To commemorate the tenth anniversary of alt.chi, two of this year's alt.chi chairs, Ames and Lindtner, will moderate a panel with chairs from previous years to reflect on the legacy of alt.chi in the broader CHI community and discuss where the track should be headed in the future. We intend the panel to be highly interactive, incorporating the audience in discussion and debate. We encourage those with thoughts on alt.chi as well as those who want to learn more about the track, to attend and actively participate. The following questions will start the discussion: 1. What is the role of alt.chi in the CHI community, and how has it shifted across the last decade? 2. What alt.chi research papers or themes have been particularly influential or provocative? 3. What is the state of critical discourse and reflection in alt.chi? Has alt.chi been a successful venue for such work? Should it be? 4. Where is alt.chi headed, what is missing, and how could it change?
Supporting scientific practice has been a longstanding goal of CSCW research. This paper explores how we might design for social science research practices and collaboration. Drawing on sixteen interviews with fieldwork-based social scientists we document the importance of small-scale long-term collaborative arrangements for research and intellectual work - pairs of researchers who work together in-depth over their careers, developing a common yet distinctive view of their research field. This contrasts with the large-scale short-lived collaborations that have classically been the target of cyber-infrastructure work. We describe technology practices among social scientists and how these can inform technology design for fieldwork practices.
This article investigates the changing television watching practices amongst early adopters of personal hard-disk video recorders (such as Tivo) and Internet downloading of video. Through in- depth interviews with 21 video enthusiasts, we describe how the rhythms of television watching change when decoupled from broadcast TV schedules. Devices such as Tivo do not simply replace videotapes; TV watching becomes more active as programs are gathered from the schedules, played from a stored collection and fast forwarded and paused during playback. Downloads users exploit the Internet to view shows and movies not broadcast, yet this watching is not fundamentally different from recording shows using a PVR, since both involve selection of shows from a limited range and a wait before the shows can be watched.
Online review Web sites have enabled new interactions between companies and their customers. In this articlewe draw on interviews with users, reviewers, and establishments to explore how local review Web sitescan change interactions around local places. ReviewWeb sites such as Yelp and Tripadvisor allow customersto “previsit” establishments and areas of a city before an actual visit. The collection of a large numbers ofuser-generated reviews has also created a new genre of writing, with reviewers gaining considerable pleasurefrom passing on word of mouth and influencing others’ choices. Reviews also offer a new channel ofcommunication between establishments, customers, and competitors. We discuss how review Web sites canbe designed to cater for a broader range of interactions around reviews beyond a focus on recommendations
Until the day comes when all vehicles are fully autonomous, self-driving cars must be more than safe and efficient, they must also understand and interact naturally with human drivers. The web extras include videos demonstrating "rude" behavior by Tesla's Autopilot system, www.youtube.com/watch?v=el4OdwtgzNk; a human driver confused by self-driving technology, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik; and aggressive driving prompted by self-driving technology, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbSQm3YaAzA.
For many years, researchers have explored digital support for photographs and various methods of interaction around those photos. Services like Instagram, Facebook, and Flickr have demonstrated the value of online photographs in social media. Yet we know relatively little about these new practices of mobile social photography and in-situ sharing. Drawing on screen and audio recordings of mobile photo app use, this paper documents the ephemeral practices of social photography with mobile devices. We uncover how photo use on mobile devices is centered around social interactions both through online services, but also face-to-face around the devices themselves. We argue for a new role for the mobile photograph, supporting networks of communication through instantaneous interactions, complemented with rich, in person discussions of captured images with family and friends; photography not for careful selection and archive, but as quick social play and talk. The paper concludes by discussing the design possibilities of ephemeral communication.
Using publicly uploaded videos of the Waymo and Tesla FSD self-driving cars, this paper documents how self-driving vehicles still struggle with some basics of road interaction. To drive safely self-driving cars need to interact in traffic with other road users. Yet traffic is a complex, long established social domain. We focus on one core element of road interaction: when road users yield for each other. Yielding – such as by slowing down for others in traffic – involves communication between different road users to decide who will ‘go’ and who will ‘yield’. Videos of the Waymo and Tesla FSD self-driving cars show how these systems fail to both yield for others, as well as failing to go when yielded to. In discussion, we explore how these ‘problems’ illustrate both the complexity of designing for road interaction, but also how the space of physical machine/human social interactions more broadly can be designed for.
