Daniel Fitton

University of Central Lancashire | UCLAN · School of Computing, Engineering and Physical Sciences

This paper describes work commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to investigate how children with multiple disabilities use tablet games in their homes. An extended study of 20 children in their families, using surveys, diaries, interviews and observations, is described. The findings from the study are captured in themes which b...

The participation of end users in design, research and evaluation has long been a feature of HCI. Traditionally these end users consent to participate in the general belief that they are contributing some knowledge that will eventually improve things for themselves or others. The involvement of children in research in HCI creates new challenges for...

Often, when designing new and novel technologies with users, the initial envisioning and concept generation stage is carried out exclusively by the research team. Within this paper three barriers are identified which make it challenging to include users within this early design activity: knowledge gap, user journey, and complex requirements. These...

This paper describes a process called RAId (Rapid Analysis of design Ideas), which assists, in the ethical and inclusive analysis of large sets of design data. It is described against an activity with 120 teenagers working in small groups contributing ideas for the design of an interactive water-drinking bottle. Four investigators systematically ex...

In this chapter, two participatory design activities are described in which teenagers create lo-fi designs describing emotions and explain the rationale for their design choices. Designs annotating and describing emotions are categorised as anthropomorphic, abstract, object based, or biomorphic. The chapter concludes: (i) teenagers use a variety of...

Adults have long been considered in detail in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community and children within the Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) community. However, teenagers (adolescents) have received far less specific consideration within the HCI and CCI areas (Fitton and Bell 2014; Fitton et al. 2013a). Teenagers are possibility the most d...

Engaging participants and choosing an appropriate technique in the research process are vitally important in developing successful products, devices and interventions. HCI researchers need to choose techniques that are suitable and appropriate for the user population being considered. In this chapter techniques used within HCI research activities w...

Locative Media Experiences (LMEs) have significant potential in enabling visitors to engage with the places that they visit through an appreciation of local history. For example, a visitor to Berlin that is exploring remnants of the Berlin Wall may be encouraged to appreciate (or in part experience) the falling of the Berlin wall by consuming multi...

Teen Computer Interaction is concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of technologies for teenagers and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them. It aims to give special consideration to the unique development issues and diversity of this particular user group. Teenagers are possibly the most diverse, dynamic and technolog...

This paper presents the findings of a low-fidelity participatory design activity for the design of wearable Augmented Reality (AR) experiences for children at play. The aims of the research were to gain insights into the different types of augmentations children find engaging and useful in different play contexts. The papers contribution is both th...

There is growing interest in maker technologies around how they can be included in school curriculums to engage children with science subjects and about their use to explore new creative possibilities. Given that maker technologies are currently unfamiliar to most children across the world this work sought to use these technologies to investigate w...

Providing users with carefully authored Locative media experiences (which can be consumed via their GPS equipped smartphones or tablets) has significant potential for fostering a strong engagement with their current surroundings. However, the availability of mobile tools to support the authoring of locative media experiences in-situ, and by non-tec...

In this paper two participatory design activities are described in which teenagers create lo-fi designs describing emotions and explain the rationale for their design choices. Designs annotating and describing emotions are categorised as anthropomorphic, abstract, object based, or biomorphic. The paper concludes that teenagers use a variety of visu...

Participatory Design (PD) in various guises is a popular approach with the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) community. In studying it as a method very little work has considered the fundamentals of participation, namely how children choose to participate and how their ideas are included and represented. This paper highlights ethical concerns a...

UX is a widely explored topic within HCI and has a large practitioners' community. However, the users considered in research and practice, are most often adults -- since adults represent the largest technology market share. However teenagers represent a growing market of unique users, and more needs to be understood about this population, from a UX...

Participatory design (PD) methods generally provide little guidance/reporting on how the tasks are introduced to participants and how participants are supported in carrying them out. This area, of understanding how a participant is guided through a design task, is particularly important for child and teenage participants who may be unwilling, for a...

Most modern tablet devices and phones include tilt-based sensing but to-date tilt is primarily used either for input with games or for detecting screen orientation. This paper presents the results of an experiment with teenage users to explore a new tilt-based input technique on mobile devices intended for text entry. The experiment considered the...

