Making Sense of Sensing Systems: Five Questions for Designers and Researchers

Bellotti, V., Back, M., Edwards, W. K., Grinter, R. E., Henderson, A., and Lopes, C. 2002. Making sense of sensing systems: five questions for designers and researchers. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Changing Our World, Changing Ourselves (Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, April 20 – 25, 2002). CHI ’02. ACM Press, New York, NY, 415-422.

Bellotti et al. inspire themselves from human-human interaction (HHI) studies to inform the design of interaction in sensing systems (ubiquitous environment). Their claim is that since we are moving away from the standard graphical user interfaces, we must reframe interaction. Norman’s gulfs of execution and evaluation must be tackled again in ubiquitous computing. Based on a communication rather than cognition emphasis of Norman’s seven stages of execution present five questions for designing interaction with sensing systems:

Each question as a relevant aspect for my interest in spatial uncertainty (and more specifically on uncertainty generated by the sensed context),

• Address: how to disambiguate intended target system that are triggered by location
• Attention: Provide relevant feedback about the system attention (i.e. its accuracy, update rate, …). Keep users aware of what their peers are learning about them (their location, its accuracy, …)
• Action: diminishing uncertainty about likely and acceptable actions
• Alignment: determining and provide a relevant locations to the users
• Accident: Without a GUI, ambiguity is a serious problem

Relation to my thesis: Ubiquitous computing suffers from a contradiction. Ubicomp designer attempt to create “invisible interface” in which the UI “disappears” into the environment while still maintaining strong communication conventions. The challenge is to develop location-aware ubiquitous systems that can communicate more naturally and effectively with people and that even when they reach states of uncertainty. That is avoiding Norman’s gulf of execution and evaluation. Getting inspiration from HHI is relevant to find clues on how manage and repair the communications between humans and sensing (such as dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty).

Reblogged from my own Making Sense of Sensing Systems: Five Questions for Designers and Researchers