Browsing by Author "Neustaedter, Carman"

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    An Autobiographical Reflection on Designing Visualizations for Personal Contexts
    (2020-10-23) Aseniero, Bon Adriel; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Tang, Anthony; Willett, Wesley; Neustaedter, Carman; Liang, Hung-Ling (Steve); Vande Moere, Andrew
    Understanding personally relevant data can help us reflect upon ourselves or learn something new. Research in information visualization has shown that the use of interactive, graphical representations of data (data visualizations) enhance our ability to process information and learn. However, most of our current understanding of designing these representations stem from task-oriented professional/work contexts. In contrast, recently, the Infovis community has been interested in designing visualizations for more personal contexts. This knowledge can be applied to emergent research on data visualization usage in broader perspectives such as casual and personal visualizations, and visualizations for public engagement, where end-users tend to be non-experts, and where aesthetics and engagement may take precedence over task efficiency. In this thesis, I take an autobiographical approach in which I analyzed eight years’ worth of archived data (through design journals) on my work in designing and implementing data visualizations. These visualizations’ use cases range from individuals logging their activities, to several people (both novices and experts) convening in public engagement settings. Central to my body of work is an emphasis on the intentional use of visual aesthetics in designing data representations. Reflecting upon this body of work and experiences, I give a case-by-case, narrative reconstruction of my design process. In these narratives, I explore the prioritization of the aesthetic look-and-feel of visual encodings on the same level as people’s data exploration tasks. With this longitudinal insight, my thesis outlines a process of how a data visualization designer can design nonconventional data representations for personal contexts from sketches to working prototypes.
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    BALANCING PRIVACY AND AWARENESS FOR TELECOMMUTERS USING BLUR FILTRATION
    (2003-02-14) Neustaedter, Carman; Greenberg, Saul; Boyle, Michael
    Always-on video provides rich awareness for co-workers separated by distance, yet it has the potential to threaten privacy as sensitive details may be broadcast to others. This threat increases for telecommuters who work at home and connect to office-based colleagues using video. One technique for balancing privacy and awareness is blur filtration, which blurs video to hide sensitive details while still giving the viewer a sense of what is going on. While other researchers found that blur filtration mitigates privacy concerns in low-risk office settings, we do not know if it works for riskier situations that can occur in telecommuting settings. Using a controlled experiment, we evaluated blur filtration for its effectiveness in balancing privacy with awareness for typical home situations faced by telecommuters. Participants viewed five video scenes containing a telecommuter at ten levels of blur, where scenes ranged from little to extreme privacy risk. They then answered awareness and privacy questions about these scenes. Our results show that blur filtration is only able to balance privacy with awareness for mundane home scenes. The implication is that blur filtration by itself does not suffice for privacy protection in video-based telecommuting situations; other privacy-protecting strategies are required.
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    The Calendar is Crucial : Coordination and Awareness through the Family Calendar
    (2006-08-04) Neustaedter, Carman; Bernheim Brush, A. J.; Greenberg, Saul
    Everyday family life involves a myriad of mundane activities that need to be planned and coordinated. We describe findings from studies of 44 different families coordination routines to understand how to best design technology to support them. We outline how a typology of calendars containing family activities is used by three different types of families Monocentric, Pericentric, and Polycentric which vary in the level of family involvement in the calendaring process. We describe these family types, the content of family calendars, the ways in which they are extended through annotations and augmentations, and the implications from these findings for design.
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    Collaboration in 360° Videochat: Challenges and Opportunities
    (2017-04-18) Tang, Anthony; Fakourfar, Omid; Neustaedter, Carman; Bateman, Scott
    We designed a videochat experience where one participant can experience a remote environment from a 360° camera. This allows the remote user to view and explore the environment without necessitating interaction from the local participant. We designed and conducted an observational study to understand the experience, and the challenges that people might encounter. In a study with 32 participants (16 pairs), we found that remote participants could actively participate in the experience with the environment in ways that are not possible with current mobile video chat. However, we also found that participants had challenges in communicating location and orientation information because many of common communication resources we rely on in collocated chat are not available. Based on these findings, we discuss how future mobile video chat systems need to balance immersion with interaction ease.
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    The Design of a Context-Aware Home Media Space for Balancing Privacy and Awareness
    (2003-05-30) Neustaedter, Carman; Greenberg, Saul
    Traditional techniques for balancing privacy and awareness in video media spaces, like blur filtration, have been proven to be ineffective for compromising home situations involving a media space. As such, this paper presents the rationale and prototype design of a context-aware home media space(HMS) - defined as an always-on video media space used within a home setting- that focuses on identifying plausible solutions for balancing privacy and awareness in compromising home situations. In the HMS design, users are provided with implicit and explicit control over their privacy, along with visual and audio feedback of the amount of privacy currently being maintained.
