These are my notes from four talks given at This Happened Edinburgh #9.

Experimenting Mobile Personal Data for a Smart Living

A project in Trento: Mobile Territorial Lab by Gianluca Zaffiro

Personal data for a cloud. Living in a world full of data but no way t build value added services without it.

Need a service platform open for development, add analysis and personalisation, must be available in real time.

Users are a constant source of data thanks to devices.

Currently we are in an organisation centric model, need to move to a user centric model - each person is in charge of our own personal data. Create rules for data sharing.

What is MTL project about? Partnership project aimed at research and service. An "open facility".

Objectives are basic research and service research, development and innovation.

150 users in a community, smart phones are sending logs of activity - calls, sensors &c. App to manage levels of access to data - personal data store. Rules are central to this. Community is people with young children - exchange information about routes to school, places to buy products cheaply.

Data is at the centre of Smart Living. Explores how to handle Privacy concerns raised by data exploitation.

Audio Driven Interaction

Used location information and sound design to make a game. Walk around to hunt creatures based on sound information - no graphics. Uses binaural sound - like 3D sound for headphones. Game is created based on GPS data but doesn't work indoors so developed method using phone's attitude sensors to work indoors.

Why sound interaction?

• experience
• communication
• emotion
• imagination

Core focus is on an experience - everything must be focused on the user experience. Evaluating the user's experience was a challenge to ask the right questions.

If people were not finding things the system picked this up and reset the map.

Currently runs in the cloud, try to move to device as the next step.

Not investigated the possibilities for assistive technology for partially sighted users.

Desktop Olympics

Interaction design workshops over five days.

What is a game? Applied same principles as ancient Olympics to office tools. Seven disciplines. Kept it to technologies that office workers are familiar with.

• Scroll racing
• Cursor slalom
• File archery
• Notepad fencing (delete the other person's name from a document)

And that's all that were mentioned.

Biggest finding was that people were happy to participate.

The details are online.

Personal relationships with the city

Places that shape a relationship with a city, emotions related to an experience and a place. Mark the five most important places on the map and add a smiley to indicate the emotion. Extended to an observed walking and talking tour of the places they had identified on the map. Identified places that jogged their memory, walking created a relaxed environment with equal conversation partners between subject and researcher. Plutchik emotion wheel used to record emotions. Created rich intimate descriptions. Intensive for researcher, time consuming (1 or 2 hours), data analysis was daunting.

Main findings: people regulate the way they feel by going for walks and visiting places that change the way they feel in a positive way.

Alt. CHI paper on "Walking & Talking" method.