Social Receipt Project
Jan 27th
Social Receipt is a research project being undertaken by Tom Leeman, a third year computer science student from the University of Lincoln. The aim of his research is to help understand how technology may be used to make positive changes to our dietary health behaviour in an engaging and social environment. After all, humans are social creatures, we live to talk about everything and anything – including our shopping receipts!
Tom is currently looking for some participants who wouldn’t mind taking part in his study for a few weeks. His research involves using a website called Social Receipt over the course of a month where you will be expected to take a photo of your supermarket shopping receipts each time you visit a supermarket and share these photos on the site.
Each participant is encouraged to comment on other participants’ receipts and rate them on the overall nutritional healthiness of the food items which they have bought as being either red (unhealthy), amber (moderately healthy) and green (healthy).
If this sounds like something you might be interested in, you should check out the Social Receipt website available at http://tom.thesocialapp.co.uk where you may learn more about the project and sign up to the research. However, you will not be able to log-in until the research has started. An email will be sent to everyone in advance of the research starting so you won’t miss out!
Tom is also available for contact if you have any questions or would like further information about the project. His email address is tom@tom.thesocialapp.co.uk.
Northern User Experience Event – Social Media & Energy Use Behaviour Change
Dec 2nd
The nice folks over at the Northern User Experience (NUX) group recently invited me along to do a talk and interactive session on social media + energy behaviour change at their stylish space at the Round Foundry Media Centre in Leeds. The talk was part of the Leeds Digital Festival and also aligned itself with the World Usability Day theme of:
“Designing with an intentional outcome of sparking change in how people behave, communicate, and do things in the world”
So who are NUX? Their membership is diverse and dynamic and spans disciplines such as HCI, information design, usability, user experience and development with a vast amount of industry and academic experience to tap into. A meeting normally takes place every month on a specified subject with an open invitation to all interested and is headed up by Keith Doyle. Check out the latest news from NUX on their events page or follow hashtag #nuxuk on Twitter.
The format of the session comprised my talk of around 40 minutes followed by an interactive task, in total it lasted 2 hours. I presented 3 case studies, two for domestic energy and one promoting physical activity that used the same social media approach as the energy studies. I noted one of the first tweets after I started the presentation was “Strong Lincolnshire accent tonight #nuxuk”, knew right away I was in good company. The energy studies presented (Wattsup and Power Ballads) delivered innovative energy feedback through social media, specifically the Facebook platform. Wattsup and Power Ballads case studies are great examples of social media + energy feedback synergies for the domestic domain, even more timely now as major energy utility company Opower is using the same approach and commercialising ‘social energy’ into a product. However, let it be said that we at LiSC were early innovators of social-energy research and delivered Wattsup back in 2009, see here and here! As with most of our completed work at LiSC, both the Wattsup and Power Ballads work is in the public domain as published peer-reviewed papers available from here and here.
All present enjoyed the unique and engaging user experience the domestic energy studies provided with plenty of questions put forward. To finish the presentation I briefly spoke of our Electro-Magnates project investigating organisational energy, and how the challenges in an organisational environment are different from the domestic domain. Also noticed some of the developers present enjoyed the adoption of opendata and discovery of tools such as Yahoo’s YQL for scraping data. At the end of the presentation there was some agreement that the first step of designing any energy app was to name it using a witty pun, this approach is carved in stone at LiSC with many hours spent getting it just right, or just plain wrong….
After the presentation I facilitated an interactive session with the goal to design (via paper prototyping) an energy visualisation for a specific theme and target user group. Each group would then present their work at the end of the session by doing a 1 minute elevator pitch, with a vote to decide the winners. Four groups then set about doing the task with beer on tap, which never fails to stir up a healthy dose of creativity. After some cracking of the whip pen was put to paper. Prizes were placed on a pedestal at the front of the room, 1st Box of Jelly Babies and 2nd Box of Heroes. I know what I prefer.
