The motivations for collecting and the idiosyncrasies of physical and digital collections have be... more The motivations for collecting and the idiosyncrasies of physical and digital collections have been long studied. However, how they are presented in the digital space is an unresolved challenge. To help better understand this problem from a design perspective, we built Thinga.Me. Thinga.Me is a system which allows users to capture photographs of physical objects and then cut them out, place them into digital collections, and share them. By segmenting the object from the background the interface creates the illusion of a physical item, giving a sense of carrying your stuff with you in your pocket. Following two years of development, iteration and feedback, we discuss uses of the app and the implications it can have for changing the way we reflect on physical things in our lives. In particular, we focus on how digital collection are presented and displayed in a realistic way as a way of providing more meaning and helping shape users’ identities. Demonstrating the importance of visual ...
Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018
Figure 1. The Zanzibar Mat (b) tracks objects equipped with NFC tags (c), senses touch, detects h... more Figure 1. The Zanzibar Mat (b) tracks objects equipped with NFC tags (c), senses touch, detects hover gestures, and can be rolled up for portability (a). Different tag designs can be used to determine rotation (d), stack objects (e), provide I/O (f), and extend sensing outside the bounds of the Mat (g).
Serendipity is an engaging, deeply personal and even magical experience to some. While serendipit... more Serendipity is an engaging, deeply personal and even magical experience to some. While serendipity has been noted to arise during people's interactions with digital photos, we have yet to understand how this occurs or how it could be supported during-and-through the use of technology. Inspired by findings about serendipity arising from people's shuffle listening, we designed a digital photo display system to explore how we could support people's encounters with serendipity with digital photos. Through this, we gained a deeper understanding of this technology-mediated serendipity and found ways that can support and even nudge people towards encountering serendipity.
We present findings from a five-week deployment of voting technologies in a city neighbourhood. D... more We present findings from a five-week deployment of voting technologies in a city neighbourhood. Drawing on Marres' (2012) work on material participation and Massey's (2005) conceptualisation of space as dynamic, we designed the deployment such that the technologies (which were situated in residents' homes, on the street, and available online) would work in concert, cutting across the neighbourhood to make visible, juxtapose and draw together the different 'small worlds' within it. We demonstrate how the material infrastructure of the voting devices set in motion particular processes and interpretations of participation, putting data in place in a way that had ramifications for the recognition of heterogeneity. We conclude that redistributing participation means not only opening up access, so that everyone can participate, or even providing a multitude of voting channels, so that people can participate in different ways. Rather, it means making visible multiplicity, challenging notions of similarity, and showing how difference may be productive.
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web - WWW '13, 2013
In recent years the Web has evolved substantially, transforming from a place where we primarily f... more In recent years the Web has evolved substantially, transforming from a place where we primarily find information to a place where we also leave, share and keep it. This presents a fresh set of challenges for the management of personal information, which include how to underpin greater awareness and more control over digital belongings and other personally meaningful content that is hosted online. In the study reported here, we follow up on research that suggests a sense of ownership and control can be reinforced by federating online content as a virtual, single store; we do this by conducting interviews with 14 individuals about their Web-based content. Participants were asked to give the researchers a tour of online content that is personally meaningful to them; to perform a search for themselves in order to uncover additional content; and to respond to a series of design envisionments. We examine whether there is any value in an integrated personal archive that would automatically update and serve firstly, as a source of information regarding the content within it (e.g. where it is stored, who has the rights to it), and secondly, as a resource for crafting personal artefacts such as scrapbooks, CVs and gifts for others. Our analysis leads us to reject the concept of a single archive. Instead, we present a framework of five different types of online content, each of which has separate implications for personal information management.
We present the Visual Decision Maker (VDM), an application that gives movie recommendations to gr... more We present the Visual Decision Maker (VDM), an application that gives movie recommendations to groups of people sitting together. The VDM provides a TV like user experience: a stream of movie stills flows towards the center of the screen, and users press buttons on remote controls to vote on the currently selected movie. A collaborative filtering engine provides recommendations for each user and for the group as a whole based on the votes. Three principles guided our design of the VDM: shared focus, dynamic pacing, and encouraging conversations. In this paper we present the results of a four month public installation and a lab study showing how these design choices affected people's usage and people's experience of the VDM. Our results show that shared focus is important for users to feel that the group's tastes are represented in the recommendations.
