Alan Dix - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Alan Dix

Oxford University Press eBooks, Aug 11, 2022

The physical world is increasingly filled with digital products to the extent that the boundaries... more The physical world is increasingly filled with digital products to the extent that the boundaries of digital and physical reality become blurred. From mundane devices such as mobile phones and washing machines, to esoteric research including tangible computation and body implants, we continually bridge two worlds, literally touching buttons and dials and metaphorically touching the bits beyond. The connection between pure thought and abstract information is through solid keyboard and mouse, but likewise the material world of buildings, cars, and running shoes is suffused with computation through sensors, displays, and flashing LEDs. How do people understand this world and how can designers create usable hybrid physical–digital products? This book brings together experience from human–computer interaction and industrial design, exploring these themes under four main headings: human body and mind; objects and things; space; and computation and information. In considering each it looks at the underlying physical processes, our human understanding of them, and then the way these inform and are informed by digital design. The final part of the book draws together the theoretical and practical implications of this for design. This includes practical advice, potential tools, and philosophical underpinnings. Digital technology is fundamentally altering the world we live in but can only be truly understood in relation to the physical world we all inhabit. The most successful future products and policies will be those that take this rich digital/physical ecology seriously.

Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, 2010

Our paths diverge life takes us to the empty places past presences have been here but are lost I ... more Our paths diverge life takes us to the empty places past presences have been here but are lost I touch the brown crackled wallpaper feel past hands touching toes echoing forgotten footfalls 1. NOT BEING THERE Presence is a word pregnant with meaning in both CSCW and VR communities. Normally we are interested in feeling an awareness of people's activities elsewhere. Sometimes we need to explicitly find out what people have been doing in order t o understand the way shared workspaces have changed. Tower's DocuDrama [Schäfer et al., 2001] is an example of this, but the concept of animating changes goes back far further [[**ref**]]. Research in Leeds Met has shown that even marginally 'intelligent' avatars can give virtual visitors a sense of co-presence in an infrequently habited virtual space. This lead t o wondering whether various forms of replaying of human presence could give the same effect, perhaps lights moving on a gallery floor following the footsteps of past ...

Qualitative–quantitative reasoning is the way we think informally about formal or numerical pheno... more Qualitative–quantitative reasoning is the way we think informally about formal or numerical phenomena. It is ubiquitous in scientific, professional and day-to-day life. Mathematicians have strong intuitions about whether a theorem is true well before a proof is found – intuition that also drives the direction of new proofs. Engineers use various approximations and can often tell where a structure will fail. In computation we deal with order of magnitude arguments in complexity theory and data science practitioners need to match problems to the appropriate neural architecture or statistical method. Even in the supermarket, we may have a pretty good idea of about how much things will cost before we get to the checkout. This paper will explore some of the different forms of QQ–reasoning through examples including the author’s own experience numerically modelling agricultural sprays and formally modelling human–computer interactions. We will see that it is often the way in which formal ...

Electronic Workshops in Computing, 2020

Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 2019

Temporally-connected personal blogs contain voluminous textual content, presenting challenges in ... more Temporally-connected personal blogs contain voluminous textual content, presenting challenges in re-visiting and reflecting on experiences. Other data repositories have benefited from natural language processing (NLP) and interactive visualizations (VIS) to support exploration, but little is known about how these techniques could be used with blogs to present experiences and support multimodal interaction with blogs, particularly for authors. This paper presents the effect of reorganization—reorganizing the large blog set with NLP and presenting abstract topics with VIS—to support novel re-visitation experiences to blogs. The BlogCloud tool, a blog re-visitation tool that reorganizes blog paragraphs around user-searched keywords, implements reorganization and similarity-based content grouping. Through a public use session with bloggers who wrote about extended hikes, we observed the effect of NLP-based reorganization in delivering novel re-visitation experiences. Findings suggest th...

Cognitive Processing, 2018

Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Interaction design and children, 2003

CHI '03 extended abstracts on Human factors in computer systems - CHI '03, 2003

Formal Aspects of Computing, 2008

This paper explores the formal specification of the physical behaviour of devices ‘unplugged’ fro... more This paper explores the formal specification of the physical behaviour of devices ‘unplugged’ from their digital effects. By doing this we seek to better understand the nature of physical interaction and the way this can be exploited to improve the design of hybrid devices with both physical and digital features. We use modified state transition networks of the physical behaviour, which we call physiograms, and link these to parallel diagrams of the digital state. These are used to describe a number of features of physical interaction exposed by previous work and relevant properties expressed using a formal semantics of the diagrams. As well as being an analytic tool, the physigrams have been used in a case study where product designers used and adapted them as part of the design process.

arXiv: Physics and Society, 2020

This paper uses a variety of analytic and computational models to assess the impact of university... more This paper uses a variety of analytic and computational models to assess the impact of university student social/study bubbles. Bubbles are being considered as a means to reduce the potential impact of Covid-19 spread within Universities, which may otherwise indirectly cause millions of additional cases in the wider population. The different models agree in broad terms that any breaking of small bubbles into larger units such as a year group or small student halls, will lead to substantial impact on the larger community. This emphasises the need for students to be well-informed and for effective campus test, track and trace.

ACM SIGCHI Bulletin - a supplement to interactions