So how did they do? Not bad at all actually. The take home message was to realise how difficult energy is to understand in terms of usage due to its intangible nature. Attempting to design a visual representation of energy consumption with a view for reductions is no easy task. The table below shows the themes and target users each group had to design for, great to see the ‘witty pun’ naming convention style was present, kudos.
| Group | Theme | User Group | App/Visualisation Name |
| 1 | University | Academics | Tune In Turn Off |
| 2 | Household | Older Adults | Just In Case |
| 3 | Organisation | Administration | Power Rangers |
| 4 | Organisation | Employees | Appliance Alliance |
First prize went to ‘Power Rangers’ – a visualisation that brazenly adorned a departmental manager’s avatar with items of super hero clothing if their department’s energy consumption is being reduced, but also removes the clothing if usage rises. Inter-departmental managerial super heroes are compared in a league table. At first glance it would be pretty easy to see which departments are doing well……
I had an enjoyable time during the talk and felt it was well received from the feedback at the end and through the on-going tweets. NUX are a great community to be involved with and have their fingers on the pulse of the latest developments in design, HCI and user experience. I’d thoroughly recommended anyone who is doing anything interesting in these fields to check them out, and also with a view to doing a talk as they are currently looking for new ideas.
As usual no visit outside my usual haunt of Sheffield would be complete without sampling a few beers. First stop was ‘The Hop’ pub with a nice selection on cask where I tried Osset Brewery’s Silver King and Excelsior pale ales. On my way home I stopped at the Midnight Bell and tried Leeds Pale and Blue Moon, I’m not a fan of Blue Moon, despite labelling itself a North American Craft Beer its basically a very fruity wheat beer.
Derek
“Power of Minds” Hack for Honda
Nov 25th
Last weekend I was privileged to be invited to participate in a commercial hack day as part of Honda’s “Dream Factory” initiative. Hosted at the Guardian offices and organised by Rewired State, the hack saw 23 developers from across the country feverishly developing prototypes and concepts based on the brief supplied by Honda.
This brief was based on the brand message for the new Honda Civic, which is “If we never venture into the unknown, how do we get anywhere new?”, along with “The Power of Dreams” and the four key attributes of “Quality, Technology, Design and Evolution”. Needless to say this brief was much more vague than developers usually expect, so there was a lot of early panic trying to decipher a brand message into something that does something.
I ended up working on two hacks over the weekend. Based on the message, it seemed like perhaps we should take these metaphorical brand messages entirely literally, making something that literally used the power of dreams, or literally helps people venture into the unknown.
The Corridor of Dreams
After a long discussion with Gareth Lloyd and Kevin Harman (one of Honda’s “Cultural Engineers“), Gareth and I worked on an art installation we called “The Corridor of Dreams”.
This piece is meant to be integrated into a corridor wall, and is triggered when a person moves near the installation. The corridor then does some analysis of the movement and appearance of the individual, and attempts to ascertain what a possible dream might be. This dream is then rendered in the form of a pixellated icon that appears in a thought bubble as the person passes by. This is timed so that to an external observer, the subject is “dreaming” the icon. For the subject themselves, they are exposed to the dream out of the corner of their eye. In this way, it provokes the individual to reflect on their dreams in the context of the mundane corridor, and remind them to resituate themselves in terms of life goals and priorities.
The Corridor of Dreams
In the time of the hack day, we didn’t have time to get it as mature as we liked, but it did function, and we had many people using the corridor during the day. These users were partly intentional, by judges and participants of the event, but since it was situated in a “working” corridor in the Guardian offices, many Guardian employees were also exposed to the piece.
Provoking with Dreams
The actual implementation was far more complicated than it might seem. The corridor used a range of different technologies that were frankly painful to integrate.
Working on the Dreams
We used the LEGO NXT brick with ultrasonic sensors to detect movement (in order to trigger the event), a USB webcam to capture the image of the approaching individual, OpenCV to analyse the content of the image and an Arduino-powered “Peggy” display Gareth constructed, in order to create the dream display. This was all plumbed together using Python, and deployed on John Bevan‘s Ubuntu Nettop.
Get Lost
As the corridor of dreams was under construction, I (perhaps foolishly) started work on a second hack based on the idea of serendipity. At CHI this year, the closing plenary by Ethan Zuckerman was on the topic of serendipity in social media. He complained that social media tries too hard to surround us with a bubble of content we have been algorithmically calculated to enjoy. He argues for the importance of serendipity and exposing yourself to truly different experiences. Based on this, and the Honda Civic message of “If we don’t venture into the unknown, how do we get anywhere new?”, the concept was created.
GetLostBot is a free service that challenges you to break your routine and explore new places. Once you sign up, GetLostBot will quietly keep an eye on the places you visit. If it feels that you are going to the same places too often, it will send you a challenge. When this happens, you will receive a message with some mysterious walking directions. Follow these to discover a place nearby that you have never been to before!
