RESEARCH WORK

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[2023] Awareness of Things

[2022] Seeing through Things

Increasing amounts of sensor-augmented research objects have been used in design research. We call these objects Data-Enabled Objects, which can be integrated into daily activities capturing data about people’s detailed whereabouts, behaviours and routines. These objects provide data perspectives on everyday life for contextual design research. However, data-enabled objects are still computational devices with limited privacy awareness and nuanced data sharing. To better design data-enabled objects, we explore privacy design spaces by inviting 18 teams of undergraduate design students to re-design the same type of sensor-enabled home research camera. We developed the Connected Peekaboo Toolkit (CPT) to support the design teams in designing, building, and directly deploying their prototypes in real home studies. We conducted Thematic Analysis to analyse their outcomes which led us to interpret that privacy is not just an obstacle but can be a driver by unfolding an exploration of possible design spaces for data-enabled objects.

[2022] Tomorrow Herb

[2022] When People Vanish

Designers have used everyday photos as stimuli to speculate alternative scenarios about the future. Many studies have developed diverse ways of re-designing roles of an actor to stimulate scenario speculation; however, a lack of understandings of how the presence of an actor influences the scenario speculation process. Therefore, this work conducted a study that investigates how everyday photos with and without human actors affect people to speculate possible scenarios. We recruited 29 crowd workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk to generate 80 scenarios for two groups of photos (i.e., with-actor and non-actor photos). We analysed these scenarios and found that with-actor photos led people to speculate consistent scenarios around human actors and their activities. By contrast, non-actor photos allowed people to speculate the scenarios flexibly and diversely. These insights suggest a new design opportunity of using non-actor photos as potential materials to encourage people to generate diverse scenarios.

[2022] Constellation of Things

Internet of Things [IoT] is a vision that every object can be connected and work as a group to create new experiences in people’s living. However, many existing IoT products are just designed as internet-enabled products that are remotely controlled through the cloud. Design researchers critically reflect that IoT designers are limited by the traditional single product design perspective, and lack of systematic perspective in seeing IoT as a design for collaboration of things. They recalled IoT designers to revisit the everyday practice in identifying ways to design intelligences into the existing products and exploring design inspirations for collaboration of things. This work proposes Thing Constellation, a novel approach to investigating the collaboration of everyday products and exploring the possible design patterns for future intelligent design. This work contributes ways of understanding relationships among people and objects that would be difficult to elicit through traditional observations.

[2022] Minty Zoo

Plant agency is commonly understood as being reactive to the environment (i.e., phototropism); however, plants can be proactive, even social beings. Botanists have identified that plants can connect and communicate through the natural language (i.e., carbon, water) to nurture and train their kin (i.e., deliver excess nutrients, send warnings when pests attack). As design researchers, we wonder how to use sensing and actuating technology to let plants outside of their natural habitats communicate across species and even with non-organic things. We designed ”Minty Zoo, an interspecies plant-based communication system. In our design, “five hub plants” are located in the cabinet, and an uneven amount of resources (water and light) are distributed among them. By observing plants’ collective behaviors through 15 sensors (monitoring: soil moisture, temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and timelapse of the plants’ growth), the generated data were used in resource re-distribution that helped to nurture the ’seedling’ on the top—ultimately recreating the ”hub plants nurturing kin” scene via artificial means. The artifact is used as a research probe in another submission paper—Plantroids and Plantborgs: Design Speculation for Plants as Social Actors. With the use of the artifact, we brought up an active discussion among designers from reflecting on human-dominated ecosystems to seeing plants as social actors. The artifact presents stages of our design research process and reflections on how we design for plants as social actors, including co-speculation of Plants-Computer Interaction (PCI) design opportunities with six designers. In conclusion, we present new design opportunities for creating an interspecies plant-based communication system through sensing technology, and introduce novel concepts (plant interaction) by using our prototype to bring up active discussions/provocations in the design community.

[2021] Thing Constellation Visualiser

Designing future IoT ecosystems requires new approaches and perspectives to understand everyday practices. While researchers recognize the importance of understanding social aspects of everyday objects, limited studies have explored the possibilities of combining data-driven patterns with human interpretations to investigate emergent relationships among objects. This work presents Thing Constellation Visualizer (thingCV), a novel interactive tool for visualizing the social network of objects based on their co-occurrence as computed from a large collection of photos. ThingCV enables perspective-changing design explorations over the network of objects with scalable links. Two exploratory workshops were conducted to investigate how designers navigate and make sense of a network of objects through thingCV. The results of eight participants showed that designers were actively engaged in identifying interesting objects and their associated clusters of related objects. The designers projected social qualities onto the identified objects and their communities. Furthermore, the designers changed their perspectives to revisit familiar contexts and to generate new insights through the exploration process. This work contributes a novel approach to combining data-driven models with designerly interpretations of thing constellation towards More-Than Human-Centred Design of IoT ecosystems.

[2019] Peekaboo Cam

The home is a rich context for design research to study things and the Everyday. However, home is also a place of utmost privacy for most people. To better understand this context through an observational artifact without impacting privacy, we designed the Peekaboo cam that enables inhabitants to control their data release actively or passively. The Peekaboo cam is an observational research camera with a coverable lens. We validate in a field study in two homes for 14 days. The resulting photo streams provide qualitative insights on Everyday things in transition. We suggest four design guidelines for observational artifacts for home ecologies.

[2019] Call Me by My Name

Voice Conversational Agents (VCAs) are increasingly becoming part of our daily life. Calling them by their names can solve more than just a problem of efficiency in interaction between users and VCAs, but also can cast them as actors capable of playing a role in a relationship. However, due to the immature state of the technology and its related services, such relationships between users and VCAs can be limited in practice. To broaden the scope in designing different relationships, this study explores VCAs depicted in sci-fi movies. Sci-fi is not purely based on fantasy, but also is a social reflection on technology, which in turn can inspire design researchers to understand and speculate the complexity of VCAs. Through community sourcing with sci-fi enthusiasts, 43 Sci-fi VCAs were deduced. A movie event was also organized to discuss the role of VCAs. Finally, this paper presents several possible design insights for designing the role of VCAs.

[2018] Once Upon a Future

Envisioning the future in a multidisciplinary collaboration continues to be a challenge. This paper presents a tool for engineers and designers to envision applications of emerging technologies. Drawing on the "suspension of disbelief" in audio drama and episodic memory theory about creativity, we build a four-act board game for creative narration. Participants are guided to enact future application scenarios by using playing cards along with theme music and sound effects. To test the tool, we conducted three workshops to discuss the distinct advantages and challenges of this approach.

[2017] Wabi-Sabi Timer

Wabi-Sabi is one of the Japanese aethetics, describing the beauty of "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete." 'Wabi-Sabi' has been discussed in HCI for years, which provided HCI a rich and unique design perspective. However current researches only discuss the choice of materials (physical form), and less focus on behaviours (temporal form) in interaction design. We believe that Wabi-Sabi can also bring HCI a poetic way of designing the expression. With research through design, we extracted five possible design elements from Wabi-Sabi, and implemented them into a 'one-minute timer'. We created five different temporal forms for timers, and conducted a field study with seven participants. Finally, we reflect our design process, and suggest the definition and possible implementation of five design elements, (A) one encounter one chance, (B) slow thinking, (C) leave blank, (D) destroy, (E) insist.