About
Overview
The Interaction Design Lab explores social and technical issues in the design, implementation, and evaluation of information and communication technologies. We conduct research in mobile computing, technologies for health and wellness, social networking, affective computing, design theory, and related areas. Our work seeks to understand how technology can help enable more healthy, socially connected, reflective living.
Focus Areas
Mediated Participation
- Creative ways of fostering engagement, and ways of fostering creative engagement.
Mobile Health
– Applications running on the mobile platform are uniquely positioned to assess health behavior and to support health-related decision making. The mHealth team works on three broad tasks:
First, we work to understand how physiological health characteristics (such as affect and stress) are best measured. We draw on the Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) class of data collection methods, meaning collection is frequent, in-situ, and as unobtrusive as possible. Where necessary, we develop new measures, for example the Photographic Affect Meter.
Second, we work to understand and encourage the role of social support in health decisions. We have done this by fostering emotional awareness and emotion sharing among out-patients, by building open- ended social awareness tools for health decision tracking, and more.
Third, we work to understand the relationship between in-application behavior, EMA measures, psychological measures such as self-efficacy, and actual health outcomes.
Social Networks
– The purpose of this research is to understand how mobile phones can be used to employ various forms of social interactions and interventions to encourage healthy behavior.Social influence has been shown to play an important role in persuasion and the motivation of behavior change; countless studies, both involving technology and not, have shown that individuals grouped with peers have better results in quitting drinking, quitting smoking, losing weight, exercising, and even surviving cancer.
Sustainable Design – IDL sustainable design projects focus on broad cultural understandings of sustainability and everyday practices.