Eric Paulos

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of California, Berkeley

This paper presents a set of design studies and discussions investigating new possibilities in designing digital limitations. Focusing on digital photography as a medium, we present design prototypes and experiments including Ultra-Low Resolution Displays, Inaccessible Cameras, and a set of point-and-shoot digital camera variants. Our design work i...

This Pictorial takes a different look at digital cameras and photos. It frames this look within a counterfunctional design perspective. This works is presented not as a design process documentation, but rather as a type of visual-textual design artifact. We see it as a means to present new concepts composed of both the textual-theoretical and visua...

This paper presents a set of design studies and discussions investigating new possibilities in designing digital limitations. Focusing on digital photography as a medium, we present design prototypes and experiments including Ultra-Low Resolution Displays, Inaccessible Cameras, and a set of point-and-shoot digital camera variants. Our design work i...

The proliferation of mobile technology has opened up opportunities for more effective services through improved work processes in nonprofit organizations. Contrary to the potential of mobile technology, few nonprofits fully exploit the capabilities of mobile technology. We present results of a qualitative study of current usage of information techn...

We present an ultra low-cost sensing system, which enables participants to see and reflect on the particulates in their air. Drawing on prior work in paper computing, we introduce small sensors for particulate pollution that can be easily assembled from common paper materials for less than $1 USD, and mailed by regular postal service to residents o...

We present the design and deployment of a bio-electronic sensing system. This system visualizes bacterial activity inside Winogradsky columns, which incubate soil samples to culture the naturally occurring microorganisms as they process metals and nutrients in the soil. Our month-long deployments with two urban communities offer insights into indiv...

Indoor air quality (IAQ) is important for health as people spend the majority of time indoors, and it is particularly interesting over outdoor air because it strongly ties to indoor activities. Some activities easily exacerbate IAQ, resulting in serious pollution. However, people may not notice such changes because many pollutants are colorless and...

This paper offers new theoretical and design insights into nteractive technology. By initially considering electric technology broadly, our work informs how HCI approaches a range of specific interactive or digital things and materials. Theoretically, we contribute a rigorous analysis of electric technology using the experiential lens of phenomenol...

Across HCI and social computing platforms, mobile applications that support citizen science, empowering non-experts to explore, collect, and share data have emerged. While many of these efforts have been successful, it remains difficult to create citizen science applications without extensive programming expertise. To address this concern, we prese...

DIYbio (Do It Yourself Biology) aims to 'open source', tinker and experiment with biology outside of professional settings. In this paper, we present the origins, practices, and challenges of DIYbio initiatives around the world. Our findings depict DIYbio as operating across intersections ('seams') between a range of stakeholders, materials and con...

This paper creatively explores and critically inquires into power and energy at scales at which it can be generated by human bodily kinetic motion, with goals of promoting more engaging, meaningful, and sustainable interactions with and through interactive technology and electricity. To do so we delineate and name the research and design space of i...

This paper proposes and investigates the area of local energy for interactive systems design. We characterize local energy in terms of three themes: contextuality, seasonality, and visibility/tangibility. Here we focus on two specific local energy technologies domestic, electrical generation from wind and solar. In order to investigate this area we...

Over the past decade, a diverse community of biologists, artists, engineers and hobbyists has emerged to pursue biology projects outside of traditional laboratories. Though still in its nascent form, this DIYbio (Do It Yourself Biology) movement has given rise to a host of technical innovations and sharing mechanisms that enable hobbyists to experi...

Motivated by a recent surge of research related to energy and sustainability, this paper presents a review of energy-related work within HCI as well as from literature outside of HCI. Our review of energy-related HCI research identifies a central cluster of work focused on electricity consumption feedback (ECF). Our review of literature outside of...

Across HCI and social computing platforms we have seen the rapid emergence and adoption of mobile applications to empower non-experts to explore, measure, and share data about their world from blooming flowers to air quality. However, the creation of mobile citizen science applications with the type and method of data collected remains under the co...

