Computing and Information Systems - Theses
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ItemDesigning video-mediated technologies to cultivate indigenous knowledge over distance( 2017)Technology design influences what users know about the world, and how they construct that knowledge. This is especially true for technologies that underlie the communication and representation of information and knowledge. Relatedly, how designers understand and prioritise certain ways of knowing over others influences how technologies are designed for people within a given context. From these premises, this thesis investigates how video-mediated technologies may be designed to support transnationals in cultivating the indigenous knowledge (IK) of their homeland, while they live elsewhere in the world. Through three field studies between Australia and Kenya, this thesis investigates how digital technologies currently used by indigenous members support or alienate the cultivation of IK, and how the design of video-mediated communication technologies in particular can be grounded in indigenous ways of knowing. In Study 1, I conduct field interviews with 8 Kenyan transnationals in Melbourne, Australia about the practice of their indigenous culture while in the diaspora, and the role that current digital technologies play in supporting them to do so. Next in Study 2, I travel to Kenya to conduct a field study of 10 video-mediated sessions between rural elders and remotely-located youth. Based on findings from Study 1 and Study 2, I generate design themes that guide the design and evaluation of Study 3. Here, I investigate the use of the new medium of 360º video-conferencing to connect learners of indigenous knowledge in Australia, with elders in rural Kenya. Through findings from these studies, this thesis makes three contributions to technology research on indigenous knowledge. First, I propose a People-Place-Praxis lens as a productive conceptual framework in which to design for IK. The lens facilitates an understanding that aligns with indigenous ways of knowing; and motivates technology design in ways that support indigenous knowledge. Secondly, I demonstrate a way by which epicentres of indigenous knowledge can be extended through use of custom video-mediated sessions. This thesis makes explicit the need to design effective deployments of the technology, that is to design what I call ViMik sessions to effectively facilitate learners in the diaspora to cultivating IK from indigenous epicentres. Lastly, this thesis extends knowledge on how to enhance the experience of ViMik sessions for learners, over distance. The approach involves supporting an individual-yet-communal experience of the ViMik session, and mediating a sense of mobility for the learners at the remote indigenous location. This thesis concludes with opportunities for future research in this area.
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ItemUnderstanding the role of technology in supporting parent–child reunion( 2017)Parent–child reunion is one of the most prevalent yet less explored areas of family life. During reunions, parents and children can strengthen their bonds and reaffirm their ties. Earlier works on Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) have highlighted the value of digital technologies in supporting the parent–child relationship during physical separation or collocation, but little work has focused on parent–child reunion. This thesis investigates the role of digital technology in supporting a specific type of parent– child reunion: a reunion following separation for work-related reasons that has a pre-, upon and post-phase. This investigation was conducted with the participation of three types of families: academic, defence and mining. This thesis presents three studies that examined the role of digital technologies in supporting parent–child reunion. The first study focused on technological shortcomings of current technology use in parent–child reunion. This study found that current technologies lack certain elements of support during the anticipation to reunite in prereunion, the initial engagement upon reunion and the sharing of experiences in postreunion. The second study identified the interactional qualities of digital technologies that aim to support parent–child reunion that led to the design of Rendezvous—the first reunion-oriented artefact. The insights from this study emphasised the importance of stimulating co-creation in pre-reunion, motivating co-engagement upon reunion and inspiring co-sharing in post-reunion. The third study evaluated Rendezvous through its field deployment with the participation of academic and mining families. The findings demonstrated the significance of Rendezvous in supporting parent–child reunion by augmenting the anticipation to reunite in pre-reunion, heightening the initial engagement upon reunion and strengthening the experience of sharing in post-reunion. The knowledge generated by this thesis has three main contributions. First, it uncovers the necessity for digital technologies to support parent–child reunion by focusing on the anticipation in pre-reunion, the engagement upon reunion and the sharing of experiences in post-reunion. Second, the thesis calls attention to the merit of asynchronous technologies in supporting parent–child reunion. Finally, it expands the current knowledge by highlighting materiality and temporality as key design considerations for reunion-oriented technologies.