The Raven architecture provides object replication for any object system that implements object p... more The Raven architecture provides object replication for any object system that implements object properties and methods. In the current Windows Internet Explorer implementation, it is particularly tightly integrated with HTML, allowing simple, rapid development of multi-user applications in a web page. Raven uses an XML schema approach to describing the objects to be shared among clients. The XML schemas determine which properties on the objects should be replicated and which methods should be remoted. In addition to the overall system design, this paper shows details of two examples: a simple chat application and a Spacewar game. It also provides detailed descriptions of some of the internal algorithms used.
The results of a study into co-located friends' use of paper for a text based and a graphics ... more The results of a study into co-located friends' use of paper for a text based and a graphics based task, are presented. The results illustrate how diverse such usage is, and we look at space, ownership, and roles to demonstrate this. The study shows that people will simultaneously input into the same text document or drawing surface when the technology (in this case paper) allows them to.
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '15, 2015
We present findings from a year-long engagement with a street and its community. The work explore... more We present findings from a year-long engagement with a street and its community. The work explores how the production and use of data is bound up with place, both in terms of physical and social geography. We detail three strands of the project. First, we consider how residents have sought to curate existing data about the street in the form of an archive with physical and digital components. Second, we report endeavours to capture data about the street's environment, especially of vehicle traffic. Third, we draw on the possibilities afforded by technologies for polling opinion. We reflect on how these engagements have: materialised distinctive relations between the community and their data; surfaced flows and contours of data, and spatial, temporal and social boundaries; and enacted a multiplicity of 'small worlds'. We consider how such a conceptualisation of data-in-place is relevant to the design of technology.
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI EA '15, 2015
We present two sets of 'data technologies' that we have designed to collect and display local dat... more We present two sets of 'data technologies' that we have designed to collect and display local data, both derived from our engagement with a community. The first, Bullfrog, is a bespoke voting device. The second, a series of physical charts, respond to the increasing sophistication of data visualisations by making playful use of pie charts and bar graphs, reimagining them in mechanical forms that are compelling but easily readable.
What does the abundance of data and proliferation of data-making methods mean for the ordinary pe... more What does the abundance of data and proliferation of data-making methods mean for the ordinary person, the person on the street? And, what could they come to mean? In this paper, we present an overview of a year-long project to examine just such questions and complicate, in some ways, what it is to ask them. The project is a collective exercise in which we – a mixture of social scientists, designers and makers – and those living and working on one street in Cambridge (UK), Tenison Road, are working to think through how data might be materialised and come to matter. The project aims to better understand the specificities and contingencies that arise when data is produced and used in place. Mid-way through the project, we use this commentary to give some background to the work and detail one or two of the troubles we have encountered in putting locally relevant data to work. We also touch on a methodological standpoint we are working our way into and through, one that we hope complica...
Proceedings of the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction Extending Boundaries - NordiCHI '10, 2010
... Spyglass. The novels follow Lyra Belacqua and her friend Will Parry as they come of age again... more ... Spyglass. The novels follow Lyra Belacqua and her friend Will Parry as they come of age against the fantasy backdrop of several parallel worlds. ... Indeed the two words are Lyra‟s surnames: Silvertounge and Belacqua. Other ...
Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference on - DIS '12, 2012
ABSTRACT DIYbio (Do It Yourself Biology) aims to 'open source', tinker an... more ABSTRACT DIYbio (Do It Yourself Biology) aims to 'open source', tinker and experiment with biology outside of professional settings. In this paper, we present the origins, practices, and challenges of DIYbio initiatives around the world. Our findings depict DIYbio as operating across intersections ('seams') between a range of stakeholders, materials and concerns. To map out the role of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) across these seams, we present design exercises (functional prototypes) that explore three areas for future work: internal collaboration tools within the DIYbio and professional community; mechanisms for external communication with stakeholders from the general public; and bio-electronic assemblies of organic and digital materials. In doing so, we hope to critically re-envision the role of HCI at the emerging intersection of biology, computation and DIY.