The dominant feature of modern technology is not how productive it makes us, or how it has revolutionized the workplace, but how enjoyable it is. We take pleasure in our devices, from smartphones to personal computers to televisions. Whole classes of leisure activities rely on technology. How has technology become such an integral part of enjoyment? In this book, Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin examine the relationship between pleasure and technology, investigating what pleasure and leisure are, how they have come to depend on the many forms of technology, and how we might design technology to support enjoyment. They do this by studying the experience of enjoyment, documenting such activities as computer gameplay, deer hunting, tourism, and television watching. They describe technologies that support these activities, including prototype systems that they themselves developed.
Brown and Juhlin argue that pleasure is fundamentally social in nature. We learn how to enjoy ourselves from others, mastering it as a set of skills. Drawing on their own ethnographic studies and on research from economics, psychology, and philosophy, Brown and Juhlin argue that enjoyment is a key concept in understanding the social world. They propose a framework for the study of enjoyment: the empirical program of enjoyment.
One of the biggest surprises about modern technology is not how productive it makes us, or how it has revolutionized the workplace, but how enjoyable it is. The great success of new technologies—such as social networking, computer graphics, wireless networks—are in how they create pleasure in our lives. People taking a walk in a forest can use a GPS device to track where they are, or while watching a football match use a phone to record a video clip of the game. Entire categories of leisure activities (such as sport and television) depend upon technology for their very existence.
This paper is an introduction to the “Future IKEA Catalogue”, enclosed here as an example of a design fiction produced from a long standing industrial-academic collaboration. We introduce the catalogue here by discussing some of our experiences using design fictionwith companies and public sector bodies, giving some background to the catalogue and the collaboration which produced it.
In-car GPS based satellite navigation systems are now a common part of driving, providing turn-by-turn navigation instructions on smartphones, portable units or in-car dash- board navigation systems. This paper uses interactional analysis of video data from fifteen naturalistically recorded journeys with GPS to understand the navigational practices deployed by drivers and passengers. The paper documents five types of ‘trouble’ where GPS systems cause issues and confusion for drivers around: destinations, routes, maps & sensors, timing and relevance and legality. The paper argues that to design GPS systems better we need to move beyond the notion of a docile driver who follows GPS command blindly, to a better understanding of how drivers, passengers and GPS systems work together. We develop this in discuss- ing how technology might better support ‘instructed action’.
As self-driving cars have grown in sophistication and ability, they have been deployed on the road in both localised tests and as regular private vehicles. In this paper we draw upon publicly available videos of autonomous and assisted driving (specifically the Tesla autopilot and Google self-driving car) to explore how their drivers and the drivers of other cars interact with, and make sense of, the actions of these cars. Our findings provide an early perspective on human interaction with new forms of driving involving assisted-car drivers, autonomous vehicles and other road users. The focus is on social interaction on the road, and how drivers communicate through, and interpret, the movement of cars. We provide suggestions toward increasing the transparency of autopilots' actions for both their driver and other drivers.
While there is a rich collection of studies of consumption and identity, the role of buying practices in ordinary conversations has been largely neglected. Minor items and major purchases regularly play a key role in furnishing our talk with topics, news, jokes and formulations of what kind of people we are. This paper unpacks the idea of post-purchase conversations contained within the common phrase “word of mouth.” What happens when products are examined in ordinary talk is pursued through the close analysis of a series of conversations around a significant purchase (a mountain bike). Drawing on the work of Harvey Sacks, and conversation analysis more broadly, this paper documents how products as a topic provide not only resources for small talk, but also an opportunity to consider our identity and its transformation. In conclusion, this paper argues that the knowledge and experience that circulate outside of the actual marketplace or point of purchase are part of a domain of economics as ordinary practice.
The advent of autonomous cars creates a range of new questions about road safety, as well as a new collaborative domain for CSCW to analyse. This paper uses video data collected from five countries - India, Spain, France, Chile, and the USA - to study how road users interact with each other. We use interactional video analysis to document how co-ordination is achieved in traffic not just through the use of formal rules, but through situated communicative action. Human movement is a rich implicit communication channel and this communication is essential for safe manoeuvring on the road, such as in the co-ordination between pedestrians and drivers. We discuss five basic movements elements: gaps, speed, position, indicating and stopping. Together these elements can be combined to make and accept offers, show urgency, make requests and display preferences. We build on these results to explore lessons for how we can design the implicit motion of self-driving cars so that these motions are understandable - in traffic - by other road users. In discussion, we explore the lessons from this for designing the movement of robotic systems more broadly.
