Our NMD students are trained to become research professionals in the field of human-computer interaction (sometimes also referred to as computer-human interaction, for instance in the largest conference in the field, which is abbreviated as CHI). Although there has been a professional association connecting all HCI professionals located in The Netherlands for a long time, this association had been somewhat dormant. Fortunately, several HCI enthusiasts, including our own teachers, Jan de Wit and Karin Slegers(!), have committed themselves to reviving this association. Therefore, we proudly present to you: the new and revitalised CHI Nederland!!
CHI Nederland will be increasingly present in the coming months (and hopefully in years to come!) through the organisation of events focused on themes such as eHealth, HCI education, and inclusive design, to name just a few. Everyone in HCI (both students and professionals) are warmly invited to join this community of HCI professionals in The Netherlands, or even to become active members, by joining one of the task forces that are currently working hard to shape the future of CHI Nederland.
You can find more information on the CHI Nederland website, including links to the social media channels used for communication within the community and information about upcoming events. We hope to meet many of you there!
In our master course Interactive Storytelling, students create their own non-fiction interactive digital narratives. In these interactive narratives, readers become interactors who can engage with the characters, choose which storyline to follow, which perspectives to explore, et cetera. The design of the interactive narratives is justified by theories about the experience and effects of (interactive) narratives. In the ’20-’21 edition of the course, the theme for all interactive digital narratives was diversity and inclusion (see our previous blogpost on this theme). The students came up with impressive interactive narratives on a diverse range of subtopics, from inequality on the work floor to the prejudices towards the LGBTQ community. We proudly showcase some of the narratives below.
Aged lets you explore the challenges that elderly people face at work or in everyday situations.
On the same subtopic, Meet May lets you step into the shoes of May, a 71 y/o grandmother who is confronted and struggles with innovative technology.
Is this your friend? is about an elementary school friendship between cultures. Interactors learn how different cultures experience and cope with diversification, and get to decide how the story ends.
Town is about implicit biases concerning gender, sexuality, disabilities, ethnicity, and visual appearance. The interactor is invited to explore different stories and reflect on his/her own biases.
In Listen up, you get to experience what it is like to have a hearing impairment on the work floor. Learn what it takes to feel included at work as a young hearing-impaired person.
Hop on a job lets children aged 11-14 yo experience different occupations. This interactive narrative hopes to reduce prejudices towards low status occupations and create awareness of the required skills and necessity of these jobs.
In We regret to inform you, you become a recruiter and discover which choices recruiters have to make, which prejudices they may have and how this affects the applicants who want to secure their place in the labour market.
And do have a look at these interactive narratives as well:
NMD lecturer Alwin de Rooij, Iris Wijers, and NMD alumnus Manon Marinussen have received the “Best paper award” at the 32nd European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics. The paper develops a theoretical basis for “augmented interoception“, which details a novel way to use sensing technology to enable people to discover new relationships between their physiological changes and subjective inner experiences.
The paper further details an experiment where participants use a technology that translates their eye’s pupil size, which is normally not accessible to the biological senses, into audible sound in real-time during several thinking tasks. The results of the study suggested that the participants were able, to some extent, to learn new relationships between changes in their thinking processes (e.g., experiences of effort) that correlate with changes in their eye’s pupils, and the sounds that the technology produced.
One of our master students, Jazzy Beek, is currently working on her master thesis project. In this blog post, Jazzy and her supervisor Hendrik Engelbrecht describe how the NMD courses Interactive Storytelling and Data and (Mis)Information have helped shape this master thesis by combining different fields.
Online, an abundance of knowledge is only a mouse click away. While humans have never experienced access to such a diversity of high quality information, filtering fact from fiction has become increasingly difficult as well. Misinformation is widespread and pervasive, which poses serious challenges to societies that base policy on evidence-based approaches. An often used form of misinformation is that of narratives.
Narratives are omnipresent: be it novels, movies, commercials or even social media posts. So much of our daily lives consist of writing, telling, listening, or reading stories. In the Interactive Storytelling course, students learn what makes narratives so powerful at persuasion. For instance, narratives are often much stronger than evidence-based arguments, because they are engaging and easier to process and comprehend.
