Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Social Network Analysis

The theory of affordances

Over the past few generations, expectations of comfort, cleanliness and convenience have altered radically, but these dramatic changes have largely gone unnoticed. This intriguing book brings together the sociology of consumption and technology to investigate the evolution of these changes, as well the social meaning of the practices themselves. Homes, offices, domestic appliances and clothes play a crucial role in our lives, but not many of us question exactly how and why we perform so many daily rituals associated with them. Showers, heating, air-conditioning and clothes washing are simply accepted as part of our normal, everyday lives, but clearly this was not always the case. When did the daily shower become de rigueur? What effect has air conditioning had on the siesta at one time an integral part of Mediterranean life and culture? This book interrogates the meaning and supposed normality of these practices and draws disturbing conclusions. There is clear evidence supporting the view that routine consumption is controlled by conceptions of normality and profoundly shaped by cultural and economic forces. Shove maintains that habits are not just changing, but are changing in ways that imply escalating and standardizing patterns of consumption. This shrewd and engrossing analysis shows just how far the social meanings and practices of comfort, cleanliness and convenience have eluded us.

Comfort, cleanliness and conveniencethe social organization ofnormality

Annual Energy Outlook

Haptic devices are now commercially available and thus touch has become a potentially realistic solution to a variety of interaction design challenges. We report on an investigation of the use of touch as a way of reducing visual overload in the conventional desktop. In a two-phase study, we investigated the use of the PHANToM haptic device as a means of interacting with a conventional graphical user interface. The first experiment compared the effects of four different haptic augmentations on usability in a simple targeting task. The second experiment involved a more ecologically-oriented searching and scrolling task. Results indicated that the haptic effects did not improve users performance in terms of task completion time. However, the number of errors made was significantly reduced. Subjective workload measures showed that participants perceived many aspects of workload as significantly less with haptics. The results are described and the implications for the use of haptics in user interface design are discussed.

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Putting the feel in ’look and feel‘

We introduce context-aware scalable authentication (CASA) as a way of balancing security and usability for authentication. Our core idea is to choose an appropriate form of active authentication (e.g., typing a PIN) based on the combination of multiple passive factors (e.g., a user's current location) for authentication. We provide a probabilistic framework for dynamically selecting an active authentication scheme that satisfies a specified security requirement given passive factors. We also present the results of three user studies evaluating the feasibility and users' receptiveness of our concept. Our results suggest that location data has good potential as a passive factor, and that users can reduce up to 68% of active authentications when using an implementation of CASA, compared to always using fixed active authentication. Furthermore, our participants, including those who do not using any security mechanisms on their phones, were very positive about CASA and amenable to using it on their phones.

CASA: context-aware scalable authentication

Tangible user interfaces are portals to digital information. In the future, securing access to such material will be an important concern. This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a PIN entry system based on audio or haptic cues that is suitable for integration into such physical systems. The current implementation links movements on a mobile phone touch screen with the display of non-visual cues; selection of a sequence of these cues composes a password. Studies reveal the validity of this approach in terms of task times and error rates that improve over prior art. In sum, this paper demonstrates the potential of non-visual PINs as a mechanism for securing access to a range of systems, ultimately incorporating mobile, ubiquitous or tangible interfaces.

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The phone lock: audio and haptic shoulder-surfing resistant PIN entry methods for mobile devices

The increasing complexity and pervasiveness of handheld devices is demanding the development of interaction techniques explicitly tailored for mobile scenarios. This paper examines one such technique: the use of device orientation to navigate through one dimensional lists or menus. We describe a novel input mapping, directly relating list position to device orientation, and two studies quantifying user performance with this system. We believe vibrotactile feedback would be significant in movement-based mobile interfaces, and also examine its influence. Our results indicate that both our input mapping and the inclusion of vibrotactile feedback positively affect user performance and experience. We conclude by discussing the design implications of this work.

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Tilt to scroll: evaluating a motion based vibrotactile mobile interface

At first glance, multi-element forearm mounted vibrotactile displays would appear to have considerable potential as an output device for mobile computing. The devices are small, robust and discrete, and the body site both easily accessible and socially acceptable for such a purpose. However, due to the absence of a thorough account of vibrotactile perception, it is hard to determine their feasibility, or even what might form an appropriate arrangement of vibrating elements or tactors. We describe two studies intended to shed light on these issues. The first extends the localization literature relating to the forearm, and its results indicate that different spatial arrangements of tactors can result in substantially different levels of performance. The second study examines the influence of adjusting the size of the area of the skin experiencing a vibration with its perceived intensity. The results indicate a positive relationship between increased size and increased perceived intensity. Finally, the implications of these studies for the design of vibrotactile arrays are discussed.

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Ian Oakley

Papers

Putting the feel in ’look and feel‘

CASA: context-aware scalable authentication

The phone lock: audio and haptic shoulder-surfing resistant PIN entry methods for mobile devices

Tilt to scroll: evaluating a motion based vibrotactile mobile interface

Determining the Feasibility of Forearm Mounted Vibrotactile Displays