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ItemDesigning digital memorials: commemorating the Black Saturday Bushfires( 2015)Digital memorials are novel technologies used for commemorative purposes. There is a growing interest in their design amongst HCI researchers. Existing studies focus on commemorating deceased loved ones, where personal and familial remembrance is emphasised. However, there are fewer examples where digital memorials play a wider social and cultural role. Commemorating a war, terrorist attack, natural disaster or death of somebody of special significance such as a leader or even celebrity, are examples where commemoration extends beyond the personal and familial, and into broader social contexts. In these instances, it is likely that large numbers of people may wish to participate, from those with deeply personal reasons, to others with only a passing interest. This thesis examines the design of digital memorials for use in contexts where these diverse audiences come together in commemoration. This thesis presents three studies, in which commemoration following the Black Saturday bushfires was used as the setting for the research. The fires occurred in 2009 in Victoria, Australia. Asides the devastation caused to the natural environment, there were 173 fatalities and massive destruction caused to homes and other infrastructure. The first study was an exploratory study examining how people commemorated Black Saturday within the first two years after the fires. The findings extend current understandings of commemoration using technology by showing similarities between how people engage with physical and web-based memorials. The second study involved participants in fire-affected communities who were asked to generate design ideas for digital memorials to commemorate Black Saturday. The study contributed a novel craft-based approach to designing technology in the commemorative context. For the third study, a digital memorial was developed that included a website and internet-connected tablet computer app to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the fires. This technology was designed for both those within the fire-affected communities and those outside. The findings report on an evaluation of the experiences of those who engaged with the digital memorial. Selected findings from the three thesis studies are expressed as a set of five design considerations intended for future designers and researchers interested in digital memorials. These are: privacy, control and context collapse; considerations for symbolism and metaphoric representations; utilising physical locations; having sensitivity towards temporal patterns; and, designing for pace and asynchronicity.
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ItemAudience experience in domestic videogaming( 2014)Videogames are frequently played socially, but not all participants actively play. Audience members observe gameplay, often participating and experiencing the game indirectly. While the existence of non-playing audience members has been previously acknowledged, there have been few attempts to understand what activities audience members engage in while watching videogames, or how their experience is affected by different aspects of the game and social situation. This thesis presents the first substantial body of empirical work on audience behaviour and experience in social videogaming sessions. Existing work was reviewed in a number of areas of literp.ature including the sociality of gameplay, the increasing role of physicality and physical actions in gameplay, and the role of audiences in HCI. Three studies were then conducted based on the research question: How do the sociality and physicality of videogaming sessions influence audience experience? An initial exploratory observational study (N = 6 families) examined the types of activities that audiences engage in while watching highly physical videogames in their homes. This study indicated that audience members can adopt a variety of ephemeral roles that provide them with opportunities to interact with one another, the players, and the game technology. Additionally, participants reported that the physicality of the gameplay heavily influenced their experience. The second study, a naturalistic experimental study (N = 134) consisted of a mixed-model analysis of the factors of game physicality and turn anticipation. Study 2 found that anticipation of a turn affects experience of both audience and player, and similarly found that highly physical games result in more positive audience experiences, although the relationship between physicality and experience is not straightforward. A third study, also an experiment (N = 24), examined the influence of game physicality and visual attention on audience experience within a mediated setting, and a cross-study comparison identified that there appears to be a strong interplay between social context and the experience of physicality. Overall, this thesis contributes an understanding of how sociality, physicality, and the interplay between the two can influence audience behaviour and experience. These findings can be used to inform the design of novel game and interactive experiences that incorporate physicality, turn anticipation, and opportunities for different types of participation in order to influence and enhance audience experience.
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ItemIndexing to situated interactions( 2006-02)Computing is increasingly pervading the activities of our everyday lives: at work, at home, and out on the town. When designing these pervasive systems there is a need to better understand and incorporate the context of use and yet there are limited empirical investigations into what constitutes this context. The user’s physical and social situation is an important part of their context when operating in an urban environment and thus needs to be understood and included in the interaction design of context-aware pervasive computing. This thesis has combined ideas from human computer interaction (HCI) and architecture to investigate indexicality in interface design as an instrument for incorporating physical and social context of the built environment into context-aware pervasive computing. Indexicality in interface design is a new approach to designing HCI for pervasive computing that relies on knowledge of current context to implicitly communicate between system and user. It reduces the amount of information that needs to be explicitly displayed in the interface while maintaining the usefulness and understandability of the communication.
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ItemAn investigation of interactivity and flow: student behaviour during online instruction( 2004-12)This thesis combines ideas from human-computer interaction, education and psychology to explore the interactions of students in an online learning environment. The motivation for the work was to understand better how to engage students in a highly enjoyable experience of online learning. The thesis describes three experiments. The first experiment was an exploratory study investigating the influence of learner interactions in an online physics learning task. Students worked through an online learning experience that offered high and low levels of interactivity. The aim was to explore their interactions and choices in an environment in which they could elect to move from the highly interactive mode to the less interactive mode at any time. Web logs were used to track their interactions and question probes gathered data on their emotions, learning goals and strategies. The analysis revealed a number of different patterns of interaction. Statistical analysis showed that most, but not all, preferred to follow an interactive path through the material. Students who used the interactive materials showed improved learning gains in transfer-style questions compared to those in the less interactive mode. Several issues were identified as important to consider in a follow-up study: emotions, affect, challenge, and the degree of control that the learner perceives.
