Glowbots

Glowbots are small wheel-based robots, which communicates with each other and visually presents this as animated light patterns. The emerging patterns can be encouraged or discouraged by shaking the robots. The concept of Glowbots was initially inspired by the interests and experiences found among people that has lizards, spiders and snakes as pets. From interviews we found that such pets involve a different experience and relation, than what owning a dog or a cat does. Some expressed their pets as a hobby of breeding lizards with interesting patterns, without being interested in different personalities. Such findings were investigated as inspiration for these robots. The concept has now been technically implemented on a robotic platform called E-puck. Glowbots have been presented at Siggraph'07, Wired Next Fest'07 and will appear as a video at HRI'08. Furthermore, they have appeared in media such as Discovery news, and the New Scientist blog.

Glowbots project website

Autonomous Wallpaper at Discovery web-news

The application Autonomous Wallpaper has been developed with the design method Transfer Scenarios. This application allows users to send pictures taken with their mobile phone to affect the wallpaper at their living room wall. This is further described at Discovery Technology News by Tracy Staedter and is commented on by Bill Gaver, who is a senior researcher in experience centred design and interaction design.
Read more at Discovery news

Transfer Scenarios at Pasta and Vinegar

Nicholas Nova blogged recently about the method transfer scenarios, marginal practices and design. He finds marginal practices interesting as they "involve passionate users about certain domains and areas". He suggests that people in the music industri should read “Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore” (Albert Mudrian, John Peel),which according to Nicholas is a good example of an interesting marginal practice (people playing music as speed as possible with extreme vocals).

Designing for New Photographic Experiences: How the Lomographic Practice Informed Context Photography

This paper has been accepted to theDPPI'07 Conference in Helsinki,22-25thj of August.

The paper describes how Lomographers (amateur photographers using old russian cameras) contributed in the design process of context photography.

Smart home technology

This paper describes a study of how orthodox jews make use of smart home technology. It illustrates how a marginal practice (rather than general mainstream users) can provide an alternative perspecive of meaningful technology use.

The technology is used to make one day each week free from work and active technology use, in order to reflect on God and to focus on spending time with loved ones. This paper also discusses intersting findings when the technology does not work as expected, suggesting that people make up their own reasons for why this is and the people in the study found their own relaxed ways to work around it.

A. Woodruff, S. Augustin and B.E. Foucault. "Sabbath Day Home Automation: ‘It's Like Mixing Technology and Religion’." Proc. CHI 2007, San Jose, CA Apr. 2007, to appear.

Allison Woodruff

Transfer Scenarios

"Transfer Scenarios: Grounding innovation with marginal practices" has been presented at the CHI-07 Conference as a fullpaper. This paper describes a design method intended to stimulate a new mindset about a specific technology. The paper presents a design case were we designed "Personal Embodied Agents (agent and robot technology) based on interviews concerning interests in reptiles as pets. The emerging applications are called Autonomous wallpaper and Glowbots.
Glowbots will be presented at Emerging technologies at Siggraph, 7-9 August, 2007.