Despite the widespread use of mobile devices, details of mobile technology use 'in the wild' have proven difficult to collect. This paper uses video data to gain new insight into the use of mobile computing devices. Our new method combines screen-capture of iPhone use with video recordings from wearable cameras. We use this data to analyse how mobile device use is threaded into other co-present activities, focusing on the use of maps and internet searches. Close analysis reveals novel aspects of gestures on touch screens, how they serve 'double duty' - both as interface gestures but as as resources for ongoing joint action. We go on to describe how users 'walk the blue dot' to orientate themselves, and how searches are occasioned by the local environment. In conclusion, we argue that mobile devices - rather than pushing us away from the world around us - are instead just another thread in the complex tapestry of everyday interaction.
Internet connected mobile devices are an increasingly ubiquitous part of our everyday lives and we present here the results from unobtrusive audio-video recordings of iPhone use -- over 100 days of device use collected from 15 users. The data reveals for analysis the everyday, moment-by-moment use of contemporary mobile phones. Through video analysis of usage we observed how messages, social media and internet use are integrated and threaded into daily life, interaction with others, and everyday events such as transport, delays, establishment choice and entertainment. We document various aspects of end-user mobile device usage, starting with understanding how it is occasioned by context. We then characterise the temporal and sequential nature of use. Lastly, we discuss the social nature of mobile phone usage. Beyond this analysis, we reflect on how to draw these points into ideas for design.
This paper examines mobile internet search, presenting search not as a process of information retrieval, but as part of conversation and talk. Through video extracts of mobile search we explore how mobile phones are interwoven into talk, and how searchers manage the participation of other conversationalists alongside the search itself. We introduce the notion of a 'searchable object' -- an object that arises in conversation that can be searched for online -- and document how such an object occasions a search. In turn we discuss the differing roles of the device 'driver' and 'passenger', and how participation is managed through questions and narration. Rather than search being solely about getting correct information, conversations around search may be just as important. We conclude by critiquing some of the pessimistic views of interaction around mobile phones and their use in ordinary life and talk.
While lightweight text messaging applications have been researched extensively, new messaging applications such as iMessage, WhatsApp, and Snapchat offer some new functionality and potential uses. Moreover, the role messaging plays in interaction and talk with those who are co-present has been neglected. In this article, we draw upon a corpus of naturalistic recordings of text message reading and composition to document the face-to-face life of text messages. Messages, both sent and received, share similarities with reported speech in conversation; they can become topical resource for local conversation-supporting verbatim reading aloud or adaptive summaries. Yet with text messages, their verifiability creates a distinctive resource. Similarly, in message composition, what to write may be discussed with collocated others. We conclude with discussion of designs for messaging in both face-to-face, and remote, communication.
It is often assumed that the interests of users and developers coincide, sharing a common goal of good design. Yet users often desire functionality that goes beyond what designers, and the organisations they work in, are willing to supply. Analysing online forums, complemented with interviews, we document how users, hackers and software developers worked together to discover and apply system exploits in hardware and software. We cover four cases: users of CPAP breathing assistance machines getting access to their own sleep data, 'hacking' the Nintendo switch game console to run non-authorised software, end-users building their own insulin supply system, and farmers repairing their own agriculture equipment against suppliers terms and conditions. We propose the concept of the 'gulf of interests' to understand how differing interests can create conflicts between end-users, designers, and the organisations they work in. This points us in the direction of researching further the political and economic situations of technology development and use.
We present five provocations for ethics, and ethical research, in HCI. We discuss, in turn, informed consent, the researcher-participant power differential, presentation of data in publications, the role of ethical review boards, and, lastly, corporate-facilitated projects. By pointing to unintended consequences of regulation and oversimplifications of unresolvable moral conflicts, we propose these provocations not as guidelines or recommendations but as instruments for challenging our views on what it means to do ethical research in HCI. We then suggest an alternative grounded in the sensitivities of those being studied and based on everyday practice and judgement, rather than one driven by bureaucratic, legal, or philosophical concerns. In conclusion, we call for a wider and more practical discussion on ethics within the community, and suggest that we should be more supportive of low-risk ethical experimentation to further the field.
