David Roedl | Human-Computer Interaction Design

On Friday I attended the annual conference of the Humanities and Technology Association, held this year at nearby Rose-Hulman Insititue of Technology in Terre Haute. The conference theme this year was “Sustainable Transformations: Technology and its Environments”, a theme that brought together a diverse collection of presentations. I enjoyed many of the talks and had some interesting conversations with other presenters.

One of the highlights for me, was J. Anthony Langlois’ talk, “Reactive environments through politicized artworks”. Langlois’ argument was as follows: We (as a culture) need to change. In order to change we must have dialogue. In order to have effective dialogue, we need to be informed. He then described artistic attempts to “make the invisible visible” by way of eye-catching (often new-media based) visualization of otherwise unseen data. His examples were diverse and provocative: energy orbs, networked umbrellas, cameras in drag, to name a few. Data visualization has been an interest of mine for some time, particularly persuasive visualization to motivate sustainable behavior. Coming from an artistic background, Langlois’ angle was a slightly different. The examples he gave were not meant to motivate particular behaviors, aid in specific task, or even convey any exact message. Rather they were meant for the viewer to take notice, react viscerally, and then ask important questions. This is an interesting perspective which I hope to explore in my work.

Later in the afternoon, Kristin Hanks and I presented our undergraduate survey research, “attitudes toward sustainability and the material effects of interactive technologies.” While many of the conference goers opted for the other session at the time, we did have a sizable audience of Rose undergrads. As a nice complement to our talk, James Adams of Troy University presented some survey results on undergrad opinions on sustainability. His conclusion was that the majority of students care about sustainability, although they aren’t quite sure what it means. After our presentation, we had some positive feedback from the academics in the audience, which developed in some interesting conversations about the complexity of achieving sustainable technology.

All in all, it was a fun conference with multidisciplinary perspectives on sustainability.

In a conceptual design for this year’s CHI competition, our team targeted an available but yet uncommon technology: windshield-projected head-up-displays. The crux of our design was to present real-time data that would influence driver behavior. The behavior we were interested in was not some occasional task, but rather the constant, and largely unconscious pattern of braking and acceleration which greatly effects fuel economy. So in order to intervene we needed the driver to give frequent, if not constant, awareness to our display.

Safety being a huge concern, we chose to implement our interface on a head-up display, projected onto the windshield. Such displays are always available in the driver’s peripheral vision and thus have been proven to minimize the amount of time a driver takes their eyes away from the road. So far they’ve been utilized commercially in limited application, such as speedometers and fuel guages.

Many questioned our choice to use this technology, with concerns about the feasibility and practicality. We were confident, however, that it was the most appropriate form to deliver the information. And it appears we’re not the only ones betting on the benefits. Microsoft has just recently applied for a patent for an adaptive heads-up user interface for automobiles . Read more about it here.

As we say in design, ideas are cheap, its execution that counts. Well seeing your design ideas duplicated by a major company is a nice validation of your thinking ability. I’m just looking forward to the day when I’m able to put some money behind my ideas, and execute ;)

Being a designer of information technologies with a strong concern for social issues, this question often pervades my thinking: can the simple dissemination of information instigate cultural change?

For me personally at least, key encounters with information seem to have drastically altered my path in life. My interest in sustainability, for example, I can almost completely attribute to three simple graphs that were shown to me by Prof. David Haberman in the spring of 2005. Continue »