Seungyon Claire Lee: BuzzWear: Alert Perception in Wearable Tactile Displays on the Wrist

We present two experiments to evaluate wrist-worn wearable tactile displays (WTDs) that provide easy to perceive alerts for on-the-go users. The first experiment (2304 trials, 12 participants) focuses on the perception sensitivity of tactile patterns and reveals that people discriminate our 24 tactile patterns with up to 99% accuracy after 40 minutes of training. Among the four parameters (intensity, starting point, temporal pattern, and direction) that vary in the 24 patterns, intensity is the most difficult parameter to distinguish and temporal pattern is the easiest. The second experiment (9900 trials, 15 participants) focuses on dual task performance, exploring users' abilities to perceive three incoming alerts from two mobile devices (WTD and mobile phone) with and without visual distraction. The second experiment reveals that, when visually distracted, users' reactions to incoming alerts become slower for the mobile phone but not for the WTD.

Jennifer Stoll: Informal Interactions in Nonprofit Networks
Nonprofit organizations often need to excel in coordinating with other organizations; and they must do so in a variety of contexts and levels from the informal to the formal. Their ability to accomplish their mission can critically depend on their efficacy in managing dependencies on others for tasks, accessing needed resources, raising their profile in the community, and achieving their goals. Although much research has been done to understand systems for supporting formal coordination between organizations, there is a gap in understanding how informal coordination can be supported by systems. As a first step towards addressing this gap, we conducted a field study of a network of nonprofit organizations, focusing specifically on informal interactions among them. Based on this study, we characterize informal coordination between organizations and the context for such interactions. Our findings point to a need to further explore a class of interorganizational interactions that have not been adequately explored or understood by our research community.

Carl DiSalvo: Mapping the Landscape of Sustainable HCI (Best Paper award)
With the recent growth in sustainable HCI, now is a good time to map out the approaches being taken and the intellectual commitments that underlie the area, to allow for community discussion about where the field should go. In this paper, we provide an empirical analysis of how sustainable HCI is defining itself as a research field. Based on a corpus of published works, we identify (1) established genres in the area, (2) key unrecognized intellectual differences, and (3) emerging issues, including urgent avenues for further exploration, opportunities for interdisciplinary engagement, and key topics for debate.

Kimberly Weaver: An Empirical Task Analysis of Warehouse Order Picking Using Head-Mounted Displays
Evaluations of task guidance systems often focus on evaluations of new technologies rather than comparing the nuances of interaction across the various systems. One common domain for task guidance systems is warehouse order picking. We present a method involving an easily reproducible ecologically motivated order picking environment for quantitative user studies designed to reveal differences in interactions. Using this environment, we perform a 12 participant within-subjects experiment demonstrating the advantages of a head-mounted display based picking chart over a traditional text-based pick list, a paper-based graphical pick chart, and a mobile pick-by-voice system. The test environment proved sufficiently sensitive, showing statistically significant results along several metrics with the head-mounted display system performing the best. We also provide a detailed analysis of the strategies adopted by our participants.

Bios:
Seungyon 'Claire' Lee is a PhD candidate in Human-Centered Computing at the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on safety and distraction issues for on-the-go users in mobile and ubiquitous computing. More generally, she is interested in the behavior of on-the-go users in urban contexts who utilize technology for personalization and socialization.  Lee earned her Masters of Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Institute of Technology and Bachelor of Engineering in Architectural Engineering and Bachelor of Science in Housing & Interior Design from Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea).  Lee is a member of the Contextual Computing Group at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which is directed by Prof. Thad Starner. During her PhD studies, she interned at PARC and IBM Almadem Research Center. Before she started her Masters in HCI at Georgia Institute of Technology, she worked as a professional architect specialized in architectural planning and 3D simulation.

Jennifer Stoll is a 3rd-year Ph.D. student in the Human-Centered Computing Program at Georgia Tech. In her research, she examines nonprofit networks with a focus on interorganizational interactions. She currently exploring how these networks of organizations, that are heavily decentralized, work together to actually "get things done". The specific area she is investigating is the prevention of child sex trafficking where a multitude of organizations must coordinate their efforts on an informal basis in order to help victims, share resources, and influence state legislation in order to protect these victims. Such coordination between organizations must occur on a sustained basis. She seeks to understand how web-based technologies can facilitate information sharing within nonprofit networks in order to sustain mobilization and coordination efforts. Her work incorporates aspects of HCI, information security, and applied information visualization.

Carl DiSalvo is an Assistant Professor at The Georgia Institute of Technology, where he directs the Public Design Workshop. His research draws together the humanities, science and technology studies, and interaction design to increase public engagement with technology and analyze the social and political uses of design. He earned a Ph.D. in Design from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006 and was a postdoctoral fellow at CMU from 2006 – 2007, with joint appointments in the Studio for Creative Inquiry and the Center for Arts in Society.

Kimberly Weaver is a Human Centered Computing Ph.D. student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her primary research area is at the intersection of mobile computing, learning sciences, and assistive technology. Currently she is researching how to teach American Sign Language to hearing parents of Deaf children using mobile devices. In Summer 2009, Weaver worked as a researcher for the Technologie-Zentrum Informatik (TZI) at the University of Bremen in Germany focusing on the use of wearable computers for work, learning, and leisure.