Abstract:
Mobile media devices such as MP3-players and digital cameras are becoming increasingly popular – standalone or integrated into mobile phones. They bring with them new practices, as well as a design space of new mobile media experiences. In this talk, I will present two projects, Context Photography and Push!Music, which explore some of this design space.

Context Photography explores an alternative photographic experience – different from today’s trend towards automation and more mega pixels.
In context photography, sensors gather real-time context information which visually affects a photograph as it is taken. Our current prototype runs on standard camera phones, and uses sound and movement as context information. In a six-week exploratory study, we investigated how people experience, use and understand a context camera and how it differs from regular digital photography. The results from this study illuminate for example the role of context in context photography and how the participants interacted in new way to take pictures.

Push!Music is an innovative mobile music listening and sharing system. It enables users to wirelessly send songs between each other as recommendations. Users can also automatically receive songs that have autonomously copied themselves from nearby players depending on listening behaviour and similar music history. We conducted a two- week preliminary user study of Push!Music, where a group of five friends used the application in their everyday life. We learned for example that the shared music in Push!Music became a start for social interaction and that received songs (personal recommendations and autonomously copied songs) were highly appreciated and could be looked upon as “treats”.

Bio:
Maria Håkansson is a PhD student in Applied Information Technology at the Göteborg University in Sweden, and works as a researcher at the Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute, also in Göteborg. She joined the lab in 2002 and started working with tangible and ubiquitous computing. Her current research projects are in the fields of mobile and ubiquitous computing and focus on new user experiences in mobile media, particularly in digital photography and mobile music. Maria is interested in the user-centred design and evaluation process of her projects. She previously obtained an MA in computational linguistics from Göteborg University.

If you would like to meet with Maria, or for more information, please contact Jofish Kaye.