Time is a difficult concept for parents to communicate with young children. We developed TimeBlocks, a novel tangible, playful object to facilitate communication about concepts of time with young children. TimeBlocks consists of a set of cubic blocks that function as a physical progress bar. Parents and children can physically manipulate the blocks...

Time is a difficult concept for parents to communicate with young children. We developed TimeBlocks, a novel tangible, playful object to facilitate communication about concepts of time with young children. TimeBlocks consists of a set of cubic blocks that function as a physical progress bar. Parents and children can physically manipulate the blocks...

Eric Paulos from Carnegie Mellon University, shares his views on the role of amateurs in the advancement and creative us social media and other interactive technologies. Citizens from a number of Arab countries, such as Tunisia and Egypt, have demonstrated this trend by creatively reappropriating and remixing a range of technologies, such as Twitte...

Studies from around the world show how the social media tools of Web 2.0 are shaping engagement with cities, communities, and spaces. Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis, and photo sharing and social networking sites, have made possible a more participatory Internet experience. Much of this technology is available for mobile phones, where it can...

Spectacle computing is a novel strategy for vibrantly projecting information into the public sphere using expressive and tangible media. We demonstrate an example of this computing meme with large, glowing balloons that change color based on input from attached air quality sensors (exhaust, diesel, or volatile organic compounds). In two public inst...

Sensing has played a significant role in the evolution of ubiquitous computing systems, enabling many of today's compelling interactive and ubiquitous experiences. In this paper, we argue for expanding the current landscape of sensing to include living organisms such as plants and animals, along with traditional tools and digital devices. We presen...

Our work explores the convergence between participatory sensing, political activism and public expressions. Unlike prior research, which focuses on personal sensing, we present low-cost, networked air quality sensors, designed to be repositioned across public landscapes by communities of citizen stakeholders. Our GPS-enabled sensors report dust, ex...

With over 13.3 million children living below poverty line in the United States, there is a pressing need for engaging HCI research with children at the socio-economic margins. Drawing from design studio culture and art therapy literature, we explore wearable computing as a creative and tangible medium (similar to markers, paints, clays, etc.) for m...

Grassroots initiatives enable communities of stakeholders to transform urban landscapes and impact broader political and cultural trajectories. In this two-day workshop, we present opportunities to engage HCI research with activist communities in Vancouver, the city hosting CHI'11. Working directly with local activist organizations, we explore the...

We present a qualitative study of reacquisition-the acquisition of previously possessed goods-involving in-depth interviews with 18 reacquirers within or nearby Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Based on critiques of sustainable consumption and our findings, we reframe technology consumption as acquisition, possession, dispossession and reacquisition. We presen...

This paper investigates the philosophical question of how we can experience energy with the aim of informing the design of future ways of experiencing energy by means of technology. Four human-technology relations formulated by philosopher of technology Don Ihde are presented. Each is then developed in the context of electrical interactive technolo...

E-waste is a generic term embracing various forms of electric and electronic equipment that is loosely discarded, surplus, obsolete, or broken [27]. When e-waste is improperly discarded as trash, there are predictable negative impacts on the environment and human health. Existing e-waste solutions range from designing for reuse to fabricating with...

With over 13.3 million children living below poverty line in the United States, there is a pressing need for engaging HCI research with children at the socio-economic margins. Drawing from design studio culture and art therapy literature, we explore wearable computing as a creative and tangible medium (similar to markers, paints, clays, etc.) for m...

Where are our beautiful, delicious urban technologies that will sooth the souls of our communities, generate the playful neo-geo-landscapes, and celebrate our omni-connected harmony? Contrary to these optimistic and homogenous visions of the technology futurists, we claim that beneath and around this utopian veneer of urban technologies lurks a dar...

