Capture and Playback for Designing Context-Aware Interactive Systems

Speaker
Mark Newman
Assistant Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Users’ experiences with interactive systems are constrained and enabled by the infrastructures that underlie them. While HCI has developed a substantial toolbox for designing and evaluating user interfaces and interactions, we have fewer options for considering user experience impacts of infrastructural capabilities during the design and development process. Infrastructure plays an especially prominent role in the domain of context-aware computing, where infrastructural components such as sensing and inference services are often designed alongside the interface and interaction capabilities.

To improve the link between infrastructure and user experience perspectives, we built the RePlay system to facilitate the capture and re-use of sensor data during context-aware system design. RePlay has evolved to encompass a number of tools for capturing, querying, organizing, transforming, and replaying contextual traces throughout the development process, allowing designers and front-end developers to focus on interaction design problems while remaining grounded in the infrastructural and behavioral constraints represented by the captured data. This talk will describe our progress on RePlay, including formative studies with designers and developers to better understand the role that captured data can play in development activities, and will discuss ongoing and future work, including facilities to better support the co-design of context recognition services.

Speaker's Bio

Mark W. Newman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. His research interests are in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing, with a focus on support for interaction design and end-user configuration. He is the co-founder and current director of Michigan Interactive and Social Computing (MISC) and leads the Interaction Ecologies research group. Mark received a 2012 NSF CAREER Award to pursue the development of tools for context-aware system design. Before joining SI, Mark was a research scientist in the Computer Science Laboratory at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) from 2000–2007. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley and his B.A. in Philosophy from Macalester College.

Speaker's Website
http://mwnewman.people.si.umich.edu/

Host
Jason Hong