Supporting early-stage ubicomp experimentation
John Canny, Scott Alan Carter · 2007
The thesis of this dissertation is that tools and techniques that leverage pre-existing infrastructures, human operators, and the increasing power of mobile devices can improve innovation, development, and evaluation of ubicomp applications. Specifically, we can encourage innovation by developing methods and tools that support situated needfinding; facilitate prototyping by developing tools and methods that eliminate the need to write code by using human operators and simple, rule-based systems; and reduce the burden of evaluations by minimizing infrastructure deployment, capturing and encouraging feedback from critical events, and using devices and interfaces with which participants are already comfortable. In this thesis, we describe fieldwork that led to a set of core challenges for ubicomp experimentation. From this fieldwork we derive a set of requirements to support early-stage ubicomp experimentation. We then describe the iterative development of a system we built based on the requirements, Momento.