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ItemDesigning sports: exertion games( 2010)Exertion games are computer games that require intense physical effort from its users. Unlike traditional computer games, exertion games offer physical health benefits in addition to the social benefits derived from networked games. This thesis contributes an understanding of exertion games from an interaction design perspective to support researchers analysing and designers creating more engaging exertion games. Playing with other participants can increase engagement and hence facilitate the associated benefits. Computer technology can support such social play by expanding the range of possible participants through networking advances. However, there is a lack of understanding how technological design can facilitate the relationship between exertion and social play, especially in mediated environments. In response, this thesis establishes an understanding of how mediating technology can support social exertion play, in particular when players are in geographically distant locations. This understanding is forged through the design of three “sports over a distance” games. The experience of engaging with them was studied qualitatively to gain a rich understanding of how design facilitates social play in exertion games. The three games “Jogging over a Distance”, “Table Tennis for Three”, and “Remote Impact - Shadowboxing over a Distance” allow investigating different perspectives of mediated exertion play, since they represent three categories of richness on a social play continuum across both the virtual and the physical world. Studies of the experience of engaging with the three games resulted in an exertion framework that consists of six conceptual themes framed by four perspectives on the body and three on games. A fourth study demonstrated that the understanding derived from the investigation of the use and design of the games can support designers and researchers with the analysis of existing games and aid the creative process of designing new exertion games. This thesis provides the first understanding of how technology design facilitates social play in exertion games. In doing so, it expands our knowledge of how to design for the active body, broadening the view of the role of the body when interacting with computers. Offering an increased understanding of exertion games enables game designers to create more engaging games, hence providing players more reasons to exert their bodies, supporting them in profiting from the many benefits of exertion.
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ItemUnderstanding participation in passion-centric social network sites( 2011)Passion describes a strong inclination towards an activity that people like and find important. It provides people with meaningful goals, facilitates personal development, and enriches their social lives. On the other hand, passion can be a source of tension with other areas of everyday life, which demands sacrifices, risks, and sometimes even suffering. The aim of this thesis is to explore the relationship between technology and passion. In particular, this thesis addresses a gap in our understanding of participation in social network sites designed to support people’s passions. While related work indicates the potential of passion-centric social network sites to enhance passion, little is known about how participation in these sites may complicate or otherwise influence passion. I conducted three empirical studies to address this gap. Study 1 and 2 examined bodybuilding and the social network site BodySpace, whereas study 3 focussed on analogue photography and Flickr. In all three studies I used a field research approach to examine passion and participation in social network sites as well as related offline settings. Study 1 identified three different categories of online participation: tool, community, and theatre. These three categories showed how passion-centric social network sites both support and constrain the development of skills, social relations, and identities related to passion. Study 2 expanded on these findings, showing how online participation and passion vary between amateurs and related professionals. Study 3 evaluated the findings from study 1 and 2 in a different context. This study refined earlier findings on participation and its influence on passion, and it showed which of these findings are applicable to different domains. Through these studies, this thesis contributes to current research in three distinct, but interrelated ways. First, the findings extend existing models of online participation by showing variations between the different categories of participation of amateurs and professionals. Second, this thesis extends current understanding of social relations on passion-centric social network sites by showing how and why users connect with different kinds of strangers as well as with groups of friends and peers. Finally, this thesis extends current understanding of passion in the context of social network sites. While existing sites support people in achieving their goals, they appear limited in mitigating sacrifices and risks, and thus they may adversely complicate passion. This thesis discusses practical implications emerging from these findings that address this challenge. It concludes with a call for novel technologies to mitigate sacrifices and to facilitate harmonious passion.
