Dr. Ing. Eva Hornecker (Dept. of Computer and Information Science, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK)
May 21st, 2010, 11:00
G29-301
English
As part of the British EPSRC Equator project researchers collaborated with curators of Chawton House and with primary school teachers on the creation of novel visitor experiences to the estate, employing location-based, context-aware mobile technology. Co-design with curators focused on generating concepts for visitor guides, and together with the teachers, we developed an augmented field trip for a group of students that used the grounds of the estate as inspiration for a creative storywriting exercise, using the same underlying infrastructure and information model, and ran it.
One of the aims of the project had been to build a 'persistent infrastructure' for use and adaptation by various stakeholders, such as the curators and teachers that would allow them to develop further visitor experiences on their own, without continuous support from the research team. It was clear from the start that one of the challenges would be to support end-users without a computing background.
Reflecting on our process of co-design we realized that the ability to author content directly on location would be essential to support the design of this type of location-based interactive experiences where the device content not simply provides information, but enriches and guides visitor's interaction with the environment. In the second project phase we developed and trialed this in-situ authoring approach. In my talk I will discuss how our experience from the co- design process led us to develop requirements for such a tool, and on the experiences and user feedback on the prototpye that we then developed.
Eva Hornecker is a Lecturer in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK. In previous lives, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Pervasive Interaction Lab at the Open University and the University of Sussex (working on the Equator project) in the UK, and an Acting Lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and at the TU Vienna in Austria. She wrote a PhD theses on 'Tangible Interfaces as a medium for collaboration support' at the University of Bremen. Her research interests concern multimodal, tangible and embodied interaction, CSCW, user research, design methods, and qualitative research methods for understanding user interaction with 'beyond the desktop' technologies.
More information are available at http://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/~eva/.