This paper describes a suite of studies that investigated 'cool' as it applies to the design of interactive products for teenagers. Beginning with a hierarchy of cool that situated cool across three dimensions of having, doing, and being cool, the studies reported here are described in terms of their findings and the extent to which they confirm th...

There is growing emphasis on teenagers to adopt healthy behaviours and sustainable lifestyles. Innovative interventions delivered through pervasive technology or the internet are increasingly viewed as effective ways to motivate and help people change their behaviour. However, delivering interventions to change teenager's attitude or behaviour via...

Previous research has tended to focus on adults or households as a whole when investigating attitudes and behaviours towards energy use. This study focussed on teenagers, ‘the adults of tomorrow’, and their attitudes towards energy consumption. 114 Teenagers aged 10e19 years took part and multiple data collection methods were used to investigate th...

When working with children in participatory design activities ethical questions arise that are not always considered in a standard ethics review. This paper highlights five challenges around the ethics of the value of design and the ethics of the children's participation and presents a new tool, CHECk that deals with three of these challenges by vi...

As participants in interaction design, teenagers offer some very unique and valuable insights both into the often-unconventional world that they inhabit and from a viewpoint that can combine elements of both child and adult perspectives. Teenagers as a user group are not often studied within interaction design and, within the field of HCI, fall int...

This paper describes the methodology through which a set of guidelines that inform the design and development of energy-use reduction technologies for teenagers were created. The presented research forms part of a wider project that aims to design, develop and evaluate mobile solutions to change teen attitudes and behavior to energy consumption. In...

Teenagers are a unique but little studied user group within the field of Interaction Design. Current literature on methodologies for research with children predominantly focuses on working with younger age groups and leaves a distinct gap between this and research methodologies used with adults. The aim of the workshop is to bridge this gap by brin...

This paper presents the process and outputs from a participatory design activity with secondary school children whose task was to design organic user interfaces (OUIs) for use in energy-aware applications. Although experienced in participatory design sessions with children and teenagers, the design team faced three new challenges in this work: how...

In this paper a collaborative game for children is used to explore touch-point overloading on a multi-touch tabletop. Understanding the occurrence of new interactional limitations, such as the situation of touch-point overloading in a multi-touch interface, is highly relevant for interaction designers working with emerging technologies. The game wa...

In recent years, there has been much interest in the potential for situat-ed displays to support sense of community. In this chapter, we describe our expe-riences of two significant situated display-based deployments which explore some of the issues that arise when such systems are used on a day to day basis. The first deployment described is that...

Participatory Design is a common practice in HCI and user based evaluations are also highly recommended. This paper looks at the practice of carrying out design and evaluation sessions with school aged children by describing a general method for carrying out and arranging whole class activities that are school friendly and then by analyzing the aca...

The ability to be or to create 'cool' is universally desirable, for individuals wishing to impress their peers and multinational corporations attempting to gain market share alike. To achieve cool, however, is as challenging as it is desirable; often fleeting, unexpected, uncontrolled and seemingly mysterious. This work builds upon previous work by...

This paper explores teenagers' attitudes towards energy consumption. The research is part of a wider project with the goal of designing, developing and evaluating mobile solutions to change teenagers' attitudes and behaviour towards energy. Diaries, stories, written scenarios and focus groups provided initial insight into teenagers' attitudes. The...

Cool is an essential characteristic when designing technologies that appeal to teenagers, but is very challenging to understand and design for. This paper describes a study that investigated cool with teenagers using a specially constructed 'Cool Wall' that allows items to be rated using a simple scale. We present the design of the Cool Wall protot...

This paper describes the development and exploration of a tool designed to assist in investigating 'cool' as it applies to the design of interactive products for teenagers. The method involved the derivation of theoretical understandings of cool from literature that resulted in identification of seven core categories for cool, which were mapped to...

Cool can be thought about on three levels; the having of cool things, the doing of cool stuff and the being of cool. Whilst there is some understanding of cool products, the concept, of being cool is much more elusive to designers and developers of systems. This study examines this space by using a set of pre-prepared teenage personas as probes wit...

