William Odom

Simon Fraser University · School of Interactive Arts and Technology

Material artifacts are passed down as a way of sustaining relationships and family history. However, new issues are emerging as families are increasingly left with the digital remains of their loved ones. We designed three devices to investigate how digital materials might be passed down, lived with and inherited in the future. We conducted in-home...

Designing radically new technology systems that people will want to use is complex. Design teams must draw on knowledge related to people's current values and desires to envision a preferred yet plausible future. However, the introduction of new technology can shape people's values and practices, and what-we-know-now about them does not always tran...

Over the past several years, people have increasingly acquired virtual possessions. We consider these things to include artifacts that are increasingly becoming immaterial (e.g. books, photos, music, movies) and things that have never traditionally had a lasting material form (e.g. SMS archives, social networking profiles, personal behavior logs)....

How can technologies be created that take on a long-term place in people's lives and that coevolve with them over time? What kinds of qualities should designers consider in crafting such kinds of computational things? And, how should we study and evaluate such new technologies through a longer temporal frame? In this chapter, we draw on examples of...

This special issue focuses on new perspectives of time within HCI research. We begin by explicating how HCI’s views of time have broadened over the years, going beyond the traditional subjective-objective dichotomy. We describe how the HCI community was originally anchored to clock time, but more recently the field has begun to incorporate the exis...

Many non-profit peer-to-peer exchange arrangements and profit-driven, multi-sided online marketplaces leverage underutilized resources, such as tools, to optimize their use to capacity. They often rely on a digital platform in pursuit of their social aspirations and/or economic objectives. We report on a field study of a local sharing community tha...

The dramatic acceleration of digital technologies and their integration into physical products is transforming everyday objects. Our domestic appliances, furniture, clothing, are growing in intelligence. Smart objects are increasingly capable of interacting with humans in a purposeful manner with intentionality. This collection of essays, descripti...

In this paper, we discuss the media coverage of a research product made for social innovation and its implications on our research and commercialization of the product that followed. We were interested in how media coverage shaped socio-technological imaginaries, cultural and social views of people around this new technology. The research product t...

With the massive proliferation of digital photos, new approaches are needed to enable people to engage with their vast photo archives over time and into the future. Our demo will feature Chronoscope - an interactive near-eye photo viewer ('scope') that uses temporal metadata embedded in digital photos as a design material to encourage curious and t...

We report on a design research inquiry aimed at understanding and exploring the values, practices, and perspectives of people that actively embrace and choose to live within collective houses and mobile vehicles as their homes. A goal of our work is to inquire into how such lived alternatives of 'home' can take a step toward broadening possibilitie...

Today, most technology users have to deal with a growing amount of personal data across many devices and online platforms. There is a growing need for tools that can help people decide more intentionally what data to keep or discard. We created five design concepts in the form of video prototypes to probe on alternative design strategies for suppor...

With the massive proliferation of digital photos, new approaches are needed to enable people to engage with their vast photo archives over time. We describe the Research through Design process of Chronoscope, a domestic technology that leverages temporal metadata embedded in digital photos as a resource to encourage more temporally diverse, rich, a...

Motivated by prior work on everyday creativity, we adopt a design-oriented approach seeks to move beyond designing for explicit interactions to also include the implicit, incremental and, at times even, unknowing encounters that slowly emerge among people, technologies, and artifacts over time. We contribute an investigation into designing for slow...

This paper discusses how a networked object in the form of a small robot designed to mediate experiences of care, social connectedness, and intimacy, was used by adolescents with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, a condition that reduces their normal functioning, including the ability to socialize. A study with nine adolescents, each using the robot for a...

The home has been a major focus of the HCI community for over two decades. Despite this body of research, nascent works have argued that HCI's characterization of 'the home' remains narrow and requires more diverse accounts of domestic configurations. Our work contributes to this area through a four-month ethnography of three collective homes in Va...

Research on product experience has a history in investigating the sensory and emotional qualities of interacting with objects. However, this notion has not been fully expanded to the design space of co-designing smart objects. In this paper, we report on findings from a series of co-design workshops where we used the toolkit Loaded Dice in conjunct...

We describe the design and deployment of Olly, a domestic music player that enables people to re-experience digital music they listened to in the past. Olly uses its owner's Last.FM listening history metadata archive to occasionally select a song from their past, but offers no user control over what is selected or when. We deployed Olly in 3 homes...

Sharing economy services have become increasingly popular. In addition to various well-known for-profit activities in this space (e.g., ride and apartment sharing), many community groups and non-profit organizations offer collections of shared things (e.g., books, tools) that explicitly aim to benefit local communities. We expect that both non-prof...

