Seminars
Abstracts
12 January
Anna Bramwell-Dicks: Music while you work: The effect of music on transcription typing performance and experience
Exposure to music is a frequent part of our everyday lives and there is a wealth of empirical evidence that music affects people's behaviour and experiences. However, despite the evidence that music can affect people, theories for why and how music affects people are lacking. More research is needed in different contexts to help us to understand why music is such an affective medium. In particular, there is a need to extend the research beyond manipulating just tempo and volume of the music to understand the effect of more dimensions of music on behaviour and experience.
During my PhD, I investigated how music affects people when typing - a mundane, work-related computing task. In this seminar I will present a number of experiments looking at how different dimensions of music (including presence of vocals, style, genre, volume, tempo and time signature) affect transcription typing performance and experience.
19 January
Yannis Darzentas
(Visiting Leverhume professor): Systems Thinking in HCI and Design
In HCI we are dealing with human-centric problems that are, in their majority, complex and wicked. As a result, such problems are difficult to understand and deal with. The robustness of the suggested ways of tackling these problems depends on capturing as much of the relevant Design Space as possible. Systems Thinking is, among other approaches, one that claims to aid the efforts to capture and understand the design problem space and describe in an operational way the possible tackling of it. Definitions, properties, and possible applications of Systems Thinking to HCI and Design, will be presented with examples.
23 January
Judy Edworthy
Plymouth University: Alarm design and implementation in complex and safety-critical domains
Alarm sounds are still ubiquitous in almost every work domain, and in some environments their use is so prolific that the term 'alarm fatigue' is used to describe over-exposure and noncompliance with alarms, particularly in the clinical environment. Part of the 'alarm problem' centres around the alarm sounds themselves, and in this talk I will focus on recent work that I have carried out with collaborators in Europe and in the US working towards improving the design of audible alarms. I will demonstrate how improvements in audible alarm design can have a broad impact on work practice. I will focus on two areas: the design of alarms for the European Space Agency control centre at Darmstadt, Germany, and current work on updating clinical alarms intended to support a global medical device standard.
2 February
Nervo Verdezoto
University of Leicester: Understanding and Designing Technology to Fit People’s Everyday Practices: Challenges and Opportunities in Healthcare and Sustainability
There is a growing desire to address societal challenges in healthcare and sustainability through the use of information technology such as medication reminders and smart electricity meters. Although these technologies have managed to raise awareness regarding people’s care activities or energy consumption, most of these technologies have failed to consider how people actually use and integrate these devices into their everyday practices. As a result, people still find it difficult to adopt and embrace these technologies to improve their health or save energy. For example, an older adult with an active lifestyle might frequently be outside the home (e.g., at work, restaurant or any other social setting) when they are supposed to take their blood pressure or medication, challenging their care activities in relation to their everyday practices. Taking a practice-based research approach, this talk presents the challenges and opportunities for designing a new generation of information technologies (e.g., self-care technology, eco-feedback technology, etc.) that can better fit into people’s everyday practices. These points are presented using several case studies in healthcare and sustainability e.g., investigating the older adults medication management practices as well as the practices of residents of a sensor-equipped student dormitory targeted to motivate them to reduce and shift their energy consumption.
Biography
Nervo Xavier Verdezoto is an Assistant Professor/Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at the Department of Informatics, University of Leicester. He is a member of the Interaction Design and Evaluation of Socio-technical Systems (IDEAS) Group. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction Group at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University in Denmark. He also was research assistant at the Centre for Pervasive Healthcare at Aarhus University during his PhD studies. His work combines fieldwork with user-centered and participatory design methods to further understand people’s everyday practices, different stakeholder’s needs, and how people appropriate technology. In particular, he has been working in various research projects related to healthcare, physical computing, and sustainable HCI.
9 February
Alistair Edwards: Clickbait post truth?
In a previous seminar I explored the phenomenon of clickbait. I wish to return to the topic because of two developments since then. One is that I supervised (Eason) Yiteng Xing's project on this topic and found out more about it. Secondly we seem to have entered an age which some are referring to as post truth.
I will discuss some of Eason's results, which were not always in line with expectations. Something else that arose from Eason's project was (as so often) a realization as to things that we do not know. Particularly, while there are definitions of clickbait, it is not always easy to apply them. If we are in a post-truth era, companies such as Facebook are pledging to implement technological solutions, and yet it seems that the subtle boundaries being tested may not lend themselved to such approaches.
Warning One of the techniques used by clickbait designers is to catch people's attention by displaying shocking or provocative material. Some of this may be displayed in this seminar.
16 February
Sally Quinn
(Dept. of Psychology): Do facial judgments predict the re-tweeting of images of missing and wanted people on Twitter?
In recent years, Twitter has become a powerful medium used by the Police to ask for the public’s help in tracking down missing and wanted individuals. The Police often post images of these people as part of their appeal and the public can retweet (share) these images in a bid to help the police find these people. First impressions from the face often bias our behaviour towards unknown others (e.g. Airbnb hosts who look more trustworthy get more customers and can charge more). In this talk, I present a series of studies which examine the relationships between first impressions from faces and how these relate to the number of retweets the images of wanted and missing people received. These studies open up discussion of whether there are optimal photos that the police can select to maximise sharing on social media.