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    Designing Remote Collaboration Technologies for Wilderness Search and Rescue
    (2021-06-28) Jones, Brennan David Gorham; Tang, Anthony; Neustaedter, Carman; Sharlin, Ehud; Willett, Wesley; Suzuki, Ryo; Semaan, Bryan
    Wilderness search and rescue (WSAR) is the search for and extraction of one or more lost people (e.g., hikers, skiers) from a wilderness area. WSAR is time-critical, and even with current technologies, workers still face challenges in effective remote collaboration, information sharing, and awareness. The overarching goal of this dissertation is to understand how user interfaces can be designed to better support WSAR distributed collaboration. I approach this first by understanding how WSAR workers collaborate remotely using today's technologies. In the first phase of my research, I ran an investigative study in which I interviewed WSAR workers and observed a mock WSAR response. My findings demonstrate that the main goal of a system for WSAR distributed collaboration should be to help workers construct and maintain a shared mental model, but there are unique challenges to doing this when scattered and moving around the wilderness. Following this, I designed a prototype of a system for WSAR commanders. This system aims to provide commanders with more implicit awareness of events in the field and the experiences of field teams. It does this through (1) body cameras worn by field teams, streaming photos periodically to the command post; and (2) aggregating existing information channels together into one interface, allowing commanders to explore this information together as part of a bigger picture. I then evaluated this system through a remote user study. I found that the awareness provided by body-camera footage could give commanders additional confidence and comfort while reducing the need for explicit communications with field teams. However, it could also shift the burden of responsibility toward commanders. Overall, this work contributes the following: (1) an understanding of WSAR remote collaboration practices; (2) the design of an interface for providing commanders awareness of events in the field; (3) a method for studying WSAR user-interface technologies remotely through simulated scenarios; and (4) an understanding of the potential opportunities and challenges of new information streams and communication modalities in WSAR. Beyond WSAR, this work contributes more broadly to our understanding of how to design remote collaboration technologies for serious team-based activities in large outdoor environments.
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    Intimacy in Long-Distance Relationships over Video Chat
    (2011-09-08T15:25:34Z) Neustaedter, Carman; Greenberg, Saul
    Many couples live a portion of their lives being separated from each other as part of a long-distance relationship (LDR). This includes a large number of dating college students as well as couples who are geographicallyseparated because of situational demands such as work. We conducted interviews with individuals in LDRs to understand how they make use of video chat systems to maintain their relationships. In particular, we have investigated how couples use video to “hang out” together and engage in activities over extended periods of time. Our results show that regardless of the relationship situation, video affords a unique opportunity for couples to share presence over distance, which in turn provides intimacy and reduced idealization. While beneficial, couples still face challenges in using video, including contextual (e.g., location of partners, time zone differences), technical (e.g., mobility, audio and video quality, networking), and personal (e.g., a lack of true physicality needed by most in order to support intimate sexual acts) challenges.
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    Location-Dependant Information Appliances for the Home
    (2007-01-02) Elliot, Kathryn; Watson, Mark; Neustaedter, Carman; Greenberg, Saul
    Ethnographic studies of the home revealed the fundamental roles that physical locations and context play in how household members understand and manage conventional information. Yet we also know that digital information is becoming increasing important to households. The problem is that this digital information is almost always tied to traditional computer displays, which inhibits its incorporation into household routines. Our solution, called location-dependant information appliances, exploits both home location and context (as articulated in ethnographic studies) to enhance the role of ambient displays in the home setting; these displays provide home occupants with both background awareness of an information source and foreground methods to gain further details if desired. The novel aspect is that home occupants assign particular information to locations within a home in a way that makes sense to them. As a device is moved to a particular location, that information is automatically mapped to that device along with hints on how it should be displayed.