The authors currently engaged in two projects to improve human-computer interaction (HCI) designs that can help conserve resources. The projects explore motivation and persuasion strategies relevant to ubiquitous computing systems that bring realtime consumption data into the homes and hands of residents in Brisbane, Australia. The first project se...

Citizen Energy is a novel, participatory citizen engagement with energy that is designed to extend our relationship with energy beyond existing producer-consumer models towards ones that are more participatory, intimate, personal, social, and emotional. In this paper we directly introduce and operationalize novel strategies for collecting, keeping,...

This paper presents a large-scale study of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) communities, cultures and projects. We focus on the adoption and appropriation of human-computer interaction and collaboration technologies and their role in motivating and sustaining communities of builders, crafters and makers. Our survey of over 2600 individuals across a range of DI...

Motivated and informed by perspectives on sustainability and design, this paper draws on a diverse body of scholarly works related to energy and materiality to articulate a perspective on energy-as-materiality and propose a design approach of materializing energy. Three critical themes are presented: the intangibility of energy, the undifferentiate...

Energy feedback systems, particularly residential energy feedback systems (REFS), have emerged as a key area for HCI and interaction design. However, we argue that HCI researchers, designers and others concerned with the design and evaluation of interactive systems should more strongly consider the ineffectiveness of such systems, including not onl...

Energy use in the home is a topic of increasing interest and concern, and one on which technology can have a significant impact. However, existing work typically focuses on moderately affluent homeowners who have relative autonomy with respect to their home, or does not address socio-economic status, class, and other related issues. For the 30% of...

Drawing on a diverse body of literature from philosophy, design theory and other areas we have been developing a perspective on energy-as-materiality and employing a designerly approach of materializing energy [1]. Building on a framework for approaching energy as materiality, we discuss several design explorations around emotional attachment to en...

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study of people's everyday interactions with energy-consuming products and systems in the home. Initial results from a large online survey are also considered. This research focuses not only on "conservation behavior" but importantly investigates interactions with technology that may be characterized...

The Common Sense project is developing mobile environmental sensing platforms to support grassroots community action. To this end, we are building a family of hardware and software components that can be used in a range of applications, as well as developing new communication paradigms that enable communities of non- experts to gather and produce i...

Street art and political activism have a rich history of shaping urban landscapes. Our work explores the processes by which public artists and political activists contribute to public spaces, introducing opportunities for HCI researchers to engage with the people who shape the aesthetic feel of our cities. We present WallBots-autonomous, wall-crawl...

Recent convergence between low-cost technology, artform and political discourse presents a new design space for enabling public participation and expression. We explore non-experts' use of place-based, modular sensors to activate, author and provoke urban landscapes. Our work with communities of bicyclists, students, parents, and homeless people su...

This paper describes inAir, a tool for sharing measurements and visualizations of indoor air quality within one's social network. Poor indoor air quality is difficult for humans to detect through sight and smell alone and can contribute to the development of chronic diseases. Through a four-week long study of fourteen households as six groups, we f...

As communities develop technological literacy and explore how technology can impact their lives, the future of urban computing will come from grass-roots initiatives in addition to traditional top-down urban planning. To this end, we aim to engage the do-it- yourself (DIY) community in exploring how individuals can add technology to their communiti...

Water is our most precious and most rapidly declining natural resource. We explore pervasive technology as an approach for promoting water conservation in public and private spaces. We hope to motivate immediate reduction in water use as well as higher-order behaviors (seeking new information, etc) through unobtrusive low-cost water flow sensing an...

We designed and prototyped WearAir, an expressive T-shirt to sense the wearer's surrounding air quality as indicated by the measured volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and publicly express those levels through visually expressive patterns. Although poor air quality has been shown to affect human health, our daily exposure to such pollutants has been...

In most large cities of the developing world, urban air pollution has worsened, which has been detrimental to the health of their populations. At the same time, it is difficult for lay people to sense the level of air quality with bare human perception as air pollutants are mostly invisible and odorless. We believe that computing technologies can h...