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ItemThe case for mobile trajectory – a practical 'theory' for mobile work( 2009)This thesis progressively evolves and presents a practical 'theory' for mobile work – mobile trajectory – through three case studies conducted using fieldwork. The three cases presented here examine tram travellers finding their way around a city centre (Case A), health care workers looking after people with mental illness in a residential setting (Case B) and mobile clinicians caring for young people with mental illness in a community setting (Case C). My concern is to develop a 'theory' for mobile work that is both practical and theoretical,; at once supporting the practical action of completing field and analytic work while abstracting away from the ordinary affairs of society. The contribution of this ‘theory’ is to synthesise ideas from the domain of studies of ICTs mobile work to support description, rhetoric, inference and application for mobile work. This 'theory' has particular COMPONENTS, FEATURES, PROPERTIES, CONCERNS and ASSOCIATED NOTIONS. A mobile trajectory has a CORE TRAJECTORY that involves particular work: the CORE WORK. There are ALIGNED TRAJECTORIES that feed the CORE TRAJECTORY. These are part of the CORE TRAJECTORY. The FEATURES of mobile trajectory are CYCLES, TRANSITIONS, TRAVERSALS, STREAMS, SCHEMES, POSSIBILITIES, HISTORICITY and SHAPE. The PROPERTIES are PHYSICALITY, LOCALITY, INSTRUMENTALITY, SYNCHRONICITY, INTER- DEPENDENCY, PREDICTABILITY and PALPABILITY. Important CONCERNS are RECONCILIATION CONCERNS, ALIGNMNENT CONCERNS, RECIPROCAL CONCERNS and CONTINGENCY CONCERNS. Key ASSOCIATED NOTIONS are SOCIAL SPHERES with particular WORLDS and SUB-WORLDS comprising MEMBERS with particular ROLES and INVOLVEMENT. SOCIAL SPHERES have particular BOUNDARIES, RESOURCES and MEDIA and shared KNOWLEDGE and PRACTICES. MEDIA and RESOURCES have particular AVAILABILITY and MUTABILITY. MEMBERS have particular BIOGRAPHIES, TIES and OBLIGATIONS and AWARENESS of others. Through the case material presented I demonstrate how this 'theory' supports the work of describing and discussing mobile work for the purpose of conceptualising, selecting, recommending and critically evaluating everyday Information and Communication Technologies. At the end of the thesis I compare mobile trajectory to three alternative approaches and two alternative theories with regard to supporting the same kind of work.
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ItemToward semantic interoperability for software systems( 2008)“In an ill-structured domain you cannot, by definition, have a pre-compiled schema in your mind for every circumstance and context you may find ... you must be able to flexibly select and arrange knowledge sources to most efficaciously pursue the needs of a given situation.” [57] In order to interact and collaborate effectively, agents, whether human or software, must be able to communicate through common understandings and compatible conceptualisations. Ontological differences that occur either from pre-existing assumptions or as side-effects of the process of specification are a fundamental obstacle that must be overcome before communication can occur. Similarly, the integration of information from heterogeneous sources is an unsolved problem. Efforts have been made to assist integration, through both methods and mechanisms, but automated integration remains an unachieved goal. Communication and information integration are problems of meaning and interaction, or semantic interoperability. This thesis contributes to the study of semantic interoperability by identifying, developing and evaluating three approaches to the integration of information. These approaches have in common that they are lightweight in nature, pragmatic in philosophy and general in application. The first work presented is an effort to integrate a massive, formal ontology and knowledge-base with semi-structured, informal heterogeneous information sources via a heuristic-driven, adaptable information agent. The goal of the work was to demonstrate a process by which task-specific knowledge can be identified and incorporated into the massive knowledge-base in such a way that it can be generally re-used. The practical outcome of this effort was a framework that illustrates a feasible approach to providing the massive knowledge-base with an ontologically-sound mechanism for automatically generating task-specific information agents to dynamically retrieve information from semi-structured information sources without requiring machine-readable meta-data. The second work presented is based on reviving a previously published and neglected algorithm for inferring semantic correspondences between fields of tables from heterogeneous information sources. An adapted form of the algorithm is presented and evaluated on relatively simple and consistent data collected from web services in order to verify the original results, and then on poorly-structured and messy data collected from web sites in order to explore the limits of the algorithm. The results are presented via standard measures and are accompanied by detailed discussions on the nature of the data encountered and an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithm and the ways in which it complements other approaches that have been proposed. Acknowledging the cost and difficulty of integrating semantically incompatible software systems and information sources, the third work presented is a proposal and a working prototype for a web site to facilitate the resolving of semantic incompatibilities between software systems prior to deployment, based on the commonly-accepted software engineering principle that the cost of correcting faults increases exponentially as projects progress from phase to phase, with post-deployment corrections being significantly more costly than those performed earlier in a project’s life. The barriers to collaboration in software development are identified and steps taken to overcome them. The system presented draws on the recent collaborative successes of social and collaborative on-line projects such as SourceForge, Del.icio.us, digg and Wikipedia and a variety of techniques for ontology reconciliation to provide an environment in which data definitions can be shared, browsed and compared, with recommendations automatically presented to encourage developers to adopt data definitions compatible with previously developed systems. In addition to the experimental works presented, this thesis contributes reflections on the origins of semantic incompatibility with a particular focus on interaction between software systems, and between software systems and their users, as well as detailed analysis of the existing body of research into methods and techniques for overcoming these problems.