Interactive Arts and Technology, School of (SIAT)

Background

Sensory Bias models for the evolution of mate preference place a great emphasis on the role of sensory system variation in mate preferences. However, the extent to which sensory systems vary across- versus within-species remains largely unknown. Here we assessed whether color vision varies in natural locations where guppies (Poecilia reticulata) and their two closest relatives, Poecilia parae and Poecilia picta, occur in extreme sympatry and school together. All three species base mate preferences on male coloration but differ in the colors preferred.

Results

Measuring opsin gene expression, we found that within sympatric locations these species have similar color vision and that color vision differed more across populations of conspecifics. In addition, all three species differ across populations in the frequency of the same opsin coding polymorphism that influences visual tuning.

Conclusions

Together, this shows sensory systems vary considerably across populations and supports the possibility that sensory system variation is involved in population divergence of mate preference.

Design thinking is a specific design practice that aims to foster innovation by elevating participants’ creative thinking abilities. It usually involves a problem-­‐ solving approach to solve complex problems, and can be best achieved through collaborative and human-­‐cantered activities. In post-­‐secondary education, design-­‐ thinking techniques and practices have been implemented into different curricula as particular skills that need to be learned in the 21st century. However, little work has been conducted to investigate design thinking in secondary education. This paper presents our findings on the successful implementation of an interaction design-­‐ thinking curriculum in secondary school education. We have performed qualitative research activities to find out about the success of the curriculum by investigating the abilities of students in transferring knowledge gained from a familiar situation (the course) to an unfamiliar situation (outside the course). Our findings suggested that teaching design thinking to secondary school students was beneficial, enabled students to make thoughtful decisions in solving simple to complex problems in their everyday life situations.

In this article we present unselfconscious interaction, a conceptual construct that describes aform of interaction with computational artifacts animated by incremental intersections thatlead to improvements in the relationships among artifacts, environments, and people. Wedraw on Christopher Alexander’s (1964) notion of goodness of fit and unselfconscious culture,and utilize Stolterman and Wiberg’s (2010) concept-driven interaction research to analyzethree interaction design concept artifacts to develop our construct for human-computerinteraction. The concept artifacts include the Discovery-Driven Prototypes (Lim et al., 2013),the Indoor Weather Stations (Gaver et al., 2013), and our own table-non-table. The resultingconstruct is comprised of the motivation of goodness of fit that is supported by two designqualities we name open-endedness and lived-with. We also describe tensions within theconstruct and the notion of purposeful purposeless in design. Our contribution in this articlelies in the articulation of the construct of unselfconscious interaction.

Community gardens are places where people, as a collaborative group, grow food for themselves and for others. There is a lack of studies in HCI regarding collaboration in community gardens and considering technologies to support such collaborations. This paper reports on a detailed study of collaboration in community gardens in Greater Vancouver, Canada. The goal of our study is to uncover the unique nature of such collaborative acts. As one might expect, we found considerable differences between community gardening collaboration and workplace collaboration. The contribution is the articulation of key considerations for designing technologies for community gardening collaboration. These include design considerations like volunteerism, competences and inclusion, synchronicity, and telepresence as unique aspects of community collaboration in community garden. We also articulate the complexities of community gardening collaboration, which raise issues like control, shared language, and collective ownership that exist more as conditions within which to design than “problems” to solve through technologies.

Tutorials are critical to the success and vitality of DIY practices. In this paper, we elevate the importance of tutorial authorship as one way to maintain and improve the quality of tutorials in DIY. We discuss the role interaction designers can play as hybrid designers, mediating between author and audience to contribute to the improvement of practices of tutorial authorship in DIY. We examine the quality of tutorials through the building and analysis of ten DIY projects and tutorials. We analyze key issues across three categories: 1) competences, components and tools, 2) sequencing, 3) and communication. We offer findings that are both practical guidelines for detailed improvements of tutorials and structural themes for improving tutorial authorship including the themes of accurate information, competences and tools, and tutorial format. In conclusion, we discuss the potential for interaction designers to simultaneously mediate and shape tutorials and tools in a form of hybrid design.

Transdisciplinary design—which is the idea of design that transcends disciplinary boundaries—has been proposed as a fourth design paradigm of interaction design education, scholarship, and practice alongside the technical, cognitive, and ethnographic paradigms. As an educational concern in particular, its aim is to teach students how to bring a values orientation to interaction design. Its focuses are design frameworks, values and ethics, design for important themes such as sustainability, equity, adaptation, justice, and social responsibility. This panel maps the state of the art in transdisciplinary interaction design education, considering also design scholarship and practice in relation to design education. The panel collects together a group of educators from chosen to provide a global perspective, with panelists from Canada, Denmark, Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan.

The home and domestic experiences have been studied from multiple points of view and disciplines, with an array of methodologies in the past twenty-five years in HCI. Given the attention to the home and the volume of research, what further areas of research might there be? Based on a critical analysis of 121 works on the topic, we present seven genres of domestic technology research in HCI: social routines in the home, ongoing domestic practices, the home as a testing ground, smart homes, contested values of a home, the home as a site for interpretation, and speculative visions of the home. We articulate dominant research perspectives in HCI, and we offer two complementary perspectives about how to investigate the domestic experience in future research: the material perspective and the first person perspective.

We adopt a design-oriented approach aimed at motivating and expanding the notion of everyday creativity beyond explicit interactions to also include the implicit, incremental and, at times even, unknowing encounters that emerge among people, technologies, and artifacts over time. We explore these ideas through the design and investigation of two interaction design research artifacts: the Photobox and table-non-table. Through analyzing and synthesizing insights that emerged across our studies, we describe a related set of concepts in support of a more implicit form of everyday creativity, which includes: unaware objects, intersections and ensembles. We conclude by interpreting findings in context of prior implications for everyday creativity and outline considerations for future work.

The visually impaired have been a longstanding and wellrecognized user group addressed in the field of Human- Computer Interaction (HCI). Recently, the study of sighted dog owners and their pets has gained interest in HCI. Despite this, there is a noticeable gap in the field with regards to research on visually impaired owners and their dogs (guide dog teams). This paper presents a study that explores the interactions of guide dog teams revealing a rich, holistic understanding of their everyday lives and needs, across both work and leisure activities. Our findings inform and inspire future research and practices suggesting three opportunity areas: supporting working guide dog teams, enhancing play-interaction through accessible dog toys utilizing sensor technologies, and speculative and exploratory opportunities. This work contributes to the growing research on designing for human-canine teams and motivates future research with guide dog teams.

This article presents a case study of an adaptive, tangible storytelling sys- temcalled “The ReadingGlove”. The research addresses a gap in the field of adaptivity for ubiquitous systems by taking a critical look at the notion of “adaptivity” and how users experience it. The Reading Glove is an interactive storytelling system featur- ing a wearable, glove-based interface and a set of narratively rich objects. A tabletop display provides adaptive recommendations which highlight objects to select next, functioning as an expert storytelling system. The recommendation engine can be run in three different configurations to examine the effects of different adaptive methods. The study of the design process as well as the user experience of the Reading Glove allows us to develop a deeper understanding of the experience of adaptivity that is use- ful for designers of intelligent systems, particularly those with ubiquitous and tangible forms of interaction.