Good indoor air quality is a vital part of human health. Poor indoor air quality can contribute to the development of chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma, heart disease, and lung cancer. Complicating matters, poor air quality is extremely difficult for humans to detect through sight and smell alone and existing sensing equipment is designed...

Personal energy consumption, specifically home energy consumption such as heating, cooling, and electricity, has been an important environmental and economic topic for decades. Despite the attention paid to this area, few researchers have specifically explored these issues within a community that makes up approximately 30% of U.S. households -- tho...

Researchers are developing mobile sensing platforms to facilitate public awareness of environmental conditions. However, turning such awareness into practical community action and political change requires more than just collecting and presenting data. To inform research on mobile environmental sensing, we conducted design fieldwork with government...

People tinker, hack, fix, reuse, and assemble materials in creative and unexpected ways, often codifying and sharing their production process with others. Do-it-yourself (DIY) encompasses a range of design activities that have become increasingly prominent in online discussion forums and blogs, in addition to a small-but-growing presence in profess...

We are at an important technological inflection point. Most of our computing systems have been designed and built by professionally trained experts (i.e. us--computer scientists, engineers, and designers) for use in specific domains and to solve explicit problems. Artifacts often called "user manuals" traditionally prescribed the appropriate usage...

Two workshops held at Pervasive 2008 and UbiComp 2008 brought together people who work on pervasive computing and HCI to tackle ecological concerns and use their expertise, skills, and insights to contribute to society’s sustainability and well-being.

By attaching sensors to GPS-enabled cell phones, we can gather the raw data necessary to begin understand how urban air pollution impacts both individuals and communities. In this paper we introduce a hardware and software platform for exploring algorithms and data gathered from pollution sensors integrated into cell phones, and discuss our main re...

This paper briefl y presents two concepts of "RE" (1) re-empowering individuals using personal mobile technology reconstructed as measurement instruments and (2) re-cycle as a design constraint for extending a product's usable lifetime. In the fi rst example we demonstrate the integration of simple low-cost, low-power air quality sensors attached t...

While we should celebrate our success at evolving many vital aspects of the human-technology interactive experience, we question the scope of this progress. Step back with us for a moment. What really matters? Everyday life spans a wide range of emotions and experiences - from improving productivity and efficiency to promoting wonderment and daydre...

Using 180 RFID tags to track and plot locations over time, guests to an event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) collectively constructed a public visualization of the individual and group activities by building a history of movement throughout the space over 120 minutes. The projected histogram builds over time, revealing crowd int...

The mobile phone is one of the most commonly carried pieces of personal, readily accessible digital technologies. Beyond just voice calls, they function as digital cameras, PDAs, internet consoles, and email and instant messaging clients. The demand for improved operating systems and programming languages has given rise to a wide range of hardware...

Only recently have researchers focused on the integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies in everyday urban settings and lifestyles. Pervasive computing has largely been applied either in relatively homogeneous unpopulated areas--for example, sensor networks in forests--or in small-scale well-defined built environments, such as sm...

Rigorous electromagnetic methods are applied to calculate the propagation constants and the fields of the allowed guided modes in uniaxial slab waveguides for an arbitrary orientation of the optic axis. In addition to the familiar TE and TM modes, there are hybrid guided modes. These hybrid guided modes can be divided into three distinct types: hom...

In this paper, we introduce a new ambient display, personal steganography, and the concept of the urban score. Strictly speaking, the ambient display itself is a particular rendering of a value of

No longer confined to our offices, schools, and homes, technology is expanding at an astonishing rate across our everyday public urban landscapes. From the visible (mobile phones, laptops, and blackberries) to the invisible (GPS, WiFi, GSM, and EVDO), we find the full spectrum of digital technologies transforming nearly every facet of our urban exp...

No longer confined to our offices, schools, and homes, technology is expanding at an astonishing rate across our everyday public urban landscapes. From the visible (mobile phones, laptops, and blackberries) to the invisible (GPS, WiFi, GSM, and EVDO), we find the full spectrum of digital technologies transforming nearly every facet of our urban exp...

