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Urban computing systems impact quality of life in densely populated areas. With the widespread availability of wireless networks and portable devices, urban areas are fast becoming a hybrid of the physical environment and the digital datasphere. This paper describes Yasmine’s Adventures, a location aware storytelling platform that leverages on urban computing strategies to create an interactive walk through the Mehringplatz area, surrounding the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Yasmine’s Adventures (YA) is a mobile application that delivers a sequence of animations clips tailored specifically to the Mehringplatz neighbourhood. The story follows an adventurous local girl as she walks home alone, visiting local landmarks. Yasmine’s perceptions of the landmarks, identified by community members in an earlier workshop, reflect the real concerns of the community. This interactive experience was created to engage visitors of the Jewish Museum to explore the relatively neglected streets of the area in which the museum is situated.

Writing is one of the oldest human activities, dating back as far as 3200 BCE. This paper provides an industrial case study about understanding the creative writing process using interviews and directed storytelling on aspiring and established writers and educators, performed during a one year capstone project, where teams of HCI students pair up with industrial designers and developers in order to solve a real world design problem. After 26 interviews and 55 hours of analysis, four concepts were used as dimensions to analyse creative writing applications: serendipity, haven, evolution and shuffle. Based on these ideas, we developed a series of prototypes by gradually increasing the fidelity of each successive prototype and making changes elicited from user feedback. The culmination of our process is Yarn, a new writing application. Yarn helps writers "unravel their story." With Yarn, a writer can (i) Play with structure; (ii) Easily move chunks of writing; (ii) Create alternatives of sections, and (iv) Write in a beautiful distraction-free way.

A healthy and sustainable relationship between humans and the built and surrounding natural environment requires a deep rethinking of concepts and models. In this context the exploration of new forms of expression enabled by emerging technologies plays an important role. Through the Hug a Tree in Africa installation we are addressing artistic, scientific and technological aspects of the challenge of connecting people and places. This will promote a healthier and more sustainable relationship between humans and the natural environment. In this installation an instrumented tree detects and records videos of participants hugging a tree. These hugs are displayed locally as a video collage and are shared with other Hug@tree installations around the world, creating a global shared embrace of nature.

Sustainability is an outstanding global issue. Our present vision of wellbeing requires resource consumption that cannot be reproduced in a sustainable way. In this chapter, the authors present a case study of “Cozinha da Madeira” (CdM), a service design concept. CdM is a design concept that highlights how one can leverage tourism in order to promote sustainable services and experiences. Through the design of the CdM transformational experience, one invites customers to appreciate local products, resources, and traditions of the island, and in general orient themselves towards more sustainable practices in their further travels abroad as well as in their own home countries. The authors are currently developing a Web-based mobile application based on the premises and research presented in this chapter in order to deliver the service to potential users and evaluate the hypothesis.

Innovations in HCI tend to rely on exploring new technologies and novel forms of interaction. For decades artists such as Jenny Holzer have sought to provoke the public with art installations by repurposing public displays and exploring ambiguous messaging. Gaver argues that ambiguity can be intriguing, mysterious, and delightful, something that engages users and allows them to explore, discover, and interpret situations for themselves. In this paper we describe MStoryG, a public digital art installation that employs a decontextualized and repurposed airport split-flap display to support collaborative storytelling. In order to explore whether ambiguity attracts the glances of passersby and through curiosity invites interaction we devised a high fidelity software prototype that facilitated rapid deployment of experiments at two different locations. In addition to evaluating user engagement with the installation we define guidelines for others seeking to repurpose familiar objects in order to attract and engage passersby.

In this paper we present the challenges exposed during the designing, implementing and assessment of a novel eco-feedback system resulting from the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI), and Digital Art. We explore how a digital art mode of inquiry can contribute to expose existing challenges in eco-feedback technology. Our new art inspired eco-feedback visualization, maps electricity consumption to effects on natural elements of the local natural landscape. The feedback was piloted with eight local families for four weeks. Reactions of the users were assessed through interviews and quantitative measures. Our findings showed that users found the mapping of the eco-feedback to artistic representations of elements of the natural environment somehow compelling, despite lacking of clear quantitative information. In conclusion, the conducted study provide useful findings and insights into future deployment of eco-feedback using artistic visualizations, information visualization and motivating behavior change.

Measuring children's behaviors and experiences has been one of the core interests of the field of Child-Computer Interaction. However, maintaining children's engagement in the evaluation process is one of the challenges that researchers need to meet. In this paper we introduce Playful Booth, a system that aimed at engaging children in playful photo taking practices with the goal of capturing their social interactions over prolonged periods of time. We then present a 4-week-long deployment of Playful Booth with a total of seventy children that aimed at addressing three research questions. First, does playful booth create initial engagement on children and does it sustain this engagement over prolonged periods of time? Second, can the deployment be sustained for prolonged periods of time with minimal resources? Last, do behavioral data as captured from playful booth reflect children's actual social participation in the school community?

