Andrés Lucero

Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, Andrés Lucero

How humans use computers has evolved from human-machine interfaces to human-human computer mediated communication. Whilst the field of animal-computer interaction has roots in HCI, technology developed in this area currently only supports animal-computer communication. This design fiction paper presents animal-animal connected interfaces, using dogs as an instance. Through a co-design workshop, we created six proposals. The designs focused on what a dog internet could look like and how interactions might be presented. Analysis of the narratives and conceived designs indicated that participants' concerns focused around asymmetries within the interaction. This resulted in the use of objects seen as familiar to dogs. This was conjoined with interest in how to initiate and end interactions, which was often achieved through notification systems. This paper builds upon HCI methods for unconventional users, and applies a design fiction approach to uncover key questions towards the creation of animal-to-animal interfaces.

Jonas Oppenlaender, Elina Kuosmanen, Andrés Lucero et al.

Feedback is an important aspect of design education, and crowdsourcing has emerged as a convenient way to obtain feedback at scale. In this paper, we investigate how crowdsourced design feedback compares to peer design feedback within a design-oriented HCI class and across two metrics: perceived quality and perceived fairness. We also examine the perceived monetary value of crowdsourced feedback, which provides an interesting contrast to the typical requester-centric view of the value of labor on crowdsourcing platforms. Our results reveal that the students (N=106) perceived the crowdsourced design feedback as inferior to peer design feedback in multiple ways. However, they also identified various positive aspects of the online crowds that peers cannot provide. We discuss the meaning of the findings and provide suggestions for teachers in HCI and other researchers interested in crowd feedback systems on using crowds as a potential complement to peers.

Anna Wojciechowska, Foad Hamidi, Andrés Lucero et al.

Drones are an exciting technology that is quickly being adopted in the global consumer market. Africa has become a center of deployment with the first drone airport established in Rwanda and drones currently being used for applications such as medical deliveries, agriculture, and wildlife monitoring. Despite this increasing presence of drones, there is a lack of research on stakeholders' perspectives from this region. We ran a human-drone interaction user study (N=15) with experts from several sub-Saharan countries using a co-design methodology. Participants described novel applications and identified important design aspects for the integration of drones in this context. Our results highlight the potential of drones to address real world problems, the need for them to be culturally situated, and the importance of considering the social aspects of their interaction with humans. This research highlights the need for diverse perspectives in the human-drone interaction design process.

Maria Karyda, Merja Ryöppy, Jacob Buur et al.

While self-tracking data is typically captured real-time in a lived experience, the data is often stored in a manner detached from the context where it belongs. Research has shown that there is a potential to enhance people's lived experiences with data-objects (artifacts representing contextually relevant data), for individual and collective reflections through a physical portrayal of data. This paper expands that research by studying how to design contextually relevant data-objects based on people's needs. We conducted a participatory research project with five households using object theater as a core method to encourage participants to speculate upon combinations of meaningful objects and personal data archives. In this paper, we detail three aspects that seem relevant for designing data-objects: social sharing, contextual ambiguity and interaction with the body. We show how an experience-centric view on data-objects can contribute with the contextual, social and bodily interplay between people, data and objects.

Andrés Lucero

This paper presents an autoethnography of my experiences living without a mobile phone. What started as an experiment motivated by a personal need to reduce stress, has resulted in two voluntary mobile phone breaks spread over nine years (i.e., 2002-2008 and 2014-2017). Conducting this autoethnography is the means to assess if the lack of having a phone has had any real impact in my life. Based on formative and summative analyses, four meaningful units or themes were identified (i.e., social relationships, everyday work, research career, and location and security), and judged using seven criteria for successful ethnography from existing literature. Furthermore, I discuss factors that allow me to make the choice of not having a mobile phone, as well as the relevance that the lessons gained from not having a mobile phone have on the lives of people who are involuntarily disconnected from communication infrastructures.

Andrés Lucero, Marcos Serrano

Research on mobile collocated interactions has been exploring situations where collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their personal mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets), thus going from personal/individual toward shared/multiuser experiences and interactions. The proliferation of ever-smaller computers that can be worn on our wrists (e.g., Apple Watch) and other parts of the body (e.g., Google Glass), have expanded the possibilities and increased the complexity of interaction in what we term mobile collocated situations. Research on F-formations (or facing formations) has been conducted in traditional settings (e.g., home, office, parties) where the context and the presence of physical elements (e.g., furniture) can strongly influence the way people socially interact with each other. While we may be aware of how people arrange themselves spatially and interact with each other at a dinner table, in a classroom, or at a waiting room in a hospital, there are other less-structured, dynamic, and larger-scale spaces that present different types of challenges and opportunities for technology to enrich how people experience these (semi-) public spaces. In this article, the authors explore proxemic mobile collocated interactions by looking at F-formations in the wild. They discuss recent efforts to observe how people socially interact in dynamic, unstructured, non-traditional settings. The authors also report the results of exploratory F-formation observations conducted in the wild (i.e., tourist attraction).