Mobility has long been a central concern in research within the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) community, particularly when it comes to work and how being on the move calls for reorganizing work practices. We expand this line of work with a focus on nomadic leisure practices. Based on interviews with eleven participants, we present a study that illuminates how digital technologies are used to shape and structure long-distance cycling. Our main analysis centers on bike touring as a nomadic leisure practice and on how it offers a radical departure from traditional modes of structuring work and life, and thus, complicates the relationship between work and leisure. We complement this with an account of managing the uncertainties of nomadicity by focusing on participants' experiences with arranging overnighting and network hospitality. We offer this study, firstly, as one response to the call for more diversity in the empirical cases drawn upon in theorizing nomadic work and leisure practices, but more productively, as an opportunity to reflect upon the temporal and spatial logics of digital technologies and platforms and how they frame our attitudes towards the interplay between work and leisure.
Apps allowing passengers to hail and pay for taxi service on their phone? such as Uber and Lyft-have affected the livelihood of thousands of workers worldwide. In this paper we draw on interviews with traditional taxi drivers, rideshare drivers and passengers in London and San Francisco to understand how "ride-sharing" transforms the taxi business. With Uber, the app not only manages the allocation of work, but is directly involved in "labour issues": changing the labour conditions of the work itself. We document how Uber driving demands new skills such as emotional labour, while increasing worker flexibility. We discuss how the design of new technology is also about creating new labour opportunities -- jobs -- and how we might think about our responsibilities in designing these labour relations.
HCI research on mobility and transport has been dominated by a focus on the automobile. Yet urgent environmental concerns, along with new transport technologies, have created an opportunity for new ways of thinking about how we get from A to B. App-based services, innovations in electric motors, along with changing urban transport patterns, are transforming public transit. Technology is creating new collective transit services, as well as new ways for individuals to move, such as through rental, free-floating e-scooters, so called 'micro-mobility'. This workshop seeks to discuss and establish HCI perspectives on these new mobilities - engaging with and even inventing new modes of transport, fostering collaboration between scholars with varied topical interests around mobility. We seek to bring together a group of industry and academic collaborators, bringing new competences to HCI around the exciting opportunities of redesigning our contemporary mobilities.
This paper engages with the challenges of designing ‘implicit interaction’, systems (or system features) in which actions are not actively guided or chosen by users but instead come from inference driven system activity. We discuss the difficulty of designing for such systems and outline three Research through Design approaches we have engaged with - first, creating a design workbook for implicit interaction, second, a workshop on designing with data that subverted the usual relationship with data, and lastly, an exploration of how a computer science notion, “leaky abstraction”, could be in turn misinterpreted to imagine new system uses and activities. Together these design activities outline some inventive new ways of designing User Experiences of Artificial Intelligence.
We present a study of long-term outdoor activities, based on altogether 34 interviews with 19 participants. Our goal was not only to explore these enjoyable experiences, but more broadly to examine how technology use was recontextualized 'away' from the everyday. Outdoor activities are commonly presented as an escape from our technology-infused world. In contrast, our interviews reveal experiences that are heavily dependent on technology, both digital and not. However, digital technology - and in particular the mobile phone - is reconfigured when taken out of its ordinary, often urban and indoor, context. We first present a diversity of 'aways' during outdoor activities by depicting cherished freedoms and interpersonal preferences. We then describe how participants managed connection and disconnection while away and upon coming back. To conclude, we discuss how constructions of away can support more purposeful engagements with digital technology, and how pointed (dis)connection can be useful for technology design also in non-outdoor settings.
While gaze is an important part of human to human interaction, it has been neglected in the design of conversational agents. In this paper, we report on our experiments with adding gaze to a conventional speech agent system. Tama is a speech agent that makes use of users' gaze to initiate a query, rather than a wake word or phrase. In this paper, we analyse the patterns of detected gaze when interacting with the device. We use k-means clustering of the log data from ten users tested in a dual-participant discussion tasks. These patterns are verified and explained through close analysis of the video data of the trials. We present similarities of patterns between conditions both when querying the agent and listening to the answers. We also present the analysis of patterns detected when only in the gaze condition. Users can take advantage of their understanding of gaze in conversation to interact with a gaze-enabled agent but are also able to fluently adjust their use of gaze to interact with the technology successfully. Our results point to some patterns of interaction which can be used as a starting point to build gaze-awareness into voice-user interfaces.
