Browsing by Author "Nunes, Nuno J."
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- Evolving SPIDe Towards the Integration of Requirements Elicitation in Interaction DesignPublication . Rosa, Jean C. S.; Rêgo, Beatriz B. do; Garrido, Filipe A.; Valente, Pedro D.; Nunes, Nuno J.; Matos, Ecivaldo S.Among the various interaction (re)design processes and approaches, SPIDe is a semio-participatory methodological process inspired by communication-centered design. However, the development of computational solutions is not limited to interaction design. Requirements elicitation is also an integral part of this process. Some SPIDe studies indicated that it is also possible to raise requirements through its application due to its participatory characteristics. This article presents an investigation on the feasibility of SPIDe when applied to requirements elic itation integrated with interaction design, presenting an exploratory case study. From the perspective of different experts, we explain the strengths and needs of SPIDe in supporting requirements elicitation integrated into inter action design. Data were collected through logbooks, semi-structured interviews, and the TAM questionnaire and then analyzed through thematic analysis. The results show that the SPIDe use for requirements elicitation integrated into the interaction design is feasible. Furthermore, they indicated that possible improvements in SPIDe could ben efit the development of the computational solutions considering a single application of SPIDe to obtain data for interaction design and requirements elicitation integrated.
- Playing for the planet: designing toys that foster sustainable valuesPublication . Barreto, Mary; Scott, Michelle; Oakley, Ian; Karapanos, Evangelos; Nunes, Nuno J.; Gomes, Sofia; Gomes, JoanaThe children of today are the adults of tomorrow, for this reason it is essential to educate this generation about sustainable values, such as recycling and reducing waste and energy consumption. By targeting children’s main activity of playing and toys, the design of a toy that instills sustainable values is illustrated through PlayGreen, a prototype of an interactive application. We argue that this type of toy should be designed according to children’s cognitive development and their learning skills, as well as conforming to a value centered design process. This paper focuses on Piaget’s cognitive development theory, more specifically, the concrete operational stage processes, which occur between the ages of seven and eleven years old. Our prototype is an application focusing on the value of resource management and allows children to create new toys from household materials. This prototype was tested with 8 and 9 year old children via a Wizard of Oz method. The prototype successfully integrated a value related to sustainability and the users were able to manipulate it easily as it was adequate to their cognitive skills.
- Towards persuasive sociometric technologies for inclusive educational settingsPublication . Lyra, Olga; Karapanos, Evangelos; Gouveia, Rúben; Barreto, Mary; Nisi, Valentina; Nunes, Nuno J.; Zimmerman, John; Forlizzi, JodiWith an increasing interest in the social inclusion of children in schools, HCI researchers have proposed technologies that support children at risk of social exclusion in their interactions with peers. However, much of this work has focused on the child at risk of social exclusion, disregarding the fact that social exclusion is a group phenomenon that often originates in children’s negative stereotyping. In this paper we argue for persuasive sociometric technologies, ones that sense children’s social interactions in real-time, and provide persuasive, just-in time recommendations to children with the goal of challenging their perceptions of diversity and motivating pro-social behaviors. We report on two studies that aimed at inquiring into children’s practices of social exclusion in school communities as well as whether and how persuasive technologies can stimulate pro-social behaviors and a sense of empathy among them.
- Towards using Low-Cost Opportunistic Energy Sensing for Promoting Energy ConservationPublication . Nunes, Nuno J.; Pereira, Lucas; Nisi, ValentinaThis position paper discusses how to leverage low-cost energy sensing to opportunistically develop activity-based approaches to energy conservation. Based on our extensive experience developing low-cost sensing infrastructures and long term deployment of ecofeedback systems, we discuss the possibility of unobtrusively inferring domestic activities from the overall aggregated energy consumption of households. We then postulate how the combination of this information with daily household activities could lead to more effective and meaningful ways to re-aggregate residential energy consumption for the purpose of ecofeedback. Here we briefly present a practical approach towards this new research direction that leverages HCI related methods, in particular using the day reconstruction method to provide semi-supervised approaches for automatic detection of household activities.
