An activity-centered ubiquitous computing framework for supporting occasional human activities in public places
Hélder Pinto · Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (RCAAP Project by FCT) · 2008
A major challenge to ubiquitous computing system designers is the provision of walk-up-and-use solutions for supporting activities performed by occasional visitors to a particular place. When arriving for the first time to a particular place, occasional visitors have little or no idea about what the local environment is providing to support their activity. Furthermore, this support has to be self-explainable and quickly learnable, as occasional visitors are not prepared to interact with an unknown system and do not have time to spend understanding and learning how to use new tools. Ubiquitous computing environments promise to transparently support people in their daily activities by leveraging computing resources existent in the physical environment. Ubiquitous computing can greatly enhance the experience of occasional visitors to public spaces, by offering effective and transparent means for achieving their activities. Moreover, ubiquitous computing interaction artefacts are becoming increasingly cheap, thus allowing for widespread availability throughout public spaces. However, there is still much to do to achieve the vision of a computing system that requires little or no attention at all, so that humans can use the computer unconsciously. Ideally, people should perform an activity requiring computing tools as they perform any other activity, by focusing on the activity itself, and using the computing tool as naturally as other tools. There is thus the need to center the design and development of ubiquitous systems in the human activity, in order to bring computing closer to people and to transparently support activities that take place in the physical world. This work thus follows an activity-centered approach to ubiquitous computing and contributes with ActivitySpot, an activity-centered conceptual and software framework targeted at providing ubiquitous computing support for occasional visitors to public spaces. The conceptual framework aims at modelling human activity and user interaction with the ubiquitous computing system. Undertaking an activity-centered approach to ubiquitous computing system design requires an understanding of how humans think about and carry out their activities. Therefore, this research is grounded on previous work on human activity analysis, namely Activity Theory, a conceptual framework for analyzing human activity developed during the twentieth century. The software framework includes a ubiquitous computing infrastructure for providing the actual support to occasional visitors, tools for deploying ubiquitous computing solutions by non-computer-expert public space administrators, and a software library for developing the support to new activities. Both the conceptual and software framework have been evaluated by a series of end-user studies which showed that ActivitySpot is effective for walk-up-and-use systems, making user interaction with a ubiquitous computing system almost as natural as interacting with other everyday tools. The majority of users clearly reported that ActivitySpot fostered learnability and usability. The choice of using elementary, everyday interaction means with a simple stimulus-response interaction model was also fundamental in the success with end-users. Moreover, the ActivitySpot software framework enables rapid development of the support for new activities and actions, by means of a software library for developers, as well as it eases the deployment and configuration of that support, by means of a graphical user interface authoring tool for public space managers.