soft switch - Nour Diab Yunes

user experience in ubiquitous-computing

Because ubicomp is, by definition, present everywhere and at-all-times, it may either interfere or facilitate contextual actions, and hence change the ways in which we act upon and perceive the environment. For Greenfield, "we" –ubicomp designers– "are uniquely positioned to affect the emergence of this technological milieu for the better." We can partake in the paradigm shift from technologies that provide uncertainty, insecurity, and that violate privacy, to designing technologies that empower users, and that support ethical, social, and environmental well-being.

Designer/Artist + Co-Creation

With the advent of new technologies and the rapid dissemination and accessibility of information, artists and designers develop increasingly sophisticated ways of thinking about the world in visual forms and of approaching open-ended questions or specific problems in new and exciting ways. It seems that design and art now represent blurred categorizations: artists and designers grow more apt at interchanging roles and are increasingly willing to collaborate and co-create.

“Conducting a Usability Evaluation” – Patrick Jordan

After having listed various evaluation methods, Jordan provides a guideline for choosing the most appropriate method(s) depending on the level at which a prototype is developed and shows an example of how such testing might be conducted.

“calm technology” (Weiser & Brown, 1996)

According the Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown (1996), "peripheral information" extends the notion of "affordances" to describe action enabling technologies that are reachable, yet on the periphery of perception and therefore encalming.

The Simplicity Shift – Scott Jenson

Scott Jenson defines 'feature blindness' as users being blinded by a feature list. He identifies the bottom-up approach of creating a user persona and a task scenario as more efficient than the top-down approach, in terms of organizing a commonsensical hierarchy of a product's features. The ideal visualization would be to 'tame' the feature list and prioritize features in accordance to a set of usage requirements and subsequent usage frequency.

Golan Levin

As a quest for expanding the vocabulary of social practices and of the object-subject relationship, emotional technology (smart, intelligent) simulates human behaviour and creative energy. It revisits the environment anew for new types of interactions and explorations.

Golan Levin is a software artist who creates screens and robotic objects that study sound, speech, movement, and gaze.