This paper describes MStoryG, a digital art installation to be situated in a future open-air museum. Our goal with MStoryG is to provoke and engage visitors in collaborative storytelling by exploiting the ambiguity that visitors interpret from an airport split-flap display used as a medium for supporting Exquisite Corpse. In order to evaluate our concept we created a software replica of an airport split-flap display, deployed as an interactive public art installation. Visitors tweet, or through an adjacent laptop, contribute to the overall storytelling process by providing a story fragment that appears on the split-flap display for other visitors to read and build on. We argue that in the right conditions ambiguity can trigger curiosity and invite interaction, but special care is needed to avoid confusing and alienating users. Here we report on our ongoing public installation and next steps in deploying MStoryG with the physical board in locus.

This paper explores uses and gratifications of a content community on a social network service - a music video sharing group on Facebook. In a two-stage study, 20 users first generated words or phrases to describe how they used the group, and what they enjoyed about their use. These phrases were coded into 34 questionnaire items that were then completed by 57 new participants. Factor analysis on this data revealed four gratifications: contribution; discovery; social interaction and entertainment. These factors are interpreted and discussed, leading to design implications and guidelines aimed at informing the design of future online services that combine media sharing with social interaction to create online systems based on a rich and meaningful object-centered sociality.

Modern society is moving towards a busier lifestyle, people have less time to enjoy themselves despite the increasing leisure options. Also, many countries around the world are facing a financial crisis, making people less wiling to travel abroad. In this paper we describe Eat&Travel, an interactive solution that ties dining and traveling together, offering restaurants the possibility to offer their customers an opportunity to enjoy a unique regional meal combined with a virtual trip in a river, where they can appreciate the landscape and learn more about the country and the culture, using an immersive CAVE environment, without the need to travel abroad.

Music and online Social Network Sites (SNS) are closely intertwined in popular culture, but we know relatively little about how performers use and take advantage of such social systems. This paper investigates this space by exploring how professional DJs leverage SNS in their work. It adopts a long term mixed-methods ethnographic approach encompassing semi-structured interviews, supported by studio visits and participant observations. Results revealed that DJs used SNS for connecting to their audiences; promoting their work; receiving peer feedback; discovering content and keeping abreast of their field; and organizing and coordinating events. We further interpret our findings in the context of issues DJs highlighted about their professional practice and technology, and our observations; and draw out design implications for future music orientated systems and services.

In recent times new story formats have appeared along with new media channels that allow more reach and target a broader pool of authors and audiences. This paper investigates the repurposing of a Solari Udine airport split-flap display as a new public channel/medium for storytelling. We explored the potential of this repurposed display through a high fidelity prototype positioned in a high density and flow area at the main entrance to a regional university. The content displayed consisted of stories by published authors as well as passersby. Stories could be sent to the display via Twitter, SMS and Facebook. We observed and reported the reactions of the invited authors as well as of the public. Through the analysis of the data collected with this study, we aim at advancing and supporting the design of interactive storytelling installations in public spaces.

This paper reports a 15 weeks study of artistic eco-feedback deployed in six houses with an innovative sensing infrastructure and visualization strategy. The paper builds on previous work that showed a significant decrease in user awareness after a short period with a relapse in consumption. In this study we aimed to investigate if new forms of feedback could overcome this issue, maintaining the users awareness for longer periods of time. The study presented here aims at understanding if people are more aware of their energy consumption after the installation of a new, art inspired eco-feedback. The research question was then: does artistic eco-feedback provide an increased awareness over normal informative feedback? And does that awareness last longer? To answer this questions participants were interviewed and their consumption patterns analyzed. The main contribution of the paper is to advance our knowledge about the effectiveness of eco-feedback and provide guidelines for implementation of novel eco-feedback visualizations that overcome the relapse behavior pattern.

Play with Fire (PWF) is an interactive installation challenging its participants to ignite generative fires over live streaming video of forests. The installation is designed to raise awareness towards sustainability issues such as climate change and forest fires. PWF initially presents its audience with a mashup of forest fire news, followed by playful interaction with fire and forests through a gestural interface. Finally, it connects to its audience mobile phones granting access to a user specific web application depicting the forest they burnt, regenerating in real-time. The forest will take from some months to years to revolve to its original state, depending on the user's performance. In this paper we address the problem of evaluating whether environmental awareness can be achieved through such a controversial installation, and approach the challenges and benefits of using HCI techniques in Digital Arts. Furthermore, we describe the evaluation of PWF in four different contexts and present preliminary results.

This paper presents HomeTree a prototype of an art-inspired mobile eco-feedback system. The system is implemented on a tablet PC and relies on a non-intrusive energy-monitoring infrastructure to access consumption and power event information. Our prototype addresses an important problem in eco-feedback, which is the fact that users loose interest about their energy consumption after a period of several weeks. To accomplish this HomeTree implements a dual visualization strategy. Initially HomeTree presents users with a screensaver that shows energy consumption mapped in a dynamic illustration of the local forest. Through this strategy we leverage the emotional connection between the short-term energy consumption and the long-term effects on nature through the local depicted landscape. In a second mode of operation users can interact with HomeTree directly by checking the historical records of their consumption data, and check which days or weeks they have reduced or increased consumption. Furthermore a comparison with a more objective baseline, such as the city of Funchal energy consumption is provided, in order to give users a sense of the level of their consumption in a wider context.

