Wednesday 6th October 2005
CitiTag: the city as a playground for a wireless location-based multiplayer game
by Yanna Vogiazou (Open University) and Bas Raijmakers (RCA)

Yanna Vogiazou from the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University and Bas Raijmakers from Interaction Design Research at the Royal College of Art will discuss their experience with CitiTag, a Mobile Bristol mixed reality game. CitiTag is designed to enhance social experiences and emergent behaviours in public spaces, by blurring virtual presence with physical. We will present the concept, design and implementation of CitiTag and discuss results from two user studies.

See www.mobilebristol.com for more details on CitiTag.

Yanna Vogiazou is a PhD researcher at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University. Her background is in communication and media and she holds a Master’s in multimedia design. Yanna's PhD research explores large-scale group interaction, play and emergent social behaviours through the use of new technologies.

Bas Raijmakers is an MPhil researcher in Interaction Design Research at the Royal College of Art. He is researching how film can contribute to design research. For the CitiTag project he made two short films of the gaming experience, which will be shown at the event.

Wednesday 13th October 2005
Riot! 1831 : the world's first global positioning system (GPS) 'radio play'
by Josephine Reid (HP Labs)

Riot! 1831, recreated the sense of walking through the 1831 riot for visitors to Queen Square in Bristol. The free public event ran from 15 April until the 4 May attracting 700 visitors from which we gathered 563 usable questionnaires, 531 GPS trace files and 30 in-depth interviews. The talk will describe how this data has informed our design research into new forms of mobile, situated and interactive experience. The project also provides insight into the process of writing narrative for the new location aware medium.

See www.mobilebristol.com for more details.

Josephine Reid is a senior researcher at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Her research interest is in the area of Experience Design and as a firm believer in the value of user participation she has been involved in the design, construction and project management of a number of field trials to explore the values of situated new media.

Wednesday 20th October 2005
TxtBoard: from text-to-person to text-to-place
by Kenton O'Hara (HP Labs)

The design of existing mobile phone technology has emphasised the primacy of placeless, one-to-one communication for both voice and text based communication. However, as shown by the continued existence of fixed line telephony, situated communication can afford a different set of response freedoms in the way we choose to communicate. While fixed line telephony provides these response freedoms for voice communication, there is no "situated" form factor equivalent for text messaging. In this talk we present TxtBoard, a small, public display appliance for the home which displays text messages sent to it from any standard mobile phone. A case study of a family's use of TxtBoard will be discussed which highlights how the fixity and the public characteristics of its display form factor create new SMS based response freedoms for the family's communication.

Wednesday 10th November 2005
Augmenting DigitalAudio Broadcast with rich data
by Erik Geelhoed (HP Labs)

Hewlett Packard Laboratories, GWR, Bristol University, ASL and Panasonic are collaborating in a Mobile Bristol project to explore the potential of Digital Audio Broadcasting through a series of user trials. Our first iPAQ-based prototype allows listeners to GWR FM to interact with a set of web pages broadcast alongside the digital audio stream and displayed on a small colour display. In a hands-on study, typical GWR listeners responded very positively to the experience of viewing web pages on a visual radio. Local news, weather forecasts, event listings, and details of the last ten songs broadcast proved especially popular. In forthcoming experiments, we will begin to explore the additional value of a wireless backchannel enabling listeners to interact directly with the broadcaster, for example to vote for records or take part in contests, and the opportunities created for DAB by broadband wireless and location-sensitive services.

Wednesday 17th November 2005
New textile developments and the implications for designers in the context of future social landscapes.
by Sharon Baurley (CSM)

A high-tech clothing sector in EU/USA is forecast to emerge in the face of the removal of trade barriers in clothing and textiles in 2005. Computational and communication technologies are forecast to disappear into our material world. Therefore, fashion might become a future mediator of technology. Some psychologists [1] have recently acknowledged that /emotional intelligence [2] or emotional self-awareness can be as intrinsic to individual and professional success as IQ. It has been suggested that communications technologies could reduce emotive expression [3], which could negatively impact on our social and professional relationships. /The emotional experience of products/ and /sensory design/ are gaining ground in parts of the design community. But the science community is only just beginning to understand how the mind processes feelings, which lead to emotions and behaviour. Fashion is an expressive medium that connects people with the social world. It is emotional by its nature, as the textiles which comprise them, appeal to our sense of touch, sight, sound, smell; clothing allows us to hide, reflect or generate mood; they help form and communicate our identities and relationships. If these values were extended through the integration of computational and communications technologies, could clothing become a tool by which we learn about, and explore the human condition? Clothing could sense, communicate, express, monitor, modulate, influence, complement, enhance, suppress and respond to human emotions. Could this new /smart/ clothing enable people to become more self-aware, and aware of others? Fashion already influences many product areas, might this new insight make clothing a fundamental part every product area?

Given that fashion and textiles have long been engaged in the emotional experience of products, it would seem that they have a good deal to impart to other design areas, such as architecture, interior environments, furniture. But these emotional values of fashion are difficult to quantify, and it is not something fashion designers tend to concern themselves with. So there seems to be a case for the exchange of methods and thought processes between design disciplines. The proposed clothing will also draw on a wide range of expertise from computing, electronics, telecommunications, psychology, neuroscience, social science. This means that designers must be able to work in multi-disciplinary teams, and engage with disciplines, concepts and methods they are unaccustomed to, whilst helping other disciplines engage with design and its processes. And will the designer’s role change to one of facilitator and mediator – of relationships and interactions between people and things, and between people?

[1] Peter Salovey, Yale
[2] Goleman, D., Emotional Intelligence, London, Bloomsbury, 1996
[3] Cox, R., What is the Value of Emotion in Communication? Implications for User Centred Design, /ICEIS/, 2003