With growing interest in how technology can make sense of our body and bodily experiences, this work looks at how these experiences are communicated through and with the help of technology. We present the ways in which knowledge about sleep, and how to manipulate it, is collectively shared online. This paper documents the sleep-change practices of four groups of 'Sleep Hackers' including Nurses, Polyphasic Sleeper, Over-sleepers, and Biohackers. Our thematic analysis uses 1002 posts taken from public forums discussing sleep change. This work reveals the different ways individuals share their experiences and build communal knowledge on how to 'hack' their sleep -- from using drugs, external stimulation, isolation, and polyphasic sleeping practices where segmented sleep schedules are shared between peers. We describe how communal discussions around the body and sleep can inform the development of body sensing technology. We discuss the opportunities and implications for designing for bodily agency over sleep changes both in relation to collaboratively developed understandings of the body and social context of the user. We also discuss notions of slowly changing bodily processes and sensory manipulation in relation to how they can build on the exploration of soma-technology.
Interactions around money and financial services are a critical part of our lives on and off-line. New technologies and new ways of interacting with these technologies are of huge interest; they enable new business models and ways of making sense of this most important aspect of our everyday lives. At the same time, money is an essential element in HCI research and design. This workshop is intended to bring together researchers and practitioners involved in the design and use of systems that combine digital and new media with monetary and financial interactions to build on an understanding of these technologies and their impacts on users' behaviors. The workshop will focus on social, technical, and economic aspects around everyday user interactions with money and emerging financial technologies and systems.
This paper explores an HCI approach to designing markets, with a primary focus on peer-to peer exchange platforms. We draw on recent work in economics that has documented how markets function, how they can be evaluated, and what can be done to fix them when they fail. We introduce five key concepts from market design: thickness, congestion, stability, safety, and repugnance. These lend HCI an analytic vocabulary for understanding why markets may succeed or struggle. Building on prior empirical work, we apply these concepts to compare two well-known network hospitality platforms, Couchsurfing and Airbnb. As a second illustrative case, we use market design to shed light on the challenges experienced by smaller-scale peer-to-peer marketplaces for lending, renting, and selling physical goods. To conclude, we discuss how this kind of analysis can make conceptual, evaluative, and generative contributions to the study and design of exchange platforms and other socio-technical systems.
Cooperatives are member-owned organisations, run for the common benefit of their members. While cooperatives are a longstanding way of organising, they have received little attention in CSCW. In this paper, through interviews with 26 individuals from 24 different cooperatives, our focus is an exploratory inquiry on how cooperatives could expand thinking into what future economies can look like and the part technologies may play in them. We discuss (1) the work to make the co-op work, that is, the special effort involved in managing an enterprise in a democratic and inclusive way, (2) the multiple purposes that cooperatives can serve for their members, well beyond financial benefit, and (3) ICT usage within cooperatives as a site of tension and dialogue. We conclude by discussing the meaning and measures of success in alternative economies, and lessons learned for CSCW scholarship on civic and societal organisations.
While urban life requires us to maintain a healthy social distance and anonymity from others, a recurring design goal has been to push against this anonymity and assist in the formation of communities. In contrast, our aim in this paper is to design for keeping others at a comfortable distance, without seeming rude or uncongenial. Building on findings from 20 interviews and two design workshops, we present three design explorations that illustrate opportunities to support a sense of friendly connection in local, communal spaces, without promoting the formation of friendship or other long-term engagements, or requiring the effort and commitment they would necessarily demand.
Pedestrians do not just walk. They rush, they dawdle, they stroll, they amble, they circle, they pause, they stop, they edge past, they saunter, they plod, they advance, they retreat, they backtrack, they lead, they follow. Walking happens as a host of more prepositional, intentional and consequential actions: they walk towards, they walk away, they walk off, they walk into. Nor do pedestrians make naked contact with the places where they are walking: hiking shoes protect their feet while hillwalking, price tags and labels shape their trajectory while shopping, podcasts envelope them in comic dialogues while they walk to work.
Although the vehicle horn is a minimal audible unit for communication, we will show that its uses are impressively varied. Drawing upon a corpus of video recordings from dashcams, we show how drivers use the horn for creating awareness; how they target particular vehicles; and how they use it for warnings, for complaints, and in instructing the seeing of an aspect of an ambiguous traffic object. Drivers' use of the horn involves, first, their sounding it in recognizable relations to past, current, and projected configurations of traffic on the road. Second, it involves drivers manipulating the vehicle horn to create sounds of shorter and longer durations that can then produce hearably distinct actions. Third, and finally, the driver can use the horn as an initiating or responsive action in relation to the actions of other members of traffic. The data are from road users in Chennai, India.