This workshop provides a venue within CHI for research through design (RtD) practitioners to present their work and discuss how, with whom, and why it is used. Building on the success of prior RtD and design research workshops at CHI, this workshop will focus on how RtD artifacts are used, with the goal of connecting diverse works with broader meth...

In this chapter we provide an overview of concepts and methods that have become part of our approach to gain a broader and deeper understanding of the relations between humans and technology. Over the years, our efforts have been to move past the field of interaction design’s dominant focus on human interaction with technology to develop a design-o...

SenseCenser is a device that senses the act of placing incense chips into it and, subsequently, the volume of incense smoke produced as the chips burn. These values can be connected to various applications, such as lighting equipment, sound systems, showing (moving) images, and more specific installations at particular rituals (e.g., a funeral cere...

We report on the design and deployment of a probe study aimed at understanding the values, practices, and perspectives of people that actively embrace living situations that could be considered 'alternative' to normative domestic dwellings. In response to the returned probes, the pictorial describes and unpacks speculative interpretations and desig...

An increasing number of non-profit groups and organizations have formed "libraries" of shared things to leverage the collaborative use of underutilized resources (e.g., power tools) for the benefit of local communities. Their key challenges are the transience and anonymity of their members, and how to nurture creative interactions among them. We de...

Focusing on the design of technology for mourning and memorialization, we describe the emergence of Automatic Conveyor-belt Columbaria, locally developed in Japan, as an example of an interactive system combining physical and digital remains, and discuss its user experiences and social influences. It concludes with implications for future HCI resea...

With the massive adoption of music streaming services globally, metadata is being generated that captures people's music listening histories in more precise detail than ever before. These archives offer a valuable and overlooked resource for designing new ways of supporting people in experiencing the music they have listened to over the course of t...

A diverse set of research and design initiatives related to time, temporality, and slowness has emerged in the DIS and HCI communities. The goals of this workshop are to: 1. bring together researchers to reflect on conceptual, methodological, and practice-based outcomes and issues and 2. to develop an agenda for future research in this growing area...

Families preserve memories of their special and everyday experiences, though it can be hard to capture all these moments in everyday life. We explore the concept of automated forms of capturing family life and presenting them through situated, tangible everyday artifacts in the home. We designed Time-Turner, an always-on video recording system alon...

Slowness has emerged as a rich lens to frame HCI investigations into supporting longer-term human-technology relations. Yet, there is a need to further address how we design for slowness on conceptual and practical levels. Drawing on the concepts of unawareness, intersections, and ensembles, we contribute an investigation into designing for slownes...

TaskCams are simple digital cameras intended to serve as a tool for Cultural Probe studies and made available by the Interaction Research Studio via open-source distribution. In conjunction with an associated website, instructions and videos, they represent a novel strategy for disseminating and facilitating a research methodology. At the same time...

Design-oriented research in HCI has increasingly migrated towards theoretical perspectives to understand the implications of newly crafted technology in everyday life. However, in this context, the relations between theory and understanding the things we make are not always clear, especially the degree to which the nature of research artifacts is r...

With the massive adoption of music streaming services globally, metadata is being generated that captures people's music listening histories in more precise detail than ever before. These metadata archives offer a valuable and overlooked resource for designing new ways of supporting people in experiencing the music they have listened to over the co...

This paper presents an analytical approach that we call the focus framework. The framework aids the analysis of the intended and unintended design attributes that emerge within a project's design process. The framework helps to reveal how prototypes and decision making interact together to shape the final design features and make visible the trajec...

This article describes and reflects on the processes of designing two devices, Timecard and Fenestra, that both aim to propose new ideas for creating technologies that support rituals of honoring deceased loved ones. The discussion provides insight into how their respective designs were crafted to provide a range of interactions and to interweave w...

Families enjoy capturing digital media about their life and replaying moments, yet it is not always easy to do so. To explore this design space, we created a physical, ambient, and situated visualization prototype called Time-Turner specifically designed for a home setting that records video of family activities and allows families to review their...

The goal for this workshop is to further experiment with a venue at CHI for practitioners of research through design to share their work with each other. This workshop, following a successful workshop in CHI 2016, will be centered upon a discussion of objects produced through a research through design process. Bringing together researchers as well...

Teens are a fascinating, dynamic population; they are on the vanguard of emerging technologies, often defining the behaviour and social mores of these products and services. At the same time, teens are still exploring and developing into the person they want to become, making them a terribly sensitive group to work with, and making it all the more...

In this pictorial, we propose an alternative approach to investigating human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers' epistemological commitments in research on the home. While researchers' commitments can be discussed through textual aspects of their research, in this pictorial we conduct a pattern analysis of visual elements as a productive way to...

