This Ubicomp 2006 workshop looks to be asking questions related to networked objects and the digital environments that would obtain when you have physical space inhabited by informatically chatty Things. It would be fun to attend this one!
Interaction Design for Augmented Objects: Making Ubicomp Approachable
Submission deadline is June 16, 2006.
Workshop date is September 17, 2006.
Interaction Design for Augmented Objects
For more than a decade the Ubicomp community has worked on the problem of distributing computational power into the environment. One strategy to achieve this goal is to augment items already present in our everyday environment. Approaches that incorporate commonly used objects range from enriching these objects with new functionalities, to using them as a means to trigger the presentation of extra information to the user. The meaning of objects is often related to the history and ritual of their use: interaction design should augment daily gestures as much as the objects themselves, leading to a natural and intuitive interaction paradigm. We believe that using an object or gesture as a basis, or “anchorâ€, for a new interaction can facilitate intuition and social acceptance, making the Ubicomp paradigm in general more approachable for real users.
The use of everyday objects for Ubicomp opens up different and sometimes contrasting scenarios, each posing interesting questions. Analyzing projects presented by other researchers as well as our own work, we have identified a number of conceptual and practical issues related to the augmentation of items that are common in our everyday lives..
We invite researchers and practitioners from industrial and product design as well as ubiquitous computing to present design concepts, sketches, and critical questions related to the area in the form of a poster. We ask participants to submit a description of their work or idea in 3 to 6 pages in the standard CHI 2006 Extended Abstracts Format, encouraging rich use of illustrations. A maximum of 25 applicants will be selected to participate in the workshop based on a review of their papers by the organizers. The selected papers will be made available on the workshop website to allow participants to familiarize themselves with each other’s work before the event. Accepted participants will be asked to bring to the workshop one of their favorite objects (augmented or not) as a source of inspiration to share with others.
Why do I blog this?
I’m interested in a variety of approaches to figuring out what are the compelling scenarios and goals by which pervasive/ubiquitous environments of networked objects can change the terms of our tenancy within the physical world in such a way as to create more habitable, life-affirming participation practices. This workshop may address such topics as it thinks through the important questions for the approaching Internet of Things.
I also really like their approach to the workshop organization — the use of hands-on hardware-sketching sounds awfully fun!
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