This paper describes how initial principles for the designs of an interactive application were informed from a study of 'coolness' with two different ages of teenagers. The study used drawings to examine how teenagers might design their environments and these were then analysed by the research team based on a set of characteristics of cool that wer...

In this paper we explore the unique challenges and rewards of engaging teenagers in the design process. This work is part of project engaging teenagers in reducing their energy use and making longer lasting changes in energy usage attitudes. This change will be achieved though the creation of mobile and wearable 'teen' technologies that make energy...

In this paper we present an overview and initial work from a research project creating 'cool' mobile technologies to educate and inform teenagers in order to reduce their energy use. Teenagers are already becoming consumers and will form the next generation of workers, homeowners, managers and policy makers; a longitudinal change in their habits co...

While the application of ubicomp systems to explore context sharing has received a large amount of interest, only a very small number of studies have been carried out which involve “real world” use outside of the lab. This article presents an in-depth analysis of context sharing behaviours that built up around use of the Hermes interactive office d...

The combination of the Internet and emerging technologies such as nearfield communications, real-time localization, and embedded sensors lets us transform everyday objects into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment. Such objects are building blocks for the Internet of Things and enable novel computing applications. As a s...

While devices such as iPhones, iPads and Surface tables enable a wide range of interaction possibilities, we do not yet have a set of widely understood terminology that conveys the new and unfamiliar touch-screen gestures required for interaction. In this paper we explore terminology for touch-screen gestures and in particular the implications for...

This paper describes the use of obstructed theatre as a novel design method for the elicitation of ideas from children for the design of a new mobile product. Obstructed theatre has previously been used, in this same context with adults, but this is the first paper that outlines its use with children. The paper describes the initial ideas for the s...

This chapter focuses on our exploration of awareness-related messaging by users of a situated display-based messaging system. The system, known as Hermes, was initially deployed outside offices in the Computing Department at Lancaster University (see Cheverst et al., 2003a,b) and a significant portion of its use related to awareness, e.g. a member...

Public displays and mobile phones are ubiquitous technologies that are already weaving themselves into the everyday life of urban citizens. The combination of the two enables new and novel possibilities, such as interaction with displays that are not physically accessible, extending screen real estate for mobile phones or transferring user content...

This paper presents an exploration of the design of a memory model to support the management of persistent historical memories recorded by smart work objects. Analysis of a range of potential application categories and scenarios involving a smart work object is used to highlight the requirements and different characteristics of object memories. The...

There is a significant disparity between wayfinding support services available in outdoor and in-building locations. Services such as Google Maps and in-car GPS allow users to examine unknown outdoor locations in advance as well as receive guidance en-route. In contrast, there is relatively little digital technology to support users in complex buil...

The use of mobile phones appears to provide a range of opportunities for supporting interaction with public displays. Furthermore, such interaction can help overcome some of the problems associated with interactions with public displays, e.g. the potential inability of users interact with a touch screen display because of its physical placement (e....

Equipment used in the construction domain is often hired in order to reduce cost and maintenance overhead. The cost of hire is dependent on the time period involved and does not take into account the actual use equipment has received. This paper presents our initial investigation into how physical objects augmented with sensing and communication te...

In this paper we describe a technology probe aiming to aid understanding of how digital displays can help supp ort communities. Using a simple photo gallery applicati on, deployed in a central social point in a small village and di splaying user- generated photos and videos, we have been able to g ain an understanding of this setting, field test ou...

This article focuses on our exploration of awareness issues through the design and long-term deployment of two systems: the Hermes office door display system (which enabled staff in a university department to post awareness messages to their door displays) and SPAM (a messaging system for supporting coordination between staff at two associated resi...

This paper presents the Hermes@Home system, which supports awareness (through messaging) between members of a home. Person(s) 'away' from the home can send messages via a web portal to an 'always on' 'information appliance' style display situated in the home, while people at home can scribble messages on the touch sensitive display of this unit for...

In this paper we consider the development of ‘digital records’ to support ethnographic study of interaction and collaboration in ubiquitous computing environments and articulate the core concept of ‘record and replay’ through two case studies. One focuses on the utility of digital records, or records of interaction generated by a computer system, t...

