1,721,075 research outputs found
Enriching archaeological parks with contextual sounds and mobile technology
No full textThe importance of cultural heritage in forging a sense of identity is becoming increasingly evident. Information and communication technologies have a great potential to promote a greater awareness and appreciation of cultural heritage. This paper presents some findings on how mobile technology can be used to foster a better understanding of an archaeological site by reconstructing the ancient environment and life. Children aged 11-13 years old are the target of our research. To motivate and engage them, a pervasive educational game has been developed and implemented in Explore!, a system aimed at supporting children exploring sites of cultural interest. Special attention has been devoted to the design of a soundscape that may improve players’ navigation in degraded physical environments and enrich their overall experience. A field study indicated that children judged their experience both useful and entertaining: not only did they enjoy playing the game but they also learned historical notions and facts related to ancient Roman life. Contextual sounds were found to have a facilitating effect on space navigation, reducing the need for map reading and improving spatial orientation. This work provides insights into the design of educational games for use with cultural heritage and a model to enrich historical sites through the creation of soundscapes which can help visitors to navigate a site and feel its historical atmosphere
Emotions in climbing: a design opportunity for haptic communication
No full textThis paper presents the results of 11 interviews to beginner climbers aimed at investigating the role of emotions in learning climbing. Climbing is an extreme sport becoming increasingly popular thanks to a higher safety and to the spread of indoor gyms. Although the evolution of this sport from alpinism to indoor practice has made it accessible to all, the emotional involvement that it entails has remained. Our findings suggest that there can be a space for the design of technologies that help managing negative emotions by augmenting the communication between climbing partners with haptic feedback
Visual complexity of graphical user interfaces
No full textGraphical User Interfaces (GUIs) of low visual complexity tend to have higher aesthetics, usability and accessibility, and result in higher user satisfaction. Despite a few authors recently used or studied visual complexity, the concept of visual complexity still needs to be better defined for the use in HCI research and GUI design, with its underlying aspects systematized and opera-tionalized, and different measures validated. This paper reviews the aspects of GUI visual complexity and operationalizes four aspects with nine computation-based measures in total. Two user studies validated the measures on two types of stimuli - webpages (study 1, n = 55) and book pages (study 2, n = 150) - with two user groups, dyslexics (people with reading difficulties) and typical readers. The same complexity aspects could be expected to determine complexity perception for both GUI types, whereas different complexity aspects could be expected to determine complexity perception for dyslexics, relative to typical readers. However, the studies showed little to no difference between dyslexics and average readers, whereas web pages did differ from book pages in what aspects made them seem complex. It was not the intergroup differences, but the stimulus type that defined criteria to judge visual complexity. Future research and visual design could rely on the visual complexity aspects outlined in this paper
Design Opportunities for Wearable Devices in Learning to Climb
Full text linkIn this paper, we present a field study on the learning of climbing aimed at defining the design space of wearable devices to support beginners. Three main findings have emerged from our study. First, climbing has a strong emotional impact on beginners; therefore, learning to climb requires mastering new motor patterns as well as negative emotions, such as stress and fear. Second, the feeling of danger that climbers often experience can be mitigated by trust in the climbing partner and the perception of her active presence. Finally, a big problem in climbing is the communication difficulty between the climbing partners and between climber and instructor. We conclude the paper presenting four design considerations for the design of wearable devices meant to support the learning of climbing by providing the actors involved with augmented communication. Such augmented communication should address both the physical and the emotional difficulties of this sport
Design Guidelines for Web Readability
No full textReading is fundamental to interactive-system use, but around 800 million of people might struggle with it due to literacy difficulties. Few websites are designed for high readability, as readability remains an underinvestigated facet of User Experience. Existing readability guidelines have multiple issues: they are too many or too generic, poorly worded, and often lack cognitive grounding. This paper developed a set of 61 readability guidelines in a series of workshops with design and dyslexia experts. A user study with dyslexic and average readers further narrowed the 61-guideline set down to a core set of 12 guidelines - an acceptably small set to keep in mind while designing. The core-set guidelines address reformatting - such as using larger fonts and narrower content columns, or avoiding underlining and italics - and may well aply to the interactive system other than websites
COOP 2016: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems
No full textThis volume presents the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP 2016). The conference is a venue for multidisciplinary research contributing to the design, assessment and analysis of cooperative systems and their integration in organizations, public venues, and everyday life. COOP emerged from the European tradition of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Cognitive Ergonomics.
A collection of 22 papers and 4 workshop overviews are presented, reflecting the variety of research activities in the field of the design of cooperative systems with a special emphasis on “Making Together” This collection offers a broad vision of collective working practices and cooperative design, embracing the idea that design requires a deep understanding of collective activities, involving both artefacts and social practices within a context. The result is a rich and articulated debate that widens the design space towards the exploration of a variety of forms of participation and engagement in collaborative system design.
Experienced researchers, academics, designers and practitioners who are interested in collaborative design theory and methods would be interested in the state of the art research and case studies this collection provides
Co-Designing Wearable Devices for Sports: The Case Study of Sport Climbing
No full textThis paper presents the co-design process of a wearable device for rock climbing, an extreme sport that requires high physical, emotional, and cognitive involvement. From the preliminary investigation of climbers’ needs, it emerged that their acceptance of wearables is mainly influenced by climbing sport-specific values like self-efficacy, trust, and adventure. Such values highlight the importance of the role technology should have beyond its functional purpose, i.e. how wearables should support climbers. Based on these insights, we designed and deployed a vibrotactile wearable device aimed at augmenting the communication between instructor and trainees and assessed its usefulness, usability, and pleasantness during an indoor climbing lesson. Finally, we conclude the paper discussing how the wearable we implemented meets the design criteria emerged from climbers’ values and reflecting on the importance to gain new perspectives on the design of wearables for sports in general
Towards a Framework for Evaluating Multitouch Public Displays
No full textIn the last few years, we have designed software applications for multitouch wall displays which provide information and/or services in different contexts, such as cultural heritage, tourism, and public events. While many of the systems proposed in the literature concentrated primarily on entertainment purposes, we are moving towards more functional applications and we are planning a set of empirical studies to evaluate their impact once used in the field. In this position paper we describe some challenges that emerged during our work and propose some initial variables which can inform the definition of an evaluation framework specific for public display applications
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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