No longer confined to our offices, schools, and homes, technology is expanding at an astonishing rate across our everyday public urban landscapes. From the visible (mobile phones, laptops, and blackberries) to the invisible (GPS, WiFi, GSM, and EVDO), we find the full spectrum of digital technologies transforming nearly every facet of our urban exp...

There is more to our urban lives than precision location systems, restaurant recommendations, and familiar desktop applications redeployed mobile phones. While many of these tools will indeed become vital urban necessities that improve our lives, we are left to wonder the role of technology in touching the other more emotional aspects of urban livi...

Urban Atmospheres captures a unique, synergistic moment - expanding urban populations, rapid adoption of Bluetooth mobile devices, tiny ad hoc sensor networks, and the widespread influence of wireless technologies across our growing urban landscapes. The United Nations recently reported that 48 percent of the world's population current live in urba...

As humans we live and interact across a wildly diverse set of physical spaces. We each formulate our own personal meaning of place using a myriad of observable cues such as public-private, large-small, daytime-nighttime, loud-quiet, and crowded-empty. Not surprisingly, it is the people with which we share such spaces that dominate our perception of...

For this issue's Works in Progress, we have six abstracts in the areas of pervasive gaming, interactive entertainment, and interpersonal interactions. Three of the abstracts cover gaming systems that combine physical and virtual environments. These discuss new development frameworks and toolkits, analyze how users interact in gaming environments, a...

UbiComp in the Urban Frontier captures a unique, synergistic moment - expanding urban populations, rapid adoption of Bluetooth mobile devices, tiny ad hoc sensor networks, and the widespread influence of wireless technologies across our growing urban landscapes. The United Nations recently reported that 48 percent of the world's population current...

Human communication and interaction comprise a wide range of verbal and nonverbal cues. Further adoption of novel telecommunication methods such as e-mail, chat, instant messaging (IM), mobile phone SMS text messaging, and videoconferencing; have augmented our mediated interaction abilities. However, a significant (and important) amount of human ex...

Ubiquitous computing has long been associated with intimacy. Within the UbiComp literature we see intimacy portrayed as: knowledge our appliances and applications have about us and the minutiae of our day-to-day lives; physical closeness, incarnated on the body as wearable computing and in the body as 'nanobots'; and computer mediated connection wi...

Human communication and interaction is comprised of a wide range of verbal and non-verbal cues. Further adoption of novel tele-communication methods such as email, chat, instant messaging (IM), mobile phone SMS text messaging, and videoconferencing; have augmented our mediated interaction abilities. However, a significant (and important) amount of...

Current internet applications leave our physical presence and our real-world environment behind. This paper describes the development of several simple, inexpensive, internet-controlled, untethered tele-robots or PRoPs (Personal Roving Presences) to provide the sensation of teleembodiment in a remote real space. These devices support at least video...

Robots provide us with a means to move around in, visualize, and interact with a remote physical world. We have exploited these physical properties coupled with the growing diversity of users on the World Wide Web (WWW) [1] to create a WWW based telerobotic remote environment browser. This browser, called Mechanical Gaze, allows multiple remote WWW...

This paper describes Version 3.0 of the system architecture, SDV interface, algorithms for automated goal selection, and metrics for collaboration and leadership. We report results from a July 2001 field test with 56 remote users. See: www.tele-actor.net

Internet-based "online robots" now provide public access to remote locations such as museums and laboratories. The Tele-Actor is a collaborative online teleoperation system for distance learning that allows many students to simultaneously share control of a single mobile resource. Our goal is to preserve the educational advantages of field trips wi...

The design, function, and challenges of online telerobotic systems. Remote-controlled robots were first developed in the 1940s to handle radioactive materials. Trained experts now use them to explore deep in sea and space, to defuse bombs, and to clean up hazardous spills. Today robots can be controlled by anyone on the Internet. Such robots includ...

