News/Research

BCNM at DIS 2021

25 Jul, 2021

BCNM at DIS 2021

BCNM shared incredible work at the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference, themed “Nowhere and Everywhere” which took place virtually from June 28-July 2, 2021.

Designing Interactive Systems is a premier venue for interaction design research in HCI and invites participants to think about material, interaction, process, technology and design.

Check out the awesome work our BCNM family produced this year — including amazing videos!!

Expanding the Design Space for Technology-Mediated Theatre Experiences
Molly Nicholas, Stephanie Claudino Daffara, Eric Paulos

Work combining live performance and technology often involves incorporating technology directly into the performance as it occurs onstage, including interactive costumes, or performer-controlled sets, lighting or sound. We invert this common approach, developing technology-mediated experiences outside the temporal and spatial confines of a live theatre production. We describe the 4-month co-design process with expert theatre practitioners, and detail how the process 1) shaped our design guidelines and 2) expands the discussion around existing best practices for cross-disciplinary collaboration. In the style of research through design, we present three annotated prototypes: the Augmented Playbill, the Prayer Wheel, and Tarot Cards as well as accompanying AR applications to convey the decisions we made and the philosophy we iteratively developed throughout the project. These artifacts also embody our six design guidelines: resonant affordances, extended narrative, reflective interaction, selective reveal, personalized experience, and privileged access.

Read more. Watch here.

Compressables: A Haptic Prototyping Toolkit for Wearable Compression-based Interfaces
Shreyosi Endow, Hedieh Moradi, Anvay Srivastava, Esau G Noya, Cesar Torres

Compression-based haptic feedback has been used in wearables to issue notifications, provide therapeutic effects, and create immersive storytelling environments. Such worn devices are well studied on the wrists, arms, and head, however, many unconventional yet context-rich areas of the body remain underexplored. Current haptic prototyping techniques have large instrumentation costs, requiring the design of bespoke embedded devices that do not have the flexibility to be applied to other body sites. In this work, we introduce an open-source prototyping toolkit for designing, fabricating, and programming wearable compression-based interfaces, or compressables. Our approach uses a lost-PVA technique for making custom inflatable silicone bladders, an off-the-shelf pneumatics controller, and a mobile app to explore and tune haptic interactions through sketch gestures. We validate the toolkit’s open-endedness through a user study and heuristic evaluation. We use exemplar artifacts to annotate the design space of compressables and discuss opportunities to further expand haptic expression on the body.

Read more. Watch here.

“I’m Better Off on my Own”: Understanding How a Tutorial’s Medium Affects Physical Skill Development
Shreyosi Endow, Cesar Torres

The shift towards distance learning brought forth by the pandemic has highlighted the shortcomings of teaching physical skills at a distance. With the emergence of new augmented and connected mediums, new opportunities arise for transferring physical skills that have resisted traditional documentation methods. However, there lacks a framework that allows tutorial authors to capitalize on a new medium’s unique affordances rather than remediating existing tutorial conventions. Our work analyzes a body of tutorials rendered in various mediums for centering clay on a pottery wheel — a foundational skill that exemplifies the difficulties of physical skill transfer. Through the lens of McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” we synthesize a taxonomy of medium conventions and themes derived from analyzing a body of centering tutorials and observation of how a tutorial’s medium affects how learners develop physical skills. We leverage our findings to motivate design recommendations to inform how new mediums can support material practices.

Read more. Watch here.