@GetLostBot's Twitter feed
Mysterious Walking Directions...
GetLostBot uses the Foursquare API to track user checkins and examines recent behaviour. If the user has fallen into a routine, it finds a nearby location they haven’t visited and creates a challenge for them. It sends the user a tweet or email with a link to an unmarked map with walking directions to the new place. Importantly, it doesn’t tell the user where they will end up! The user is forced to “venture into the unknown” and follow the directions in an adventurous spirit.
The app is online here – go sign up!
Demos
All the developers were brought together on the Sunday afternoon to demo creations. There were some extraordinarily cool apps developed, including safety systems for bikes, live collaboration services and even a demonstration of ethernet delivered over chicken wire!
Intense Demo Session
One of my favourite apps was “Don’t Break My Heart” by Rain Ashford – a wearable bike light that changed colour and beats-per-minute based on proximity. A cyclist wearing it on their back would give simple feedback to drivers following behind when they get too close.
Don't Break My Heart
There were a ton of cool apps, and you can find out more about them on the Rewired State hack summary page.
The first prize was deservedly won by Jordan Hatch for his Orchestra brainstorming tool. This is a really neat system that gives people 3 minutes to come up with points around a discussion, then reveals them at the end. The idea of “sparing a couple of minutes” for collaboration and implementing a scaffold for it is extremely powerful.
Four apps were also selected to go on to public vote in the Guardian website for a further prize. My Get Lost app was selected as the winning app within the “Evolution” category! This is a great honour, and hopefully this exposure will lead to many more people engaging with serendipity and getting lost more often!
The Guardian has written up the event here.
Organisational Change for Sustainability Workshop
Nov 21st
As a researcher on our sustainablity project – Electro Magnates – I have always been pro-active in looking for potential collaboration opportunities with other universities doing similar work to our own in the sustainability field, particularly when parallels of behaviour change and technology are present. At a recent CABOT energy workshop in Bristol which Shaun and I attended, we met some great people from both academic and industry backgrounds with a keen interest in energy use demand, covering both the residential and commercial sectors.
Of particular note were the folks from Sustain , a carbon reduction company who specialise in reducing energy consumption in organisations and who have a partnership with Bristol University. During discussion at the workshop with Rachel Freeman, a Research Engineer at Sustain and also based at Bristol University, we found that hers and our own energy work at Lincoln had many parallels with research direction and goals. In light of this we are jointly organising a workshop to investigate the theme of ‘Organisational Change for Sustainability’. So far we have had a good level of interest and it promises to be an interesting day. The workshop is scheduled to run on Thursday 8th December 10am-4pm at Bristol University, more information available here. If you would like to attend the workshop or would like more information then please contact Rachel Freeman at Rachel.Freeman@sustain.co.uk or Derek Foster at defoster@lincoln.ac.uk.
Derek
Research presentation: ENACT background
Nov 1st
Below are the slides for a talk I gave at the Lincoln School of Computer Science Research Seminar on October 26th 2011. The talk describes the potential of technology to provide useful support for mental and emotional health issues and provides background to our ongoing EPSRC funded project called ENACT.
Abstract: Mental and Emotional health difficulties are a leading cause of disability worldwide. Interestingly, studies have consistently shown that interpersonal relationships and social support can play a vital role in emotional health and wellbeing. Technologies that effectively support emotional wellbeing are likely to offer significant benefits, both for individuals and for society as a whole. This talk will discuss the potential of social media such as social networking sites, online games and mobile phone applications to provide social support for the emotional wellbeing of users, as well as the design constraints inherent in doing so. The EPSRC-funded project called “Exploring social Networks to Augment Cognitive behaviour Therapy (ENACT),” which is being lead by the Lincoln Social Computing research centre, will be discussed as an example of work in this field.
Conference report: DiGRA 2011
Sep 21st
In recent news, LiSC members recently attended the 5th Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference in Hilversum (NL) hosted by the Utrecht School of the Arts. Oliver presented his work on groups and social-emotion driven NPC crowds in open-world games, whereas Ben discussed Power Laws and Social Architectures in online gaming communities. Both papers will be available soon on the UL Repository and on the DiGRA Webpage - I will update this blog post accordingly.