Play with Fire is an interactive art installation that proposes participants to ignite generative fires over live streaming video of selected forests. This experience paradoxically encourages playing with fire to stimulate awareness and prevention of fire related damages to the forests.We envisage the installation triggering controversial feelings by combining the "beauty and danger" of a forest on fire. Our goal is to raise awareness for human causes in forest fires and effect attitude change towards environmental protection.In this proposal we outline the concept and installation setup for the ACE 2011 Creative Showcase and Interactive Art track.

This paper describes several art based eco-feedback concepts conceived around the potential of emotional attachment between people and the natural environment. Starting from a sensor-infrastructure that looks at how families consume electricity in their homes, we investigate several artistic visualizations of the Madeiran local landscapes exploring the connection between families and elements of the endemic laurel forest. The approach described here leverages digital art as a means to go beyond traditional eco-feedback technology. By coupling people and the forest landscapes we intend to narrow the physical, temporal and psychological gaps between our everyday actions and nature. We explore how people can build a direct emotional connection between their daily energy consumption and the impact on the natural environment (such as climate change and related forest fires, mudslides, desertification and erosion).

iLand is a technology enhanced location aware narrative experience that captures and exposes the rich oral culture and traditions in the Island of Madeira for a wide variety of audience in particular foreigners and tourists. Using the Madeira main city, Funchal, as a setting to bring a new level of engagement of the audience with the old part of the city and its traditional stories. With this aim in mind we designed an immersive experience in the old part of the city were the local settings and its tangible details merge with the story world and events. As the experience unfolds the audience is taken deeper into the local traditions as well as into the old part of the city. In order to achieve this we designed and produced a series of short stories carefully distributed in the real space. The experience is mediated through the Placeware location aware mobile story platform [1] to functions as a tangible interface between the local stories and architectural setting and its audience.

This paper describes the initial stages for the iLand project, a Location Aware Multimedia Story project that captures and exposes the rich oral culture and traditions at the Island of Madeira, using the Madeira main city, Funchal, as a setting to bring a new level of engagement of the audience with the city and its traditional stories. We developed high quality content to be used in an already existing platform to deliver location aware stories. With the story experience carefully designed, an evaluation was carried out in order to expose the opportunities where such systems can be improved. Finally we discuss the results from the evaluation and explain how we will address them in the design of our new system.

As computing and communications technologies evolve, there is the potential for new forms of digitally orchestrated interactive narratives to emerge. In this process, balanced attention has to be paid to audience experience, creative constraints, and presence and role of the enabling technology. This paper describes the implementation of HopStory, an interactive, location-based narrative distributed in space and time, which was designed with this balance in mind. In HopStory, cinematic media is housed within wireless sculptures distributed throughout a building. The audience, through physical contact with a sculpture, collects scenes for later viewing. Inspired by the history of the installation space the narrative relates a day in the life of four characters. By binding the story to local time and space and inviting the audience to wander, we amplify the meaning and impact of the HopStory content and introduce an innovative approach to a day-in-the-life story structure.

Head-Mounted Display based Virtual Reality is proliferating. However, Visually Induced Motion Sickness (VIMS), which prevents many from using VR without discomfort, bars widespread adoption. Prior work has shown that limiting the Field of View (FoV) can reduce VIMS at a cost of also reducing presence. Systems that dynamically adjust a user’s FoV may be able to balance these concerns. To explore this idea, we present a technique for standard 360° video that shrinks FoVs only during VIMS inducing scenes. It uses Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping and peripheral optical flow to compute camera movements and reduces FoV during rapid motion or optical flow. A user study (N=23) comparing 360° video with unrestricted-FoVs (90°), reduced fixed-FoVs (40°) and dynamic-FoVs (40°-90°) revealed that dynamic-FoVs mitigate VIMS while maintaining presence. We close by discussing the user experience of dynamic-FoVs and recommendations for how they can help make VR comfortable and immersive for all.

According to UNESCO, Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) refers to the acts, expressions, and understandings and the associated objects and environments embedded within the ideas and customs of communities and individuals. Sometimes these facets are passed down through generations, but they can also be lost as people's surrounding circumstances change. This paper investigates how Digital Storytelling (DS) can explore and enable discussions surrounding the various interpretations of ICH, particularly in communities at risk of social exclusion. The authors outline a DS field study, which engaged with ICH notions with first and second-generation migrant participants in Portugal. This process's objectives were to observe what kinds of stories these methods could elicit and if some ICH form would feature in them. The outcomes were then analyzed to understand if and what sort of ICH is highlighted and how it connects to their present surroundings. These insights were used to inform the requirements of a new interactive DS platform for the authoring and viewing of stories that engage with the subject of ICH.