The motivations for collecting and the idiosyncrasies of physical and digital collections have be... more The motivations for collecting and the idiosyncrasies of physical and digital collections have been long studied. However, how they are presented in the digital space is an unresolved challenge. To help better understand this problem from a design perspective, we built Thinga.Me. Thinga.Me is a system which allows users to capture photographs of physical objects and then cut them out, place them into digital collections, and share them. By segmenting the object from the background the interface creates the illusion of a physical item, giving a sense of carrying your stuff with you in your pocket. Following two years of development, iteration and feedback, we discuss uses of the app and the implications it can have for changing the way we reflect on physical things in our lives. In particular, we focus on how digital collection are presented and displayed in a realistic way as a way of providing more meaning and helping shape users’ identities. Demonstrating the importance of visual ...
Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018
Figure 1. The Zanzibar Mat (b) tracks objects equipped with NFC tags (c), senses touch, detects h... more Figure 1. The Zanzibar Mat (b) tracks objects equipped with NFC tags (c), senses touch, detects hover gestures, and can be rolled up for portability (a). Different tag designs can be used to determine rotation (d), stack objects (e), provide I/O (f), and extend sensing outside the bounds of the Mat (g).
Serendipity is an engaging, deeply personal and even magical experience to some. While serendipit... more Serendipity is an engaging, deeply personal and even magical experience to some. While serendipity has been noted to arise during people's interactions with digital photos, we have yet to understand how this occurs or how it could be supported during-and-through the use of technology. Inspired by findings about serendipity arising from people's shuffle listening, we designed a digital photo display system to explore how we could support people's encounters with serendipity with digital photos. Through this, we gained a deeper understanding of this technology-mediated serendipity and found ways that can support and even nudge people towards encountering serendipity.
We present findings from a five-week deployment of voting technologies in a city neighbourhood. D... more We present findings from a five-week deployment of voting technologies in a city neighbourhood. Drawing on Marres' (2012) work on material participation and Massey's (2005) conceptualisation of space as dynamic, we designed the deployment such that the technologies (which were situated in residents' homes, on the street, and available online) would work in concert, cutting across the neighbourhood to make visible, juxtapose and draw together the different 'small worlds' within it. We demonstrate how the material infrastructure of the voting devices set in motion particular processes and interpretations of participation, putting data in place in a way that had ramifications for the recognition of heterogeneity. We conclude that redistributing participation means not only opening up access, so that everyone can participate, or even providing a multitude of voting channels, so that people can participate in different ways. Rather, it means making visible multiplicity, challenging notions of similarity, and showing how difference may be productive.
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web - WWW '13, 2013
In recent years the Web has evolved substantially, transforming from a place where we primarily f... more In recent years the Web has evolved substantially, transforming from a place where we primarily find information to a place where we also leave, share and keep it. This presents a fresh set of challenges for the management of personal information, which include how to underpin greater awareness and more control over digital belongings and other personally meaningful content that is hosted online. In the study reported here, we follow up on research that suggests a sense of ownership and control can be reinforced by federating online content as a virtual, single store; we do this by conducting interviews with 14 individuals about their Web-based content. Participants were asked to give the researchers a tour of online content that is personally meaningful to them; to perform a search for themselves in order to uncover additional content; and to respond to a series of design envisionments. We examine whether there is any value in an integrated personal archive that would automatically update and serve firstly, as a source of information regarding the content within it (e.g. where it is stored, who has the rights to it), and secondly, as a resource for crafting personal artefacts such as scrapbooks, CVs and gifts for others. Our analysis leads us to reject the concept of a single archive. Instead, we present a framework of five different types of online content, each of which has separate implications for personal information management.
We present the Visual Decision Maker (VDM), an application that gives movie recommendations to gr... more We present the Visual Decision Maker (VDM), an application that gives movie recommendations to groups of people sitting together. The VDM provides a TV like user experience: a stream of movie stills flows towards the center of the screen, and users press buttons on remote controls to vote on the currently selected movie. A collaborative filtering engine provides recommendations for each user and for the group as a whole based on the votes. Three principles guided our design of the VDM: shared focus, dynamic pacing, and encouraging conversations. In this paper we present the results of a four month public installation and a lab study showing how these design choices affected people's usage and people's experience of the VDM. Our results show that shared focus is important for users to feel that the group's tastes are represented in the recommendations.