After enjoying a couple of fine Dutch beers along the quiet canals in Amsterdam, we, as in Ben and I, travelled to Hilversum and attended to the conference opening party, which was situated in “De Vorstin”. To our surprise, the opening party was, to my opinion, most unconventional, and I recall Ben describing it as ‘surreal’. And this is not meant in a bad way, as it was was really fun. There were plenty of games played, and to cite a handful; Joust and B.U.T.T.O.N. from the Copenhagen Game Collective (DK), Winnitron from Dutch Game Garden (NL), and the Do-it-yourself-DJ deck. As the games went on, a guy in a koala-suit, known as Kid-Koala, put a lot of effort creating a real musical ambience among the guests. My personal highlights of the evening were the Chick’n’Run contest, the robot/samurai cosplayers and the wrestlers (!). Ben was right, the party was ‘surreal’. I did not expect something as fun as this.
The conference itself unfolded over the following days. This year, DiGRA introduced a system dubbed MATCH, which is meant to open dialog and to help collaboration. The MATCH system linked conference participants together, who are working on similar topics. During each match, each presenter has a ten minutes introduction time, followed by twenty minutes of discussion time. Speakers were encouraged to present without PowerPoint slides and to use alternative approaches.
I got matched with Joerg Niesenhaus, from the Game Technology Competence Center (Uni Duisburg-Essen), who presented his work about the playful crowd-sourcing to gather data to be used in the context of improving electro-mobility. Our MATCH went really well, and I managed to liaise with Joerg, his colleagues and plenty of other speakers from the conference. I even got congratulated by many to have a fully PowerPoint-less presentation – many people still relied on the good old slides. Hooray!
As there were several matches running in parallel sessions, it was difficult to attend to all of them. I decided to participate in sessions about prototyping, procedurality, animal play, game-labs, metrics and games industry. There were several keynotes as well, for instance Eric Zimmerman proposed to re-think games research, Garry Crawford review his new book, Gentleman boardgame designer Reiner Knizia discussed maximum impact game design and Mary Flanagan spoke about games from a values-oriented standpoint. There were also keynote speaks from Bernie Dekoven, Jen Jenson, Suzanne de Castell and Antanas Mockus Sivickas. Graduates from the Utrecht School of the Arts also presented their work, most noticeable are ‘Herboren’, ‘Mac and Cheese’, ‘Ascendance: Rise of the Gods’, ‘Skizo Kid’ and ‘Fingle’. Brilliant work, guys.
Between the sessions, there was plenty of time to socialise, exchange contact details, and to play board-games which were generously put at disposal by SubCultures. In the evenings, Ben and I enjoyed the local cuisine and local drinks/beers. The conference itself finished on Saturday afternoon, leaving us enough time to further enjoy being tourists in the beautiful cities of Hilversum, Amsterdam and Utrecht.
In short, I thought that the conference was excellent. I got plenty of good feedback about my work and I was able to socialise and liaise with many researchers from different fields. The conference itself was well organised, there were plenty of great speakers and plenty of activities. In one word, it was a proper fun conference. Kudos to the organisers. Guess what? I’m really looking forward to submit another work to DiGRA 2013.
For further impressions of the conference, check out those videos:
We’re slowly sticking all our presentations online
Aug 16th
Having ignored Bens recommendation for years and years, we have finally got around to posting conference presentations on slideshare. There’s a bar on the side with a shortcut to a few of them. You can see all of them here —>>> HERE!
The Bin Diaries are going live…
Jul 27th
We are looking to recruit a small number of participants to be involved in trialling a ‘Bin diary’, or to take part in a short focus group.
Participants need to be between 18 and 25, and have access to the internet. Preference given to those who like cake! Please see the link for details below- and note the chance to win iTunes vouchers!
Skype and Facebook
Jul 15th
The recent announcement that Facebook would be integrating Skype into the social network platform caught my attention. Chat on Facebook has great advantages in that it alleviates your cognitive load (essentially meaning you don’t have to remember great swathes of information) and it allows you to multitask.
Your previous conversations with your Facebook friend are displayed within the text chat window when you chat to them. You don’t have to refresh your memory as to what you were discussing the last time you communicated. I often chat to people whom I haven’t talked to in a while and some whom I am not particularly emotionally close to. This record allows me to talk to my friends without awkward pauses whilst I think “did they break up with so and so?” etc. This also reduces the potential for embarrassing faux pas.
