Themes
Interdisciplinary user-centred approach to understanding and designing for interactions between people and technologies in everyday contexts... particular interest in opportunities enabled by pervasive/ubiquitous sensors, wireless networks, tangibles and handhelds... 'real world' deployments... reflected on to evolve theories and methods.
Playing & Learning
We are building a pervasive infrastructure in the gardens at Chawton House for creating novel interactive experiences for visitors. Working closely with the staff and with teachers at a local school, we have run creative writing experiences with yr 6 children where they engage in diverse activities in the grounds to gather inspiration for their story writing. The same system can be used for other visitors.
Ubiquitous Domestic Environments
New technologies offer opportunities beyond usual 'smart home' scenarios but it's not clear yet what these might be. We studied local households to find out how consumer technologies come to be in people's homes and what we can learn from current experiences. We are also working with these households to develop design ideas for future 'smart' technologies they really want to live with.
Growing Old: Having Fun, Staying Connected. and Telecare
Aging populations are creating an imperative to explore pervasive technologies for supporting care in people's homes. We are interested in telecare and ambient assisted living environments. We also explore opportunities for the same technologies to support quality of life through games, leisure activities and social connectivity. Experience with these will empower people when using the same technologies for telecare.
Pervasive Learning & the GRID
Simulating GRID-based infrastructures, we have conducted projects with school children using sensor based data collected remotely by scientists, as well as by themselves, to support their understanding of their environment. A new project will look at how to enable teachers themselves to run such eScience experiences.
Creativity and Embodied Interaction
Art and technology come together to create interactive devices for experiences such as installations for exhibitions exploiting aspects such as touch, breath, sway, and sound. We also support self-expression for complexly disabled people through video and games. Through these we also develop more principled design understandings, drawing on literatures such as embodied interaction and enactive perception.
Social Connectivity and Interaction
These projects involving collaborative, public and private displays for planning, creating and socialising draw upon external cognition to help create usable and useful shared and individual-use displays. The research investigates the challenges involved in gaining immediate access to public spaces e.g. at a conference, the kinds of work displays that support leisure time planning, multi-player gaming and the ways in which people think about their social network can help them organise social communication and contacts on-line.
