Interaction Design Group

Tuck will present highlights of his PhD research which establishes an understanding of the User Experience of Serendipity. He also hopes to reflect upon his own PhD journey and more importantly, the PhD experience.

Serendipity is a personally meaningful experience arising from chance encounters. While people do encounter serendipity in their everyday lives (albeit not all the time), serendipity can also arise as a user-experience through people's use of interactive technologies such as when listening to their digital music in the shuffle mode.

So what is this brand of shuffle-led serendipity? How does serendipity arise from not choosing your own songs but instead having it randomly (chosen and) presented to you by a music player? Does the practice of music listening as well as the technology involved in shuffle listening in fact nudge people towards serendipitous encounters? And does it work for other digital content besides music, say, photographs? To find out the answers as well as hear Tuck's (hopefully more interesting) reflections into his (seemingly) long, solitary and occasionally serendipitous PhD journey, he would like to see you at the seminar.

Tuck Leong is a PhD candidate with the Interaction Design Group, Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne.
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This talk argues that the design of learning spaces is an area of compelling interest to HCI. The built fabric of Australian universities is ageing; while the technology infrastructure required to meet next-generation teaching and learning needs is frequently under-funded or absent. At a time when the Australian tertiary student population is growing and diversifying, it is essential that HCI develops a research agenda capable of meeting these important challenges.

The present reality is that key aspects of the contemporary educational built environment are failing to meet our students' needs. Complex problems are involved, and it is interesting to note that some of the most compelling research in this area is currently emerging, not from architecture and design, but from fields like sports medicine, paediatrics, ergonomics, and engineering. HCI should be a prominent voice in this interdisciplinary discourse and debate. One starting point for this agenda comes from recent work at the University of Cambridge on students' use of spaces and technologies for learning. In the UK context, we found that informal and non-institutional, or "semi-institutional", spaces were increasingly important to students, but that the design of such spaces frequently failed to address students' preferred learning behaviours and work patterns. We now have an opportunity to pursue these questions further in the context of the Spaces for Knowledge Generation Project (http://www.skgproject.com/). SKG is a $220K ALTC partnership project between La Trobe University as lead institution, Charles Sturt University, Apple and Kneeler Design Architects. The project aims to inform, guide and support the development of next-generation learning and teaching spaces and practices, and to provide a model for designing student learning environments that is future-focused and sustainable for the medium term.

Catherine Howell is Educational Designer in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University. She is an experienced user researcher and e-learning evaluator, and has a special interest in qualitative research methods. Catherine is currently involved in several institutional research and development projects relating to teaching and learning, including the Enquiry Based Learning Project, for which she acts as Evaluator. Her PhD at the University of Cambridge (2005) investigated the impact of colonial spaces and places on the European cultural imaginary.

Presentation Slides

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Exertion games – these are games that require intense physical effort – are believed to facilitate not only physical health, but also more social play than traditional computer games. Floyd has found through a qualitative analysis of "Table Tennis for Three" aspects of design that can facilitate such social play. The aim is to contribute to our understanding of how people play these games and of how we can support exertion and social play in future designs.

Table Tennis for Three is an exertion game for three networked players that is played with a real bat, ball and table. Floyd has used video recordings and interviews of 42 players in order to understand how users experience social play in exertion games, and found aspects of awareness and uncertainty to be important factors that can aid in the design of future games.

This talk will largely be based on a paper to be delivered at CHI 2009 in April, which was short-listed as 'best paper'. Florian 'Floyd' Mueller is a PhD candidate with the Interaction Design Group, Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne.
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This presentation is based on a paper that will be presented at EDUCAUSE2009 (in Perth). It will highlight the main business requirements and describe Deakin University's solution to support a digital learning resource repository to be shared across faculties. The originality of the Deakin learning repository resides in the suite of learning resource collections supporting its various business objectives including the objective of managing intellectual property across all faculties of a multi-disciplinary educational institution.

Since finishing her PhD in Computer Science in 1994, at the University of Grenoble (France), Sandrine worked as a lecturer for both Bond (Gold Coast) and Melbourne Universities, as a research scientist for CSIRO (Sydney) and as an information architect for Modem Media (London), an online advertising company. She is now a business analyst for Deakin University, within their Knowledge Media Division (http://deakin.edu.au/kmd/). Her interests cover requirements gathering, usability engineering and task modelling. Sandrine is actively involved in the HCI community. She is a reviewer for many international conferences; and in Australia, she is the OZCHI (http://ozchi.org) liaison of CHISIG (htpp://chisig.org), the Australian HCI professional society.
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This talk considers studies of photography by five families in Sichuan, China, focusing on sharing and display. I plan to make the argument that practices around photographs in Chinese families reflect deeper values that are worked through in the course of family life. I will present evidence in the form of three examples to support this argument: (1) photo sharing as reflecting moral behaviour; (2) the propensity to focus on subjects such as flowers, and trees and landscapes as reflecting the belief of balance in Nature; (3) the use of photo collections as reflecting notions of ancestral worship and filial piety. At the end of the talk, I argue for: (1) the need to include values in any consideration of photo practices; (2) the importance of considering and tracing how different values are embedded in everyday technologies.

Connor Graham is an Independent Researcher with interests in Studies of Everyday Life, Workplace Studies, Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Supported Cooperative Work. He has just passed his PhD conducted through the Interaction Design Group at the University of Melbourne.
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We are living in an age of excess and indifference, of prosthetic augmentation and extended operational systems. The dead, the near dead, the undead and the yet to be born are existing simultaneously. This is the age of the cadaver, the comatose and the chimera. The cadaver can now be preserved indefinitely with plastination. The comatose body can be sustained on a life-support system. Cryogenically suspended bodies await possible reanimation. Chimera is the body that performs with mixed realities. A biological body, augmented with technology and telematically performing with virtual systems. The chimera is an alternate embodiment.

This is an age of organs without bodies, of organs awaiting bodies. There is now a proliferation of organs. A proliferation of biocompatible components in both substance and scale that allows technology to be attached and implanted into the body. Organs are extracted and exchanged. Organs are engineered and inserted. Blood flowing in my body might tomorrow be circulating in your body. Ova are fertilized in-vitro with sperm that has been unfrozen. The face of the donor becomes a third face on the recipient. The body acts with indifference. Indifference as opposed to expectation. An indifference that allows something to occur, that allows an unfolding - in its own time and with its own rhythm. An indifference that allows suspending a body with hooks, inserting a sculpture inside the body and surgically constructing an ear on an arm. This presentation examines alternate anatomical architectures using mechanical, virtual, biotech and surgical augmentation and exploration of the body. It exposes the obsolescence, the absence and the emptiness of the body.

Note that this seminar will not be held at the IDEA LAB. Instead, it will be held at the Law Building, Lecture Theatre G08, University Square, 185 Pelham Street, Carlton 3053.

Stelarc is a performance artist who has performed with a third hand, a virtual arm, a 6-legged walking robot and is presently surgically constructing and stem cell growing an ear on his arm.
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