To further enhance the students experience of the module we are  hosting a Windows Phone 7 (WP7) workshop with Microsoft on Wednesday March 7th @1pm-5pm – by registering and coming along you could be in with a chance to win a brand new Nokia Lumia 800 on the day! The event will take place in the Lincoln School of Computer Science in room MC3204 (Comp Lab B), and will include presentations by Microsoft on WP7 followed by a coding session then finishing the day off with pizza.  If you are interested (you don’t have to be enrolled on the Social Applications Development module) then it would be helpful to familiarise yourself with developing for WP7 using Visual Studio 2010 and the WP7 ‘Mango’ SDK, by doing so you will get more out of the workshop. All machines in room MC3204 are installed with the prerequisite tools if you want to get a head start!

Most of you who read this will not know what Human Technology is. Human Technology deals with all kinds of human-technology interaction and tries to enhance user-friendly interfaces. I will eventually become a ‘soft’ engineer, mainly interested in human factors and behaviour, but with enough technical education to be able to communicate with developers/designers. I’ve been taught from basic usability studies to broad investigations on the societal demands on technological innovations. The focus is on ICT, building environment and product design. As an HT-engineer I know that the situations in which technicians design a product, service or interface are pretty complex. At the end of my study I will not only know how the end users think, but also how the designers think and how those minds can be brought together.

During my time at LiSC I assisted in the ENACT, Eat,Cook,Grow and KillaWhatts project. In the ENACT project I worked together with Shaun Lawson, Conor Linehan, Sue Jamison-Powell and Andy Garbett. The goal of this project is to set up a new way of Computerized Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for people suffering from insomnia.My work in the ENACT project involved the set up of the usability testing for the mobile phone application. The usability trials are still running at the moment.

In Eat,Cook,Grow I worked together with Shaun Lawson and Jaz Choi from the Queensland University in Australia. Eat,Cook,Grow is a project on sustainable food. The main goal of the is toraise people’s awareness of healthy and ecological food options with nutritional data and educational information. Shaun and I were in charge of recruiting participants for the website I8Dat and the focus group. Together with Jaz we had a really interesting focus group, and the analyses showed lots of usable data.When I am back in The Hague, I will run the I8Dat trial in The Netherlands!

Killawhats is a project on energy usage in student courts on the Lincoln University Campus. The goal of the project is to reduce the amount of energy students use by introducing the students of various courts with a Facebook application that monitors the energy usage per court.On this project I worked together with Derek Foster. Originally I was going to be in charge of the recruitment and the focus group, but the project got postponed.

I also worked on a literature review oncognitive behavioral therapy for people suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome after sexual abuse and what the possibilities and requirements are to set up an online group cognitive behavioral therapy.

I want to thank everyone in LiSC, I had a really great time and would love to come back when I finish Human Technology.

To see if this is the case and technology can enhance the monitoring and nutritional processing side of a person’s diet, my final year project will look at this. Being a Web Technology student a web application was developed, Plate and Rate lets users upload images of the food, other users of the application then rate and tag these food choices for how closely they believe they match the NHS Eat Well plate.

Plate and Rate makes it easy for you to tag the content, all you have to do is increase or decrease the size of the segments in a pie chart for how much of that food type you think is in the plate you’ve been given to rate. Plate and Rate then collates all of this data and gives you information back on how well you did.

Firstly, Plate and Rate tells you how close you were to the guideline for each plate you uploaded and awards you points for how well you did. Then, the application collates all of your plate data and creates an ‘overall plate’ this is every plate you have uploaded mashed together into one big plate which you can then compare to the guideline. Plate and Rate then plots how far away from the guideline you were for each meal you uploaded allowing for an overview and a progression on how you did. The application also allows for you to view your uploads for the past 7 days for finer control. Plate and Rate also awards you points for how accurately you rated other people’s plates, letting you gain ideas and enhancing your knowledge of balanced meals. This work carries on where a previous project left off – read the results of that project here.

This is currently very exciting and promising research for the future and lets you make it easier to see the food you’re eating over a period of time, simply by uploading images and using the application. The trial is expected to run for three weeks and if you’d like to participate then please visit http://chrisborrowdale.co.uk/participate/ and complete the form. Here you’ll be asked a few questions to assess your current eating habits – to get an even spread of participants.

If you have any queries then please feel free to contact me at chris@chrisborrowdale.co.uk

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.

“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, 1^st Box of Jelly Babies and 2^nd 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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:

Opening Party.
Day 1.
Day 2.
Day 3.