Assignment: Midterm Project 2: Project Progress Sketches

Collaborators: nick, eknight

Our team's revising two ideas. The first, dClips:

The clips are not the UI, the UI is what you clip to.

In many ways, we already use paper or other physical items to represent pieces of information. Scribbled post-its represent a fleeting idea, pictures represent memories of people and places, flyers represent meetings and print-outs represent digital documents. These representations are themselves a type of UI for their informational referents, if only a shallow one. In many ways they're very successful -- physical objects, even if they're made of paper, can stick in our memory better than a fleeting image on a screen, we can re-arrange and position pictures for our organizational purposes and it's trivially easy to annotate a print-out with important notes.

But there are obvious problems here -- the print-out may have been a faithful representation at the time that it was made, but it won't be updated automatically and there's no way to see if it's out of date. The meeting flyer might remind you of the meeting, but won't recall the digital calendar item. The post-it with your task for a particular deadline won't move when the associated deadline gets pushed forward.

This simple tangible UI, that most of us are using already, is static and disconnected. The print-out doesn't stay representative, and the user's changes to it aren't reflected in its digital version. Short of digital paper and great strides in handwriting recognition technology, we can't completely close this gap. But a simple device -- a digital binder clip, say -- can make significant advances on both sides of the gap.

Consider version control.

In the morning, you print out the latest version of a design document that you'll be reviewing in a meeting after lunch. When you print it out, you also ask for a clip for that document (File -> Clip, in addition to File -> Print) and you attach the clip (which is glowing green) to your printout. You read over the document during lunch, but when you get back to the office, you notice that your clip has started glowing red. Your version of the document is out of date! (The author must have made some last minute changes before the meeting.) You can print out a new version of the document (and update your clip) to read over the designer's changes before the review meeting.

After the meeting, you get back to your own work, a piece of problematic code you've been working on with a couple other developers for the past few weeks. You print out a copy (and a clip) of the file and head to a colleague's office to talk to him about it. During that discussion, the two of you come up with a solution to the problem that the team has been running into with this particular piece of code and you write out the changes in red pen. You squeeze the clip (which turns yellow) to check-out the associated file from the source control system. All the other developers know that you're actively changing this code and won't implement their own overriding changes.

Consider search.

Your boss asks hands you a document with his handwritten notes on it and asks you to quickly update the document and send out the revisions. You remove the clip from the notes, hold it up to your computer screen and the document pops up on your screen for editing.

Alternatively, your boss comes in and asks you to show him the notes you took in the meeting last week. You can't find the printout on your messy desk, but know exactly the document he's talking about. You pull it up on your screen, press a button and a clip on a printout at the back of your desk starts blinking.

Your boss asks for all the annotated drawings you did for the Foo project. Since you put a clip on each one when you printed it out, you type "Foo" on your computer and all seven drawings on your bulletin board light up.

++++

Our second idea, Subedu: Enabling Subtle Non-Verbal Communication

Subedu is a subtle-non verbal communication system between networked mobile devices. As mobile devices become pervasive in society, their collective presence is redefining socially-acceptable behavior. A person engaged in a private conversation on their phone in a public place no longer raises eyebrows. Even with this relaxation of acceptable behavior there are still situations where engaging in a private conversation with a distant person is frowned up. Subedu provides a means to subtly and simply communicate with a distant person while maintaining an engaged role in your immediate environment.

Imagine being in a group of people, perhaps for a business meeting, a class, or on public transportation. You'd like to communicate with a loved-one, perhaps a simple message - “I'm thinking of you” or “I'm working late”. While in some situations it's acceptable to engage in a conversation on your mobile phone, whether it be voice, email, or text-messaging, more often than not the mere presence of your mobile phone changes the group dynamic. In a class room, it may signal to the instructor that you're not interested in her presentation. Regardless of the situation, the mere emergence of a mobile phone can be construed as a disrespectful indication that you'd rather be elsewhere. Subedu allows you to engage in simple conversation without displaying your mobile phone, or making motions that draw attention.

While in your group, now imagine the ability to place your hand on top of your jeans pocket, the same pocket where you keep your phone. You press your hand down on your phone and squeeze it gently, sending a “I'm thinking of you” message to that loved one. Your phone vibrates so slightly, confirming the message was sent. A few minutes pass, and your phone begins to warm in your pocket. Your loved-one has sent a similar message back to you. You've engaged in this conversation without disrupting those around you, or calling attention to yourself.

In its most simple sense, Subedu is a suite of sensors that allow you to send and receive simple, pre-established messages with one other person. It's not intended for lengthy conversations with a wide audience, but rather short, personal communications with a partner.

In a larger sense, Subedu is a communication platform that fosters language creation, in that users can define and create their own gesture-message vocabulary. Through a combination of sensor readings and gestures, the user could design a gesture-message vocabulary that permits more lengthy and varied communications.

Related Work:

Brave, S. and Dahley, A. inTouch: A medium for haptic interpersonal communication. Ext. Abstracts CHI 1997, ACM Press (1997), 363-364. Interface 2003, PP. 155-166, June 11-13 2003.

Chang, A., O’Modhrain, M.S., Jacob, R.J.K, Gunther, E. and Ishii, H. ComTouch: Design of a vibrotactile communication device. In Proc. of Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems, 2002, pp. 312-320.

Chang, A., Resner, B., Loerner, B., Wang, X. and Ishii, J. LumiTouch: An emotional communication device. Ext. Abstracts CHI 2001, ACM Press (2001), 313-314. 1996, ACM Press (1996), 29-30.

Chen, C.-Y., Forlizzi, J. and Jennings. P. ComSlipper: An expressive design to support awareness and availability. Ext. Abstracts CHI 2006,
ACM Press (2006), 369-380.

Suzuki, K. and Hashimoto, S. Feellight: A communication device for distant nonverbal exchange. In Proc. of the 2004 ACM SIGMM Workshop on Effective Telepresence, (2004), 40-44