- Understanding families’ motivations for sustainable behaviorsPublication . Barreto, Mary L.; Szóstek, Agnieszka; Karapanos, Evangelos; Nunes, Nuno J.; Pereira, Lucas; Quintal, FilipeWhile interest in eco-feedback technologies has peaked over the last decade, research increasingly high lights that simply providing information to individuals regarding their consumption behaviors does not guarantee behavior change. This has lead to an increasing body of work that attempts to characterize individuals’ latent motivations that drive sustainable behaviors. With this paper we aim at expanding this body of work by analyzing such motivations in the context of families. We report findings from inter views with 15 families who used an eco-feedback interface over a period of 2 years. Our study reveals that motivations for sustainable behavior were not only rooted in individuals’ environmental concerns and need for expense management but they also regarded: (i) individuals’ and families’ need for a sense of control and security, (ii) parents’ self-perceived responsibility of their role as parents and (iii) the percep tion of individual as well as family identity. We argue that in order for eco-feedback technologies to attain long-lasting behavioral changes in the domestic environment they need to address basic family needs that go beyond individual ideals of pro-environmental behavior
- Understanding the limitations of eco-feedback: a one-year long-term studyPublication . Pereira, Lucas; Quintal, Filipe; Barreto, Mary; Nunes, Nuno J.For the last couple of decades the world has been witnessing a change in habits of energy consumption in domestic environments, with elec tricity emerging as the main source of energy consumed. The effects of these changes in our eco-system are hard to assess, therefore encouraging researchers from different fields to conduct studies with the goal of understanding and im proving perceptions and behaviors regarding household energy consumption. While several of these studies report success in increasing awareness, most of them are limited to short periods of time, thus resulting in a reduced knowledge of how householders will behave in the long-term. In this paper we attempt to reduce this gap presenting a long-term study on household electricity consump tion. We deployed a real-time non-intrusive energy monitoring and eco feedback system in 12 families during 52 weeks. Results show an increased awareness regarding electricity consumption despite a significant decrease in interactions with the eco-feedback system over time. We conclude that after one year of deployment of eco-feedback it was not possible to see any significant increase or decrease in the household consumption. Our results also confirm that consumption is tightly coupled with independent variables like the house hold size and the income-level of the families.
- Watt-I-see: design and evaluation of an interactive installation using eco-feedforward strategiesPublication . Quintal, Filipe; Barreto, Mary; Jorge, Clinton; Nisi, Valentina; Nunes, Nuno J.In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of Watt-I-See (WISE), a tangible interactive installation aimed at probing awareness in two target audiences (children and adults) about renew able energy resources that could inform eco-feedforward strategies. Our system combines a tan gible interface representing five different energy sources, with a set of Lego™ blocks used to manipulate different weather conditions that affect the available energy mix. Through the evalu ation of WISE, our main goal was to expose users to the effort necessary to produce the energy used in our day-to-day lives. We evaluated the installation separately for children and adults. The focus on children was due to their importance in the overall household consumption and their role in future scenarios where consumers will have to adapt to the availability of renewable energy sources. The focus on adults was to observe the impact of such information in their decision mak ing regarding their routines. Our findings highlight the success of the interface in engaging chil dren and adults, creating awareness between weather conditions and energy production and the fossil-fuel energy baseline in the grid. Overall, the study highlights the importance of providing a close point-of-interaction feedback as it enables a better understanding of energy-related decisions, reactions, and availability of resources.
- What-a-Watt: exploring electricity production literacy through a long term eco-feedback studyPublication . Quintal, Filipe; Pereira, Lucas; Nunes, Nuno J.; Nisi, ValentinaThis paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of an eco-feedback system capable of providing detailed household consumption information and also real-time production breakdown per energy source. We build on recent studies reporting an increased awareness generated by eco feedback systems that also integrate micro-production information, taking advantage of a closed grid production network on an island with a high concentration of renewables, we deployed the What-a-Watt system in a building with 9 households for a period of 34 consecutive weeks. Results show that all the participating families have shown increased awareness of the production and distribution of electricity, thus becoming more familiarized with concepts such as the different sources of energy and how their availability relates to external variables such as weather conditions and time of day. Furthermore, our results also show, that the families using our system have managed to reduce their overall consumption. This research is a first attempt to provide more effective eco-feedback systems to consumers by integrating complex Smartgrid information in the feedback.