| Friday 30th January Julie Maitland (University of Glasgow) Title: From Persuasion to Negotiation: New Directions for Health Promoting TechnologiesOver recent years, designing technologies to promote health-related behavioural change has been an area of growing interest in the HCI and Ubicomp communities. Current approaches appear to advocate a behaviour-centric approach; that is focusing exclusively on one particular problem behaviour in isolation e.g. physical inactivity. Given the prevalence of self-monitoring and social facilitation in emerging designs (including our own), the assumption appears to be that increasing an individual’s awareness of their behaviour and the behaviour of others will promote behavioural change. While this is true to some extent, we suggest that this represents a somewhat naive view of how individuals come to make decisions regarding their health and health-related behaviours. This talk will briefly cover the current state of the art, before using examples from three studies of health-related behavioural change in cardiac rehabilitation, weight-management, and families ‘at risk’, to highlight the strengths and limitations of the current approaches and suggest additional avenues of technological innovation. About the speaker: Julie is a final year PhD student investigating the role that social networks play on health-related behavioural change, and exploring the potential for technological support thereof. |
| Friday 13th February Julie Coultas (Sussex University) Title: Creating Baby Einsteins? A longitudinal study of infants using an interactive educational learning toyWhat can infants learn from an interactive learning toy? There have been many reports in the media of the harmful effects (or otherwise) of exposure to television at a young age (Sigman, 2008;Young, 2005, 2007). But are there also benefits? In this talk I will describe an eleven month study of infants using one particular interactive toy that connects to a television. The research included observation of infants and semi-structured interviews with their parents. All infants were developing normally but the study highlighted many individual differences in the infant's usage of the toy. I will focus both on how the toy could facilitate learning and also some of the barriers to learning e.g. understanding of contingency. |
Friday 27th February Friday 13th March Social network sites like Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace have attracted millions of people. They use these sites to keep in touch with large networks of friends, to maintain ties with business partners, or to explore interests such as music. In this talk I will discuss the ways in which people appropriate social network sites to pursue interests that have turned into passions. This research is based on a current ethnographic study of bodybuilding, which serves as an example for an extreme passion. I will describe passion as a multi-stage process, starting with the development of an interest to stages where a passion can turn into an obsession. Depending on the stage, social network sites inherit different potentials to support passions. I will discuss the potentials of existing social network sites as well as their limitations and risks. Since this study is work-in-progress I would welcome suggestions on the presentation of the data as well as on opportunities for comparing the findings from bodybuilding with other passions.
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