We are studying how computers can support "everyday" activities such as communication with friends, cooking, leisure pursuits, and shopping. Such activities are different than checking email or writing a memo for a number of reasons. People perform small parts of these activities when time permits and when it is not overridden by other - often more pressing - demands of life. Thus, these activities are highly integrated into the fabric of everyday life. In addition, these activities are often among the most pleasurable endeavors that people engage in, and great care must be taken when supporting and enhancing such activities so as not to compromise their naturalness and humanity. Because of these characteristics of everyday activities, supporting everyday activities is fundamentally different than supporting production, self-contained tasks such as checking email.
In this research, we are exploring the design principles that underlie a system supporting everyday activities. The key question is as follows: what are the key design principles that help a system to successfully support everyday activities? We are investigating a novel approach to developing such principles. This approach employs an integrative framework in which we use theoretical and empirical constraints to drive our investigation of the design principles of systems that support everyday activities. We anticipate that by applying constraints based on theoretical work (top-down constraints) and constraints based on an empirical study (bottom-up constraints), we can sufficiently constrain and make progress towards the key design principles of systems that support everyday activities.
And... you can help us with this research by using the SmartShopper. The SmartShopper is our idea of a small system that supports the everyday activity of shopping, and we need data about how people use (and don't use) it. As discussed above, we plan to use this data to constrain design principles from a bottom-up perspective. Of course, all data collected will remain completely anonymous throughout our research.
This is an abstract from our proposal for this work:
We propose a novel method to develop design principles of Everyday Computing (EC) technology. Current research into EC design principles utilizes a theoretical, top-down approach in which observed features of everyday activities drive EC design principles. However, such research has yielded relatively few design principles; also, these principles have not been empirically validated. With few principles to guide EC technology design, it remains difficult to design successful EC technology. We posit an integrative approach to developing and understanding general design principles of EC technology. In this approach, we derive hypothesized design principles using the top-down approach, apply these principles to design and build an EC technology, and perform an observational study of this technology. An observational study is best characterized as an empirical, bottom-up study. Integrating the top-down approach and the bottom-up approach using one technology provides a medium to obtain data that validate or invalidate the design principles hypothesized by the top-down method. In addition, the data obtained may suggest new design principles that were not generated using the top-down approach. The EC technology we apply this framework to is a Palm Pilot(r) application that supports a number of activities related to shopping.
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