Contacts in Context
Master's Project for summer term 2009 and winter term 2009/2010
Lead by
Prof. Dr. Thorsten Teschke, professor for software engineering
Prof. Dr. Barbara Grüter, professor for interactive communication
University of Applied Sciences, Bremen
Abstract
Have you ever been on a bus, a tram or a train and caught a smile? And you would have liked to get in touch with this person, but didn’t dare? Ubiquitous computing [Wei91], the interweaving of computing with everyday life, may come to your help by providing further possibilities for interaction in situations like the friendly encounter on the tram [BB+07].
In this project we will study issues of mobile context-aware services and their use by means of prototyping a getting-in-touch service for public transport. Traditionally applications are called context-aware, if they are able to react to foreseeable situations that are characterized by predefined dimensions such as location and time. As soon as a person enters one of these situations, the application recognizes this and provides information and interaction possibilities. But this will not suffice in unpredictable situations like the mentioned one [CCD05].
Let’s consider the situation once more: What makes situations like this "special"? It’s not only two people at the same time on the same tram. It’s more than that, it’s (among other things) the arising interaction between those two. This constitutes unpredictable dimensions of context that emerge and exist only between these two persons and in this situation. Today we know how to support the interaction of people in foreseeable, predefined situations; tomorrow we will have to facilitate the interaction of people in unexpected, novel situations. But what does this mean and how is it possible to achieve it? In our project, we want to widen our understanding of context in order to include even such unpredictable and dynamically emerging aspects of context [Dou04]. To spark the imagination and answer these questions design studies in the field, theoretical work and technical implementation of a prototype of a getting-in-touch service in public transport are needed.
Project Description
Context as defined by Dey and Abowd is «any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity [...] considered relevant to the interaction» [DA99] and typically refers to time, location, identity and state of people or computational or physical objects. This notion of context is reduced, however, to static and thus foreseeable aspects of the environment. Unpredictable and dynamically emerging dimensions of context that come into being within and by the activity of people are widely ignored [Dou01, Dou04]. We strive for a deeper understanding of this dynamic context and its differences to its static counterpart. A redefined concept of context, then, will enable us to reason about novel approaches to both software engineering and interaction design of mobile and context-aware applications.
In order to prototype services such as a getting-in-touch service, we will have to consider the dimensions of ubiquitous services illustrated in Figure 1. First, each service represents the integration of conceptual, technical and aesthetical facets that only together enable or facilitate activities. Second, each activity influences a service's behavior or appearance, e.g. by changing or creating context or even by driving its future development. Starting point for the latter might be the use of social tagging as known from web sites such as del.icio.us and Flickr or the observation of recurring patterns of interaction that deserve to be adequately supported by the service.
Figure 1: Dimensions of ubiquitous services
Hence, this project encompasses complexly interwoven conceptual, technical and aesthetical problems:
- Conceptual: development of a concept of a getting-in-touch service which explicitly regards the dynamic aspects of context.
- Technical: design and implementation of mobile context-aware services for the getting-intouch scenario; issues to be tackled may contain
- mobile service provisioning, e.g. in a tram, context acquisition and representation,
- context-aware adaptation of service behaviour and appearance.
- Aesthetical: interaction design for mobile context-aware services and its evaluation. Issues of service interaction in the tram comprise
- Two among many – users, devices, services
- Mind and body engaged – embodied interaction
- The world of ubiquitous interaction in the tram, private moments interwoven with public everyday-life
We will combine cultural probes, field studies and the study of related work in order to bridge the mentioned contradicting notions of context.
The main objectives of our project are twofold:
- Design and implementation of a mobile context-aware getting-in-touch service prototype for the tram
- Design and study of interaction and experience mediated by our service
We expect to extract generalizable conceptual, technical and aesthetical results from our prototype
and intend to publish these on scientific conferences.
Learning OutcomesDepending on the course of the project, the students will acquire knowledge, experiences and competencies in the following fields:
- Software engineering: development of flexible mobile context-aware services that adapt themselves to dynamically changing contexts
- Interaction design: conceptualization and design of ubiquitous interaction in dynamically changing contexts
- Reflection:
- Analysis, discussion, and comparison of different approaches to concepts of ubiquitous computing such as context-awareness, software adaptation and human computer interaction
- Evaluation of the achieved results both in the lab and in the field
- Publication of the project's results on scientific workshops and conferences
- Project management: conducting a media and software engineering process with an interdisciplinary international project team, both in the roles of a project member and project manager.
Student Backgrounds
We seek students with a strong interest in ubiquitous computing and substantial competencies in digital media or media informatics. Due to the interdisciplinary character of the project all students need an open mind regarding the basic problem of reasoning about an adequate notion of context and assessing its influence on interaction design and software development.
In addition, we expect proficiency in
- either at least one of the programming languages Java or C# as well as experience in software development of web applications or mobile systems (having contributed 2000 or more lines of code to such projects)
- or the design of interaction beyond the desk at the level of theory as well as experience in interaction design and evaluation (having contributed to such a project as documented within the portfolio).
Furthermore, your background should be complemented by capabilities or experiences in one or
more of the following fields which are relevant for the design of ubiquitous software systems and
their use:
- Software design (terms such as UML, software architecture and design patterns should not be foreign words for you)
- Interaction design and ubiquitous interaction (knowledge about embodied interaction and competence in experience design)
- Mobile application development (JavaME, .Net CF or even Google’s Android)
- Knowledge and competence in activity-theory and studies on media experiences
- Development of self-adaptive software, e.g. by aspect-oriented programming (AOP) or metaobject protocol (MOP)
- User-centered application development using web 2.0 technologies such as folksonomies
- "Intelligent" technologies such as ontologies, machine-learning and reasoning
Resources
- [BB+07]: A. Bassoli, J. Brewer, P. Dourish, K. Martin, S. Mainwaring: Underground Aesthetics: Rethinking Urban Computing. Pervasive Computing, Vol. 6, No. 3, July- September, pp. 39-45.
- [CCD05]: J. Coutaz, J.L. Crowley, S. Dobson, D. Garlan: Context is key. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 48, No. 3, March 2005, pp. 49-53.
- [DA99]: A.K. Dey, G.D. Abowd: Towards a Better Understanding of Context and Context-Awareness. Georgia Tech GVU Technical Report GIT-GVU-98-01 ftp://ftp.cc.gatech.edu/pub/gvu/tr/1999/99-22.pdf.
- [Dou01]: P. Dourish: Where The Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. MIT Press October 2001.
- [Dou04]: P. Dourish: What we talk about when we talk about context. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 8, No. 1, February 2004, pp. 19-30.
- [Wei91]: M. Weiser. The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American, September 1991, pages 94-104.
ContactThorsten Teschke:
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Barbara M. Grüter:
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(http://www.masterdigitalmedia.hs-bremen.de/
)
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