Probing is a common operation employed to reduce the position uncertainty of objects. This paper demonstrates a technique for constructing provably near optimal probing strategies for precisely localizing polygonal parts. This problem is shown to be dual to the well studied grasping problem of computing optimal finger placements as defined by Mishr...

Humans live and interact within the real world but our current online world neglects this. This paper explores research into Personal Roving Presence (PRoP) devices that provide a physical mobile proxy, controllable over the Internet to provide tele-embodiment. Leveraging off of its physical presence in the remote space, PRoPs provide important hum...

Probing is a common operation employed to reduce the position uncertainty of objects. This thesis demonstrates a technique for constructing provably near optimal probing strategies for precisely localizing polygonal parts. This problem is shown to be dual to the well studied grasping problem of computing optimal nger placements as dened by Mishra e...

Computer scientists John Canny and Eric Paulos discuss computer- mediated communication from Cartesian and phenomenological perspectives. The current Cartesian model for teleconferencing ignores the role of the body and breaks communication into separate channels for video, text, and audio. The results are often stilted and unsatisfying. Canny and...

In the rush into cyberspace we leave our physical presence and our real#world environment behind. The internet# undoubtedly a remarkable modern communications tool# still does not empower us to enter the o#ce of the person at the other end of the connection. We cannot look out their window# admire their furniture# talk to their o#ce mates# tour the...

At the intersection of telerobotics, computer networking and human social interaction we have chosen to explore an area we identify as personal tele-embodiment. At the core of this research is an emphasis on the individual person rather than the intricate complexities of the machine. While the mechanical elements of our system are essential to its...

Real world assembly sequences consists of multiple assembly steps, many of which can be performed in parallel. In practice this parallelism is often not exploited because of the complexity involved in avoiding collisions between all of the robots. In this paper we describe a simplified method of achieving smooth collision free paths for multiple ro...

Summary The spontaneous growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) over the past several years has resulted in a plethora of remote con- trolled mechanical devices, all of them accessible from any net- worked computer in the world. This panel brings together a diverse collection of pioneers who are actively engaged in exploring future directions and implic...

Robots provide us with a means to move around in, visualize, and interact with a remote physical world. We have exploited these physical properties coupled with the growing diversity of users on the World Wide Web (WWW) to create a WWW based telerobotic remote environment browser. This browser, called Mechanical Gaze, allows multiple remote WWW use...

Research and development in robotics and industrial automation has created a need for good grasp planning algorithms for a variety of object shapes and hand types. This in turn has stimulated research on the inherent computational geometry of grasping. The purpose of this paper is to survey some of the recent grasping results, algorithms, and ideas...

Peg-in-hole insertion is not only a longstanding problem in robotics but the most common automated mechanical assembly task. 1 In this paper we present a high precision, self-calibrating peg-in-hole insertion strategy using several very simple, inexpensive, and accurate optical sensors. The self-calibrating feature allows us to achieve successful d...

Peg-in-hole insertion is not only a longstanding problem in robotics but the most common automated mechanical assembly task. In this paper the authors present a high precision, self-calibrating peg-in-hole insertion strategy using several very simple, inexpensive, and accurate optical sensors. The self-calibrating feature allows the authors to achi...

Ubiquitous computing, by its very definition, aspires to weave computing technologies across the fabric of our everyday lives. Many of the successes and failures encountered during the pursuit of ubiquitous computing will be dictated by the manifest integration of play. It is play that helps us cope with the past, understand the present, and prepar...

In this workshop we propose to explore new approaches to bring about real environmental change by looking at the success of empowering technologies that enable grassroots activism and bottom up community participation. Ubiquitous computing is transforming from being mostly about professional communication and social interaction to a sensor rich per...

Accepted proposal for a workshop held at the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, May 19th, 2008, Sydney, Australia

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 223-240).