As the number of public displays in the environment in- creases, new opportunities open up to improve situated in- teraction and to enable new kinds of applications. In order to make distributed display resources available to nomadic users, a key issue to address is how control can be dynami- cally shared between display users. It is important to s...

Much work on display-based ubicomp systems (and rapid prototyping in general) focus on producing proof-of-concept demonstrators, usually to gauge technical feasibility and collect initial user feedback. In our work, we've found that it's often equally important to investigate factors such as use and appropriation and that in some cases, without use...

This paper presents some of the early design work of the 'Care in the Digital Community' research project - begun under the EPSRC IRC Network project EQUATOR. We outline some initial findings and designs from this interdisciplinary research project focusing on developing enabling technologies to assist care in the community for user groups with dif...

It is important that systems that exhibit proactive behaviour do so in a way that does not surprise or frustrate the user. Consequently, it is desirable for such systems to be both personalised and designed in such a way as to enable the user to scrutinise her user model (part of which should hold the rules describing the behaviour of the system)....

Much work on display-based ubicomp systems (and rapid prototyping in general) focus on producing proof-of-concept demonstrators, usually to gauge technical feasibility and collect initial user feedback. In our work, we've found that it's often equally important to investigate factors such as use and appropriation and that in some cases, without use...

One of the most promising possibilities for supporting user interaction with public displays is the use of personal mobile phones. Furthermore, by utilising Bluetooth users should have the capability to interact with displays without incurring personal financial connectivity costs. However, despite the relative maturity of Bluetooth as a standard a...

One of the most promising possibilities for supporting user interaction with public displays is the use of personal mobile phones. Furthermore, by utilising Bluetooth users should have the capability to interact with displays without incurring personal financial connectivity costs. However, despite the relative maturity of Bluetooth as a standard a...

Despite the interest surrounding 'ubiquitous computing', the number of deployed and evaluated ubicomp systems is still relatively small and consequently our understanding of some of the issues surrounding interaction with such systems is still somewhat limited. In this paper, we share our experiences of supporting interaction with office door displ...

To date there have been very few ubicomp systems that have been deployed and evaluated 'in place' and over the longer term. Consequently, t he issues related to the management and maintenance of such systems remain a very much under explored (but non- the-less critical) area. This paper discusses our experiences managing and maintaining the Hermes...

In recent years, the proliferation in use of the GSM short message service (or SMS) has prompted numerous studies into person to person messaging via mobile devices. However, to date, there has been relatively little exploration of systems that enable mobile messaging to (potentially ubiquitous) situated displays rather than the mobile devices of p...

Within the field of ubiquitous computing, many of the issues related to the notion of ‘situated interaction’ remain very much under explored. For example, there is little understanding of the kinds of interactions or uses that are likely to occur when large numbers of interactive displays are publicly situated throughout an office environment. In t...

This paper presents some of the early design work of the 'Digital Care' research project. We outline some initial fmdings and designs from this interdisciplinary research project focusing on developing enabling technologies to assist care in the community for user groups with different support needs. Our early studies suggest that designing for car...

This paper presents some early design work of the 'Digital Care' project, developing technologies to assist care in the community for user groups with different support needs. Our focus is on developing a SMS Public Asynchronous Messenger (SPAM) system for SMS messaging to a situated display in hostels for ex-psychiatric patients run by a charitabl...

This position paper reflects on the use of cultural probes in design. In detailing our use of probes we analyse their contribution to design. Using probes data from the study of a climbing club we reflect on how probes might 'work' for design.

This paper discusses how the public setting of a situated display acts as a resource for security. The very publicness creates a social auditability that prevents certain kinds of abuse. This is illustrated through our experience with Hermes – a situated door display that allows electronic notes to be left. Potential 'security' threats have not mat...

This paper considers some social features of a simple technol- ogy - SMS texting - as a means of enabling people to send messages as a routine feature of everyday working life. It uses a rich ethnographic case study of the everyday working usage of text messaging to point to the dan- gers of 'over-designing' technology' and to suggest that supporti...