The ubiquity of low-cost, sensor-rich, mobile computing devices has meant that designing context-aware systems is now a common concern in Information Architecture. Because of how prevalent context-aware systems have become, the way in which practitioners design context-aware systems is of great importance. While design frameworks and models have been proposed for context-aware computing systems...

Use experience has been proposed as a primary goal and driving force in interactive system design, raising the issue of how evidence can be gathered to design for ‘use experience’. According to particular views in anthropology, experience can be studied analyzing its expressions. We provide examples of this, from two projects: the configuration of open prototypes in a co-development project to ...

During unmoderated discussions it is commonly observed that some people end up having more influence than seems justified by the actual quality of their contributions. In this paper, we propose and illustrate a spreading-activation architecture for modeling such differential influence. In our model, each participant’s level of influence vis-à-vis others in a discussion emerges out of the interp...

Many have proposed that autobiographical stories do more than describe a pre-existing self. Sometimes narrators can change who they are, in part, by telling stories about themselves. But how does this narrative self-construction happen? Most explanations rely on the representational function of autobiographical discourse. These representational accounts of narrative self-construction are necess...

As project-based industries such as Architecture, Engineering and Construction globalize, workers require strategies for managing conflict in virtual project networks. Our aim in this paper is to explore the efficacy of boundary objects as tools to mediate conflict in culturally-diverse, distributed networks. Based on annotated recordings for eight networks of graduate student engineers, we dem...

This paper describes SynFace, a supportive technology that aims at enhancing audio-based spoken communication in adverse acoustic conditions by providing the missing visual information in the form of an animated talking head. Firstly, we describe the system architecture, consisting of a 3D animated face model controlled from the speech input by a specifically optimised phonetic recogniser. Seco...

In recent years, some people have tried to incorporate semantics into virtual scenes in order to create virtual environments close to the real world as much as possible. Our purpose in writing this paper is to present the OntSceneBuilder object-oriented software system that uses any domain ontology for visualization and management of the virtual scenes. The ontology provides a precise specifica...