out how women use this app and what impact it has on their experiences of breastfeeding and social networking in the city. (And, while the work has been conducted here in Newcastle, the app is available for use globally.)

 

TangiSoft

Ahmed Kharrufa
Things

TangiSoft was a hybrid of a physical and soft keyboard, intended to combine the advantages of both. It was designed for use with a digital tabletop, specifically for applications that require high mobility and frequent switching between text entry and other tasks.

The device was a piece of paper with a printed keyboard. It was developed for a pre-production prototype of the multi-pen Promethean Activboard digital tabletop, whose digitising technology was an electromagnetic grid that reacted to a battery- and wire-free mouse pen and could read and distinguish input from up to three pens simultaneously. For the TangiSoft keyboard, we used one pen to input text and the sensors of two other pens to track the pen’s movements.

We hypothesised that having a tangible keyboard would facilitate two-handed interaction, improving mobility and helping users to better integrate text entry with higher-level activities. During our analysis of the keyboard, which involved tests by ten participants, we found that mobility was largely a characteristic of the user, but that the keyboard did encourage more two-handed interaction and that users were more mobile than they were with a soft keyboard.

 

Production Crate

Tom Bartindale
Things

Production Crate is a media production system for conference management. It is an aggregate of information from many different sources, including social networks such as Twitter and Flickr, direct video submissions and so on, all of which is displayed on smart tables. This information can be distributed to many different outputs throughout the conference. Production teams are able to curate conference media and make editorial decisions, as they might if they were producing a live television show. The system aids back channel conversation and can help shape discussion amongst conference delegates.

Production Crate also enables delegates to access the content that is most relevant to them without having to search for it. By providing them with electronic badges, the smart tables recognise delegates as they approach, and are able to bring up relevant content at once.

This is part of Tom Bartindale’s PhD: Interaction Design for Live Events.

 

Invisible Design

John Vines, Stephen Lindsay, and David Green
Things |

Invisible Design is a technique for generating insights and ideas with workshop participants in the early stages of concept development. It involves the creation of ambiguous films in which characters discuss a technology that is not directly shown.The technique builds on previous work in HCI on scenarios, persona, theatre, film and ambiguity. By not visibly showing the design on-screen – although it is still in the scene – the films provide opportunities to seed discussions about the experiences around a particular idea or design space without focusing on the physical form and exact functionality of the design. We have used the Invisible Design approach in a number of projects:

  • Smart Money was used in the New Approaches to Banking for the Older Old project to explore issues to do with sharing money with people you trust and don’t trust.
  • Panini (aka Hagels Bagels) was used to explore problems related to physical mobility and navigation for older people.
  • Biometric Daemon was used to elicit concerns about security and privacy in the context of biometric authentication technologies that hold sensitive personal information.

The concept and development of Invisible Design was developed in collaboration with Pam Briggs of PACT Lab at Northumbria University.

 

Guardian Angel

John Vines and Paul Dunphy
Things |

A concern raised by the older people interviewed during the New Approaches to Banking for the Older Old project was that reduced mobility would lead to difficulty with accessing their money. This led in some cases to people divulging security details to carers, friends and relatives.

We came up with the concept of the Guardian Angel service, which would address this concern. It would allow an account holder to give a delegate restricted access to their money in order to carry out specific tasks. An application for mobile technology such as an iPad would allow the account holder to customise the boundaries of the nature of this access. For example, they would be able to allow access at particular ATMS or shops within a certain distance of their home, set a limit on the amount of money that could be transferred or withdrawn, or set a time limit during which the task had to be carried out. The delegate would have their own card linked to the Guardian Angel service, negating any need for the account holder to give away their PIN. Furthermore, the service would notify the account holder once the task had been carried out.

Part of the New Approaches to Banking for the Older Old project.

 

StoryCrate

Tom Bartindale
Things |

StoryCrate was designed in collaboration with BBC Research & Development and is a production tool for use during television filming. Its primary aim is to provide an overall status indicator for the production, which anyone on the team can access at any time.

StoryCrate consists of a high-resolution tangible display built into a portable flight case, which is connected to cameras as they film. When a camera stops filming, the clips it has recorded appear on the device, and the on-site production staff is able to produce “rush” edits from the shots instantaneously, slotting them into place on the pre-prepared storyboard. This live storyboarding allows instant playback of clips in the final production order rather than the order in which it was shot, something that has not previously been accomplished during the shooting process. Designed to facilitate creativity, it allows on-site staff to utilise their skills in a way they previously could not.