The Raven architecture provides object replication for any object system that implements object p... more The Raven architecture provides object replication for any object system that implements object properties and methods. In the current Windows Internet Explorer implementation, it is particularly tightly integrated with HTML, allowing simple, rapid development of multi-user applications in a web page. Raven uses an XML schema approach to describing the objects to be shared among clients. The XML schemas determine which properties on the objects should be replicated and which methods should be remoted. In addition to the overall system design, this paper shows details of two examples: a simple chat application and a Spacewar game. It also provides detailed descriptions of some of the internal algorithms used.
The results of a study into co-located friends' use of paper for a text based and a graphics ... more The results of a study into co-located friends' use of paper for a text based and a graphics based task, are presented. The results illustrate how diverse such usage is, and we look at space, ownership, and roles to demonstrate this. The study shows that people will simultaneously input into the same text document or drawing surface when the technology (in this case paper) allows them to.
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '15, 2015
We present findings from a year-long engagement with a street and its community. The work explore... more We present findings from a year-long engagement with a street and its community. The work explores how the production and use of data is bound up with place, both in terms of physical and social geography. We detail three strands of the project. First, we consider how residents have sought to curate existing data about the street in the form of an archive with physical and digital components. Second, we report endeavours to capture data about the street's environment, especially of vehicle traffic. Third, we draw on the possibilities afforded by technologies for polling opinion. We reflect on how these engagements have: materialised distinctive relations between the community and their data; surfaced flows and contours of data, and spatial, temporal and social boundaries; and enacted a multiplicity of 'small worlds'. We consider how such a conceptualisation of data-in-place is relevant to the design of technology.
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI EA '15, 2015
We present two sets of 'data technologies' that we have designed to collect and display local dat... more We present two sets of 'data technologies' that we have designed to collect and display local data, both derived from our engagement with a community. The first, Bullfrog, is a bespoke voting device. The second, a series of physical charts, respond to the increasing sophistication of data visualisations by making playful use of pie charts and bar graphs, reimagining them in mechanical forms that are compelling but easily readable.
What does the abundance of data and proliferation of data-making methods mean for the ordinary pe... more What does the abundance of data and proliferation of data-making methods mean for the ordinary person, the person on the street? And, what could they come to mean? In this paper, we present an overview of a year-long project to examine just such questions and complicate, in some ways, what it is to ask them. The project is a collective exercise in which we – a mixture of social scientists, designers and makers – and those living and working on one street in Cambridge (UK), Tenison Road, are working to think through how data might be materialised and come to matter. The project aims to better understand the specificities and contingencies that arise when data is produced and used in place. Mid-way through the project, we use this commentary to give some background to the work and detail one or two of the troubles we have encountered in putting locally relevant data to work. We also touch on a methodological standpoint we are working our way into and through, one that we hope complica...
Proceedings of the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction Extending Boundaries - NordiCHI '10, 2010
... Spyglass. The novels follow Lyra Belacqua and her friend Will Parry as they come of age again... more ... Spyglass. The novels follow Lyra Belacqua and her friend Will Parry as they come of age against the fantasy backdrop of several parallel worlds. ... Indeed the two words are Lyra‟s surnames: Silvertounge and Belacqua. Other ...
Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference on - DIS '12, 2012
ABSTRACT DIYbio (Do It Yourself Biology) aims to 'open source', tinker an... more ABSTRACT DIYbio (Do It Yourself Biology) aims to 'open source', tinker and experiment with biology outside of professional settings. In this paper, we present the origins, practices, and challenges of DIYbio initiatives around the world. Our findings depict DIYbio as operating across intersections ('seams') between a range of stakeholders, materials and concerns. To map out the role of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) across these seams, we present design exercises (functional prototypes) that explore three areas for future work: internal collaboration tools within the DIYbio and professional community; mechanisms for external communication with stakeholders from the general public; and bio-electronic assemblies of organic and digital materials. In doing so, we hope to critically re-envision the role of HCI at the emerging intersection of biology, computation and DIY.
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Papers by Tim Regan