Multitasking, supposedly a chiefly female skill (I have my doubts on the veracity of this claim), is something for which Facebook is particularly suited. I can have conversations with several people at once (one of my Facebook friends is remarkably adept at spotting this however – “Oi are you talking to someone else?!” is a typical response). I can be working on a word document, I can be coding some data, or I can be watching television and still carry out a semblance of a conversation with someone on Facebook (knowing that they are probably doing exactly the same thing).
Now the crux of this post; video messaging is a very private, directed thing. There is no record of your previously “face to screen to face” conversation, the capacity to multitask is severely reduced. I can have a very lazy Sunday morning, breakfast in bed, MacBook perched on my lap, and can pop on Facebook to catch up on the news. I can chat to people on there and they won’t know that I am in my tattiest PJs, hair akin to a birds nest and (because of a particularly late night) mascara burdened eyes producing a very good Alice Cooper impression. There would be absolutely no way I would even consider Skyping at that particular moment.
Photo by Laura Brown, Flickr
I predict we will only see a small number of select groups of people using Skype over Facebook. There will be those people who are geographically distant to each other such as friends who have emigrated. There will also be those who use Facebook chat for more intimate reasons, anyone who has ever used Chat Roulette will have probably encountered the more, erm, explicit uses of video chat. You will of course have people using it for much more innocent reasons – parents showing off new babies to friends and relatives, grandparents checking in with their grandchildren at university etc.
It is not just the goals of use that will have an impact on the adoption of Skype over Facebook. For someone who isn’t technically literate, Skype is a relatively complicated thing to set up, it also requires a webcam. Most laptops and netbooks have this functionality built in, but someone with a desktop pc may have to source this. Even easy access and relative expertise does not guarantee use. I have an iPhone, my husband has an iPhone. We could feasibly video call each other. This would allow for a supposedly richer experience, we would be able to see each other’s expressions and supposedly gain more meaning from our conversation. We have both had video message functionality for more than a year. We have never had a video chat. Whilst I would quite happily use Skype for professional purposes – a situation where I am selling my skills and knowledge, I would feel very uncomfortable using it in a social situation, particularly when communicating with acquaintances.
So it will be interesting to see who uses Skype, and whether its integration with Facebook actually produces a new set of individuals who prefer video communication to text in every day online conversations. We may also find that in 40 years’ time video communication is the norm just as telephone communication is today.
Conference report: KES-AMSTA 2011
Jul 12th
A quick update about the KES-AMSTA 2011 conference, which took place between June 29 and July 1, 2011 in Manchester, United Kingdom. The conference attracted many researchers who discussed and presented their work covering subjects such as agent and multi-agent systems and their applications and methodologies. In addition to the main track of the conference, a Doctoral Track was organised, in which LiSC member Olivier presented his work entitled “Towards Agent-Based Crowd Simulation in Airports using Games Technology“, which has been co-authored with Patrick Dickinson and Tom Duckett.
Olivier is highly interested in research involving crowd simulations, more specifically, he focus his work on the modelling of the social aspects of emotions for groups of individuals in virtual crowds for video-games. His recent paper discusses the use of games technology for crowd simulation in an airport terminal and investigates the unique traits of airport terminals as a backdrop for novel gaming experiences. LiSC also recently used airport terminals as a gaming backdrop for the pervasive mobile phone game ‘BlowTooth’.
The conference was well attended by researchers worldwide. Several work from many fields were presented, for instance: conversational agents, dialogue systems, text processing, agents and social networks, modelling, planning and prediction, robotics and manufacturing, agent optimisation, negotiation and security, agent profiling etc. To cite a couple of work, Kazienko et al. uses social network analysis as a tool for improving enterprise architecture, Wojewnik et al. investigates the social network effects of attrition rates on telecommunication customers, Crossley and Amos uses a zombie-infection case-study in relationship with agent-based simulations and Nikolaev and Ayesh uses policy based HTN Planning and multi agent e-Learning Systems. Those are just a handful of the presented work; the full proceedings of the conference are available through Springer.
Good News! During the closing session of the conference, the chairman, James D. O’Shea, from the Manchester University, congratulated the LiSC member Oliver with the “Best student paper”-award in front of the KES-AMSTA conference audience for his presented work. Good stuff! A few pints of fine ale and peach flavoured beer (?) celebrated the occasion.