SUMMARY: 1st Workshop on Designing & Evaluating Mobile Systems for Collocated Group Use @ Mobile HCI 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden http://nirmalpatel.com/mobile_collocated/index.html Submission deadline: April 30, 2011 FULL CALL: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PAPERS 1st Workshop on Designing & Evaluating Mobile Systems for Collocated Group Use @ Mobile HCI 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden http://nirmalpatel.com/mobile_collocated/index.html Submission deadline: April 30, 2011 With the proliferation of mobile devices it has become common to see groups of users working or playing together using multiple mobile devices. While much effort is exerted to ensure that interaction with a mobile device is useful for each individual user, less effort has gone into considering how to design and evaluate mobile interfaces and platforms for group use. Recent improvements in the interaction, computing, connectivity and general flexibility of mobile devices make them an ideal, yet underutilized, platform for group level interaction. The purpose of this workshop is to encourage discussion and exploration of the collocated group use of mobile devices and to shed light on the challenges of designing and evaluating mobile collocated group experiences. There are many open research questions in this space, but this workshop will concentrate discussion on HCI issues. Topics/Questions of Interest ============================ - How does the size of the group impact the collocated group experience? - As groups change size, how does the physical orientation of the group members impact the experience? - How do existing social relationships within the group effect interaction with the technology? - At what point in the design cycle should these relationships be considered/designed around? - Should and can we leverage information on social networking sites regarding social groups to improve the process that precede the group interaction (both technical and physical group formation)? - How do we design interactions with technology while keeping in mind that due to the collocated nature of the group, interactions, for example non-verbal body language, occur outside of the sensing scope of the system? - When we can sense communication between participants that is not directed at the system (i.e. listening for speech), how can we leverage the information to provide a more fluid experience? - Can a well designed experience stretch the feeling of being a collocated group beyond just a measure of physical distance? - Unlike traditional, groupware it is common for users to have wildly divergent mobile devices in terms of physical affordances and software platforms. Can we develop engineering and design techniques that avoid a lowest common denominator approach and instead accentuate the devices' different capabilities to increase overall usefulness? - Evaluating mobile collocated group-use of technology has its own set of challenges. What are these challenges and what have participants done to overcome these challenges? - How can we move beyond just designing for the mobile phone? Can ensembles of mobile devices be used to support mobile collocated group interaction? Goals ===== The goal of this workshop is to hear from fellow researchers who are interested in the mobile-collocated space. Primarily we will focus on developing a canonical set of implications for design and evaluation. Participants for this workshop should submit 2-4 page papers on finished projects or works-in-progress describing their own work which may fall in the domain of mobile-collocated use. The workshop will start with quick presentations of the accepted papers. The majority of the time will be spent breaking into groups based on interest in design or evaluation and trying to distill some of the common recurring themes from the individual works. Groups will then speak quickly about the resultant themes and the workshop as a whole will comment. By the end, we will have compiled a list of design and evaluation principles that can help guide future efforts in the mobile collocated research space. A secondary goal is to uncover current emergent uses of mobile technology to enhance mobile-collocated interaction (such as sharing photos with the camera LCD) and to compile a list of scenarios in which designing these systems makes sense. This will help us and the participants find new domains of interaction in which a more considered design approach could results in better overall interaction. Finally, participants will be encouraged to bring demonstrations of their systems to the workshop to be shown to the participants as a conversational aid used to ground the discussion. For more details please see our website at: http://nirmalpatel.com/mobile_collocated/index.html Important Dates =============== Submissions Due: April 30th, 2011 by 23:59 PDT (UTC-7) Acceptance Notification: May 21, 2011 Camera Ready: June 1, 2011 Workshop: August 30, 2011 Submissions =========== Submissions should be a maximum of four pages in the MobileHCI 2011 Archive Format and address open research questions on the topics of interest which will be used to foster workshop discussion. Submissions are due by April 30th, 2011 by 23:59 PDT (UTC-7) and should be emailed to mobile.collocated@gmail.com. A small committee will peer-review submitted papers. Papers will be selected based on several criteria: - Does the paper fit the theme of the workshop? - How potentially transformative are the ideas in the paper? - Does the paper address the research questions of the workshop, or pose new research questions? - Is the paper well-written? Notification of acceptance will be provided by May 21st, 2011. Please note that accepted workshop papers will NOT be published in the conference proceedings nor in the ACM Digital Library. However, the accepted papers will be disbursed to all participants so that they may familiarize themselves with the workshop material prior to attending. Workshop Format =============== The workshop will follow the full-day format to allow for as much discussion as possible amongst the participants. We will divide the workshop into four parts (pre- and post- break for the morning and afternoon). During the first session, each participant will give a very short presentation (duration dependent on number of accepted participants) explaining his or her research and ideas to the other participants. To encourage discussion, a “back channel”—a web page simultaneously editable/viewable by many users—will be available to participants. During presentations, the other participants will be encouraged to use the back channel to note directions for further discussion. After the morning break, we will hold a group discussion about themes which emerged across the participant’s talks. Those themes will be the focus of the first half of the afternoon’s agenda. There will be 3–5 breakout groups formed to discuss in-depth some of the ideas and issues that were noted during the morning. In the remaining time, the participants will be brought back together, and a representative from each group will present the results of the discussion and talk about future opportunities. Organizers ========== Nirmal Patel is a Ph.D. student at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the Computer Science program with a focus on HCI. Nirmal has a Bachelors and Masters degree in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Nirmal is currently a User Experience Researcher at Google. His research is primarily focused on determining the design and evaluation issues when creating groupware experiences for groups of mobile, collocated users. Email : nirmal@gatech.edu Website : http://nirmalpatel.com James Clawson is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology who hopes to complete his Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing in the Summer of 2011. Focused on examining mobile communication, James conducts research in two areas: mobile text input and the collocated group-use of mobile technology. Email : jamer@cc.gatech.edu Website : http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~jamer/