Mobile devices have begun to raise questions around the potential for overuse when in the presence of family or friends. As such, we conducted a diary and interview study to understand how people use mobile devices in the presence of others at home, and how this shapes their behavior and household dynamics. Results show that family members become f...

People accumulate huge assortments of virtual possessions, but it is not yet clear how systems and system designers can help people make meaning from these large archives. Early research in HCI has suggested that people generally appear to value their virtual things less than their material things, but theory on material possessions does not entire...

Prototypes and prototyping have had a long and important history in the HCI community and have played a highly significant role in creating technology that is easier and more fulfilling to use. Yet, as focus in HCI is expanding to investigate complex matters of human relationships with technology over time in the intimate and contested contexts of...

We describe the design, implementation, and deployment of Fenestra, a domestic technology embodied in the form of a wirelessly connected round mirror, photo frame, and candle that displays photos of departed loved ones. Fenestra's interaction design, form, and materials are inspired by Japanese domestic practices of memorializing departed loved one...

The goal for this workshop is to provide a venue at CHI for research through design practitioners to materially share their work with each other. Conversation will largely be centered upon a discussion of objects produced through a research through design process. Bringing together researchers as well as their physical work is a means of gaining in...

div class="page" title="Page 1"> Speculative and fictional approaches have long been implemented in human-computer interaction and design techniques through scenarios, prototypes, forecasting, and envisionments. Recently, speculative and critical design approaches have reflectively explored and questioned possible, and preferable futures in HCI re...

We adopt a design-oriented approach aimed at motivating and expanding the notion of everyday creativity beyond explicit interactions to also include the implicit, incremental and, at times even, unknowing encounters that emerge among people, technologies, and artifacts over time. We explore these ideas through the design and investigation of two in...

The idea of images as a foundational mode of creating and articulating knowledge about interactivity has been gaining traction in HCI and interaction design. The use of photography and imagery has been the foundation of traditional schools of design. In HCI, the centrality of visual form has been advanced by Goldsmiths at the University of London u...

The home and domestic experiences have been studied from multiple points of view and disciplines, with an array of methodologies in the past twenty-five years in HCI. Given the attention to the home and the volume of research, what further areas of research might there be? Based on a critical analysis of 121 works on the topic, we present seven gen...

Emerging over a decade ago, slow technology is a design philosophy aimed at supporting experiences of reflection through and on technology in everyday life. Recent research has suggested that slow technologies can open up new forms of interaction with digital content that support self-reflection and re-visitation of the past. However, little work h...

In this Pictorial we explain and describe Eclipse, a method aimed at eliciting subjective qualities of people's experiences of and relationships with public places. Our method guides participants to sequentially explore their memories, sensations, sense of place, and stories related to a public place. Our goal is to present this method in a pictori...

People worldwide are increasingly acquiring virtual possessions. While virtual possessions have become ubiquitous, little work exists on how people value them, and how their experiences of them differ from material possessions. In this paper, we reflect on and synthesize findings from five studies we conducted over the past five years that investig...

The creation of a personal legacy is a process through which information, values, and memories are passed down to future generations. This process is inherently subjective, both as a curated collection of the elements of one's life, and as an evolving form of remembrance that is subject to the interpretations of those to whom it is left. Based on d...

We have developed User Enactments to help support design teams in more successfully investigating radical alterations to technologies' roles, forms and behaviors in uncharted design spaces. To date, no work exists that explicitly unpacks the practical development of a cohesive set of user enactments. Interest is growing in the method with its recen...

We describe the design, implementation and deployment of Photobox, a domestic technology that prints four or five randomly selected photos from the owner's Flickr collection at random intervals each month. We deployed Photobox in three homes for fourteen months, to explore how the slow pace at which it operates could support experiences of anticipa...

Thirty HCI practitioners participated in a CHI 2011 workshop [7], intending to directly engage with the processes, goals, and challenges of six Vancouver area nonprofit organizations. Analysis of the workshop documentation allowed us to track instances of reciprocal interaction between stakeholders. Findings revealed that various design tactics wer...

As we can interact with other people through various social applications, we have acquired increasing amounts of virtual possessions that have both personal and social meanings. Unlike material possessions that usually have a clear ownership to a person, the emerging virtual possessions are often created by and shared with multiple people. Thus, th...

Design researchers in academia often face the situation where they should achieve both scholarship and practitionership. It is particularly relevant when they undertake corporate-sponsored research projects. As a way to smoothly bridge research and practice in design, we show how design researchers in academia can conduct a project that both advanc...