This is a part of Tom Bartindale’s PhD: Interaction Design for Live Events

 

Wearable Acoustic Monitor

Cassim Ladha, Karim Ladha, Roisin McNaney, Bin Gao, and Daniel Jackson
Things

Current approaches to assessing a person’s social wellbeing generally rely on subjective retrospective judgments by the person themselves at the time of the assessment. As part of the MRC-funded Monitoring Device to Objectively Assess Psychosocial Impairment project we are developing a Wearable Acoustic Monitor (WAM), a wrist-worn device that records levels of social interaction of the wearer. The device will be used to explore our hypothesis that levels of social interaction are a reliable indicator of the psychosocial wellbeing of the wearer.

To ensure that the WAM does not invade a user’s privacy, the device will not collect raw audio data, but will present a compact representation of what it records, which will then be subject to analysis using pattern recognition algorithms. Information taken into account will include frequency and length of interactions, and voice acoustics such as pitch and amplitude, which can provide insight into the emotional state of the speaker.

This device will be piloted by clinicians as a means of assessing the psychosocial wellbeing of older patients with depression, potentially allowing a more tailored approach to their treatment.

Part of the Monitoring Device to Objectively Assess Psychosocial Impairment project.

 

TouchBridge

Diana Nowacka, Daniel Jackson, Cassim Ladha, and Karim Ladha
Demos Things |

TouchBridge was an active tangible marker system for optical based multi-touch surfaces. It built on a previously proposed method of marker tracking based upon the augmentation of physical objects with IR Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). In this previous method, the LEDs transmitted a modulated signal that was tracked by a camera; this signal was able to transmit a unique ID for each object in addition to a small amount of state information. However, this system was physically limited in terms of bandwidth as a camera was used to receive the modulated signal.

Our prototype utilised modulated Infrared light to provide a bi-directional communication channel between objects and the surface. A separate transceiver replaced the camera, allowing for the reliable tracking of the position and orientation of 16 uniquely identified physical objects at an update rate equal to the camera frame rate. Our system could also transmit information about the state of each object at a higher data rate than previous systems. It therefore presented the potential for Tangible User Interfaces that responded to complex manipulations of controls embedded within physical objects.

     

    Balance Ticker

    John Vines, Paul Dunphy, and Andrew Monk
    Things |

    Keeping detailed records of how much money is in an individual bank account and tracking receipts of transactions are highly valued by many older people who carefully manage their finances. However, Modern payment technologies and bank accounts have a tendency to penalise those who wish to keep tight control of their finances. There are fewer opportunity to receive paper statements and paper bills, and the paper receipt at the shop is now becoming something to be asked for rather than given out of courtesy. This is at odds with the experiences and desires of the eighty-something-year-old participants in the New Approaches to Banking for the Older Old project, many of whom enjoyed and took great pleasure from documenting the various incomings and outgoings.

    The Balance Ticker is a simple device that helps support this practice in a period where physical records of transactions are becoming less available. An account holder keeps the device at home and it provides an ongoing and ever-increasing record of what money is going in and out of a specific bank account over a period of time. It is designed to facilitate record keeping and control, providing just enough information for each transaction (time, amount) that its owner still has to go through the effort of documenting where the payment was made and what it was for and chase up those transactions that appear incorrect.

    Part of the New Approaches to Banking for the Older Old project.

     

    Livewell Interactive Installation

    Digital Interaction
    Things

    This interactive installation was launched at the Great North Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne in November 2010 as part of the Livewell: Lifestyle Interventions Project. The institute wanted a multi user interactive install on one of the stands in the conference hall. Using a custom-built FTIR multi-touch table from Touchscape, we designed and produced software that consisted of two activities.

    Studies have shown that significant health benefits are gained by abiding by a more Meditarranean-style diet, which would include more fresh fruits and vegetables, cereals and fish, and less red meat, dairy products and saturated fats. The first activity was therefore a food categorisation puzzle where users were encouraged to categorise food items into “Mediterranean” and “non-Mediterranean” groups. The second activity was an activity that allowed users to visualise the accuracy of their judgement of food portion sizes.