TY - JOUR T1 - House Memory: On Activity Traces As a Form of Cultural Heritage JF - ACM interactions Y1 - 2014 A1 - Dong, Tao A1 - Newman, Mark W. A1 - Ackerman, Mark S. KW - activity traces KW - cultural heritage KW - houses KW - memory KW - memory applications KW - memory traces KW - pervasive environments KW - ubicomp environments AB -

In the past few years, we have seen a wave of new "smart" consumer products that make everyday places aware of our activities. There are thermostats that adjust temperatures based on occupancy [1], doors that alert us when we forget to close them, and "beacons" that track our indoor locations [2]. With recent advances in sensor technologies and the Internet of Things, every corner of our world is slated to gain some capability of capturing our activity traces.

As everyday places become more aware of what we do, an enormous volume of activity traces can be captured and potentially amassed over the long run. Yet the narratives surrounding those technologies mostly focus on short-term gains in efficiency and comfort; few have considered the long-term value of those captured traces. We are concerned that traces will be discarded prematurely, since the perceived risk to privacy easily outweighs the as yet unclear benefits. Thus, it is important to ask: How might we, or rather our future generations, find digital footprints left in a place useful in the long term?

VL - 21 UR - Complete-OnlyDOI ER - TY - CONF T1 - "If These Walls Could Talk": Designing with Memories of Places T2 - Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems Y1 - 2014 A1 - Tao Dong A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Mark W. Newman KW - activity traces KW - family memory KW - memory KW - memory artifacts KW - pervasive environments KW - ubicomp environments AB -

This work explores the potential value of using the enormous amount of activity traces latest ubicomp environments have started to capture. We sought to understand potential practices of using these traces in the long term through a field-based study in the USA that examines how today's people use traces left by their predecessors in the houses where they live.

We found that our participants received, discovered, and made use of many small traces held by artifacts, people, and building materials. Those traces were used to provide practical assistance to participants' appropriation of their houses as well as to connect participants with the past in an evocative manner. Our analysis highlights the roles played by the social context and the mutability of the house in the experience of remembering the house as well as in shaping participants' attitudes of passing on traces of prior appropriation of the place. To illustrate the design implications of those findings, we offer three design concepts to characterize potential ways of using traces captured by ubicomp environments in the long term.

JF - Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems PB - ACM CY - New York, NY, USA SN - 978-1-4503-2902-6 UR - Complete-NoFile ER - TY - CONF T1 - Social Overlays: Collectively Making Websites More Usable T2 - 14th IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (Interact 2013) Y1 - 2013 A1 - Tao Dong A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Mark W. Newman KW - crowdsourcing KW - social computing KW - web AB -

Many small organizations lack the expertise and resources to conduct usability evaluations of their websites. Social Overlays, presented here, is a new system that allows a community of users to collectively improve their website. Social Overlays enables end–users to identify and repair common user interface problems through creating “overlays” on web pages as part of their regular use, thereby improving usability while reducing the need for professional services. In short, Social Overlays harnesses the diversity of experience and ideas within a community to "crowd source" usability. To evaluate Social Overlays, we examined whether a group of community members without any usability training could use Social Overlays to identify and repair UI problems on their medium–sized community’s website. We found that they could. Community users were able to uncover a large number of UI problems and formulate reasonable solutions to the problems they identified. In addition, we compared Social Overlays to two standard ways of assessing web-site usability: expert inspection and usability testing. We found that Social Overlays users identified more problems, and their reported problems differed in useful ways from those found by the experts and the usability testing team.

JF - 14th IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (Interact 2013) UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Discovery-based Games for Learning Software Y1 - 2012 A1 - Tao Dong A1 - Mira Dontcheva A1 - Diana Joseph A1 - Karrie Karahalios A1 - Mark W. Newman A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - help AB -

We propose using discovery-based learning games to teach people how to use complex software. Specifically, we developed Jigsaw, a learning game that asks players to solve virtual jigsaw puzzles using tools in Adobe Photoshop. We conducted an eleven-person lab study of the prototype, and found the game to be an effective learning medium that can complement demonstration-based tutorials. Not only did the participants learn about new tools and techniques while actively solving the puzzles in Jigsaw, but they also recalled techniques that they had learned previously but had forgotten.

UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Supporting Re-Use in DIY Software Projects: A Gray-Box Approach T2 - Workshop on Hacking, Tinkering, Crafts & Inventive Leisure Practices, ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Y1 - 2011 A1 - Tao Dong A1 - Huh, Jina A1 - Mark W. Newman A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - collaborative help KW - configuration KW - hacking communities KW - knowledge sharing KW - recommender systems KW - Software customization AB -

DIYers who work with software often attempt to reuse others’ work wherever they can as they seek to assemble, modify, and extend their systems. In this paper, we briefly discuss the challenges faced by software DIYers in the process of reusing others’ software configurations through our study of the MythTV community. We also discuss the benefits of enabling users to engage with others’ configurations as “gray-boxes,” allowing them to pay attention to just the parts that must be opened up and modified and ignore the rest. We propose a new technical facility called Tailor Wear to give users guidance and hints about where and how to modify configuration artifacts by visually presenting the tailoring traces left by similar or selected peers.

JF - Workshop on Hacking, Tinkering, Crafts & Inventive Leisure Practices, ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Bringing the field into the lab: supporting capture and replay of contextual data for the design of context-aware applications T2 - Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST ’10) Y1 - 2010 A1 - Mark W. Newman A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Jungwoo Kim A1 - Atul Prakash A1 - Zhenan Hong A1 - Jacob Mandel A1 - Tao Dong KW - context-aware KW - data capture KW - design tools KW - pervasive KW - pervasive environments AB -

When designing context-aware applications, it is difficult to for designers in the studio or lab to envision the contextual conditions that will be encountered at runtime. Designers need a tool that can create/re-create naturalistic contextual states and transitions, so that they can evaluate an application under expected contexts. We have designed and developed RePlay: a system for capturing and playing back sensor traces representing scenarios of use. RePlay contributes to research on ubicomp design tools by embodying a structured approach to the capture and playback of contextual data. In particular, RePlay supports: capturing naturalistic data through Capture Probes, encapsulating scenarios of use through Episodes, and supporting exploratory manipulation of scenarios through Transforms. Our experiences using RePlay in internal design projects illustrate its potential benefits for ubicomp design.

JF - Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST ’10) UR - Complete-NoFile ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Simplifying User-Controlled Privacy Policies JF - IEEE Pervasive Computing Y1 - 2009 A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Tao Dong A1 - Gifford, Scott A1 - Kim, Jungwoo A1 - Mark W. Newman A1 - Atul Prakash A1 - Qidwai, Sarah KW - location-aware computing KW - location-based computing KW - privacy KW - privacy-enhancing architectures KW - privacy-protective applications AB -

Location-aware computing infrastructures are becoming widely available.

However, a key problem remains: letting users manage their privacy while

also giving them interesting applications that take advantage of location

information.

VL - 8 UR - Complete IS - 4 ER -