Thursday, May 22, 2008

"When users 'do' the ubicomp"

In the March-April issue of ACM Interactions I found a short text that I really liked. The title was "When Users 'Do' the Ubicomp" by Antti Oulasvirta. I liked it because it was one of the first ubicomp papers I have read that has a perspective based on how the everyday life is experienced by people when they try to handle all their artifacts. Of course, one reason that I liked it is that it really fits with research we are doing in a research group I am heading, focused on the "Ecology of Interactive Artifacts". It is all about the same questions, how do people handle their growing number of digital interactive artifacts, what strategies do they use, and how is it possible to describe these ecologies in ways that make sense, and how is it possible to support designers who are expected to design artifacts that fit these ecologies, and is it possible to design on the level of ecologies? These is still an unexplored and almost invisible questions in contemporary interaction research, but they will become more important in the coming years!

2 comments:

Heekyoung Jung said...
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Heekyoung Jung said...

Thank you Erik for introducing the article. I also enjoyed it very much. I particularly like the idea of 'beautiful seams' considering physical and contextual affordances among multiple devices, rather than only emphasizing seamless connection or sharing information.

The issues suggested in the article sound very interesting and help to develop specific research ideas too.