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    Sharing Digital Photographs in the Home through Physical Mementos, Souvenirs, and Keepsakes
    (2007-08-08) Nunes, Michael; Greenberg, Saul; Neustaedter, Carman
    People now easily share digital photos outside the home via web publishing and gift-giving. Yet within the home, digital photos are hard to access and lack the physical affordances that make sharing easy and opportunistic. To promote in-home photo sharing, we designed Souvenirs, a system that lets people link digital photo sets to physical memorabilia. These mementos trigger memories and serve as social instruments; a person can enrich their storytelling by moving the physical memento close to their largeformat television screen, and the associated photos are immediately displayed. We implemented Souvenirs, and then reexamined our design premises through contextual interviews with 20 households. Families described their current practices of photo sharing and memento use, and also reacted to the Souvenirs design. Based on these interviews, we redesigned Souvenirs to better fit the real practices of photo and memento use in the home
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    Sticky Spots and Flower Pots: Two Case Studies in Location-Based Home Technology Design
    (2006-04-11) Elliot, Kathryn; Neustaedter, Carman; Greenberg, Saul
    Ethnographic studies of domestic environments have shown the fundamental role that contextual locations play in helping people understand and manage communication information. Yet it is not clear how this knowledge can be applied to the design of home technologies to effectively support the routines of home inhabitants. For this reason, we present two case studies in home technology design that use the results of previous ethnographic studies on domestic locations to motivate the designs and to make them location-based. The first case is StickySpots a location-based messaging system that allows household members to send short digital messages to various places in their home. The second case is location-dependant information appliances a pair of physical ambient displays that show different information depending on where they are placed within the home. We reflect on these case studies to motivate and discuss an initial set of guidelines for location-based design in the home.
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    Supporting Coherence with a 3D Instant Messanger Visualization
    (2002-04-12) Neustaedter, Carman; Greenberg, Saul
    Instant messengers have become a popular medium for providing awareness of others and supporting casual interaction. To smoothly move into and out of computer mediated conversation, coherence is necessary not only as a means to represent conversations, but also to afford an awareness of who is around and if they are available for interaction. We have developed a peripheral visualization for an instant messenger designed to utilize people's natural cognitive abilities. Each contact is represented by pictures for each availability state (eg. online, offline) or video snapshots embedded within a 3D environment using a space metaphor. Contacts that are more available - determined as a function of availability state and a viewer-settable interest level - are placed in the foreground and contacts less available are placed closer to a single focal point in the distant space. The viewer is able to move contacts throughout the space to create a spatial mapping. Contacts that are of interest display conversation bubbles containing incoming messages.
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    Understanding How to Design Awareness Groupware for the Home
    (2005-05-09) Greenberg, Saul; Neustaedter, Carman
    People naturally maintain an awareness of the location, activities, and emotions of their family and friends. We call this interpersonal awareness: a naturally gained understanding of the social relations of one s social contacts. This awareness is vital in home life for it provides family and friends with: an understanding of how to best move into interaction with one another, knowledge needed to coordinate and plan activities, and feelings of connectedness and comfort. We build on this existing model of interpersonal awareness to articulate a set of design guidelines that describe how groupware should be designed to support interpersonal awareness in the home. Specifically, we show how awareness groupware should be designed as simple and reliable awareness appliances that can provide meaning and interaction by being embodied in everyday domestic routines. We also discuss how designs should support contextual locations within the home while ensuring users maintain adequate control and feedback over awareness information.
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    Using Physical Memorabilia as Opportunities to Move into Collocated Digital Photo Sharing
    (2009-02-27T22:55:29Z) Nunes, Michael; Greenberg, Saul; Neustaedter, Carman
    The uptake of digital photos vs. print photos has altered the practice of photo sharing. Print photos are easy to share within the home, but much harder to share outside of it. The opposite is true of digital photos. People easily share digital photos outside the home, e.g., to family and friends by email gift-giving, and to social networks and the broader public by web publishing. Yet within the home, collocated digital photo sharing is harder, primarily because digital photos are typically stored on personal accounts in desktop computers located in home offices. This leads to several consequences. 1) The invisibility of digital photos implies few opportunities for serendipitous photo sharing. 2) Access control and navigation issues inhibit family members from retrieving photo collections. 3) Photo viewing is compromised as digital photos are displayed on small screens in an uncomfortable viewing setting. To mitigate some of these difficulties, we explore how physical memorabilia collected by family members can create opportunities that encourage social and collocated digital photo sharing. First, we studied (via contextual interviews with 20 households) how families currently practice photo sharing and how they keep memorabilia. We identified classes of memorabilia that can serve as memory triggers to family events, trips, and times when people took photos. Second, we designed SOUVENIRS, a photo-viewing system that exploits memorabilia as a social instrument. Using SOUVENIRS, a family member can meaningfully associate physical memorabilia with particular photo sets. Later, any family member can begin their storytelling with others through the physical memento, and then enrich the story by displaying its associated photos simply by moving the memento close to the home's large-format television screen. Third, we re-examined our design premises by evoking household reactions to an early version of SOUVENIRS. Based on these interviews, we redesigned SOUVENIRS to better reflect the preferences and real practices of photo and memorabilia use in the home.