This report presents preliminary results from an unobtrusive video study of iPhone use--totalling over 100 days of everyday device usage. The data gives us a uniquely detailed view on how messages, social media and internet use are integrated and threaded into daily life, our interaction with others, and everyday events such as transport, communication and entertainment. These initial results seek to address the when, who and what of situated mobile phone use--beginning with understanding the impact of context
In this paper we use the EU guidelines on ethical AI, and the responses to it, as a starting point to discuss the problems with our community’s focus on such manifestos, principles, and sets of guidelines. We cover how industry and academia are at times complicit in ‘Ethics Washing’, how developing guidelines carries the risk of diluting our rights in practice, and downplaying the role of our own self interest. We conclude by discussing briefly the role of technical practice in ethics.
Recent developments in gaze tracking present new opportunities for social computing. This paper presents a study of Tama, a gaze actuated smart speaker. Tama was designed taking advantage of research on gaze in conversation. Rather than being activated with a wake word (such as "Ok Google") Tama detects the gaze of a user, moving an articulated 'head' to achieve mutual gaze. We tested Tama's use in a multi-party conversation task, with users successfully activating and receiving a response to over 371 queries (over 10 trials). When Tama worked well, there was no significant difference in length of interaction. However, interactions with Tama had a higher rate of repeated queries, causing longer interactions overall. Video analysis lets us explain the problems users had interacting with gaze. In the discussion, we describe implications for designing new gaze systems, using gaze both as input and output. We also discuss how the relationship to anthropomorphic design and taking advantage of learned skills of interaction. Finally, two paths for future work are proposed, one in the field of speech agents, and the second in using human gaze as an interaction modality more widely.
Drawing on 168 hours of video recordings of smartwatch use, this paper studies how context influences smartwatch use. We explore the effects of the presence of others, activity, location and time of day on 1,009 instances of use. Watch interaction is significantly shorter when in conversation than when alone. Activity also influences watch use with significantly longer use while eating than when socialising or performing domestic tasks. One surprising finding is that length of use is similar at home and work. We note that usage peaks around lunchtime, with an average of 5.3 watch uses per hour throughout a day. We supplement these findings with qualitative analysis of the videos, focusing on how use is modified by the presence of others, and the lack of impact of watch glances on conversation. Watch use is clearly a context-sensitive activity and in discussion we explore how smartwatches could be designed taking this into consideration.
The transition from local and personally owned file-based media management to cloud-based streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix brings new opportunities for users, but also leaves gaps in their understanding and practice. In this paper we present findings from an interview study that explored early adopters’ complex relationships with their collections which spanned physical, digital and cloud media. From this we entered a design process focussing on new material forms for cloud based media. Based on this we discuss our design and point to areas where, tangible or not, affordances from physical and digital media are available to be explored in the cloud. Looking in particular at the concepts of scarcity, gifting, and identity we outline possible reasons why, and why not, they could be incorporated into cloud media services.
We consider how data is produced and used in cities. We draw on our experiences working with city authorities, along with twenty interviews across four cities to understand the role that data plays in city government. Following the development and deployment of innovative data-driven technology projects in the cities, we look in particular at collaborations around open and crowdsourced data, issues with the politicisation of data, and problems in innovating within the highly regulated public sphere. We discuss what this means for cities, citizens, innovators, and for visions of big data in the smart city as a whole.
Voice interaction with mobile devices has been focused on hands-free interaction or situations where visual interfaces are not applicable. In this paper we explore a subtler means of interaction -- speech recognition from continual, in the background, audio recording of conversations. We call this the 'continuous speech stream' and explore how it could be repurposed as user input. We analyse ten days of recorded audio from our participants, alongside corresponding interviews, to explore how systems might make use of extracts from this stream. Rather than containing directly actionable items, our data suggests that the continuous speech stream is a rich resource for identifying users' next actions, along with the interests and dispositions of those being recorded. Through design workshops we explored new interactions using the speech stream, and describe concepts for individual, shared and distributed use.
The explosion of mobile applications and services presents challenges for evaluation and user study. One successful approach has been to deploy instrumented applications, logging their use over long periods of time. We present an expansion of this by remotely recording video and audio of use, while also capturing device and app context. In vivo combines five data collection techniques -- screen recording, ambient audio recording, wearable cameras, data logging and distributed remote uploads. This data provides a range of insights and we discuss examples from previous work which reveal interaction design issues where interface confusions or task mismatches occur. We see how apps are integrated into ongoing activity and environment (such as how maps are used in situ), and how recorded conversations around and about apps may be used for evaluation purposes. We conclude by arguing that this combinative method helps us to move from considering app use in isolation, to studying app use in interaction.