Did you ever read a book or watch a movie in which one of the main characters tragically experiences terminal illness and you felt really sad? This is also called “identification”, which means perceiving the story events from the character’s perspective. When you identify with a character in a narrative, you are less likely to generate counterarguments against the message in the narrative. Readers or viewers are therefore more tolerant towards lower accuracy of the presented information because stories appeal to emotion rather than reason.
Because of this, misinformation is commonly spread in the form of a narrative. There are many examples of misleading narratives online, such as the myth that vaccinations cause autism. What makes these narratives often so powerful is that they appeal to a very basic human emotion – fear. Misinformation typically makes use of so-called fear appeals in order to persuade the reader. For example, the narrative about how vaccinations cause autism has led to considerable fear for many parents, which eventually resulted in the rise of vaccine-preventable diseases. In the Data and (Mis)Information course, students learn to develop a critical attitude towards data and information and explore questions such as “Why do people believe in the link between vaccinations and autism?”. Understanding the process of how (mis)information works presents the first step towards fighting it.
Jazzy’s thesis combines these approaches by investigating whether misinformation in narrative fear appeals is more accepted among readers who identify with a character. In her study she uses a narrative fear appeal, in the form of a social media post, to see how a seemingly harmless behavior can be turned on it’s head to create a threat.
The need to understand how misinformation affects people’s perceptions has become especially urgent now. Understanding how this affects people’s perceptions will hopefully lead to better ways to tackle misinformation.
Curious about Jazzy’s blog post for the course Data and (Mis)Information about fighting misinformation with storytelling? Click here!
In this blog post, Jan de Wit writes about an article he recently published together with NMD graduates Alicia van der Kraan and Joep Theeuwes. In this article, they present the findings of the research that Alicia and Joep conducted for their master’s theses. It was published in a special issue on digital games and mental health, as part of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. You can find the full article here.
There is a rise in the popularity of live streaming platforms, on which streamers broadcast content, mostly related to videogames, to an audience of viewers that tune in from all over the world. While watching the streamer play games, the viewers are able to interact with each other, and sometimes also with the streamer, by using the chat function that is part of the platform. These interactive features enable the streamers to build a tight-knit community around them.
Twitch from the viewer’s perspective. On the left is a list of popular channel suggestions (blurred for privacy), in the middle the broadcasted game and streamer, on the right the chat.
The majority of people active on Twitch, currently the most popular live streaming platform, are male (81.5%), and 55% of users are between 18 and 34 years old. This can be a difficult time in a person’s life, where the transition from adolescence into adulthood takes place. Not being able to successfully complete these transitional steps, including figuring out your identity, career, and relationships with others, could lead to experiencing various mental health issues such as anxiety or depression. There are several invasive life events that could happen at any age, such as break-ups, financial stress, or death of a loved one, that can lead to mental health issues as well. This particular demographic to which the majority of Twitch users belong is however relatively unlikely to seek out professional help when needed.
We therefore wondered if platforms such as Twitch could provide comfort for people going through these difficult and stressful times. We were also curious to learn whether people’s viewing behaviour changed during these difficult times, for example by actively seeking out smaller communities to have more meaningful interaction. To investigate whether this is indeed the case, we conducted a survey with 84 participants, all current Twitch viewers that were going through a difficult period in life when filling in the survey, or had experienced such a difficult period in the past.
The majority of participants indicated that Twitch helped them cope, and that it became a larger part of their lives during the difficult period compared to regular viewing. Recurring themes were the entertainment, distraction, and sense of community Twitch offers. Viewing behaviour during difficult periods appears to remain largely the same in terms of the streamers that are watched, although time spent viewing increases, and there is a change toward more time spent actively watching rather than having the stream on in the background. Several participants shared anecdotes of times when they benefitted from participating in a streamer’s community, and were sometimes even helped by the streamer directly (e.g., through self-disclosure from the streamer discussing their problems).
In summary, our research shows that streamers, supported by platforms such as Twitch, serve an important purpose for people that are active on the platform and are going through a difficult time, even without consciously attempting to do so. It is important to note, however, that the interactions that happen on Twitch are not a replacement for any kind of professional support. At the same time, we do believe that the streamers and viewers active on Twitch are able to contribute to mental health awareness and literacy, and hope that they are able to remove some of the obstacles that prevent people from seeking out additional help when needed.
In our research skills course Rapid Prototyping, taught by Simone Ashby, students learn how to create prototypes to answer research questions. In this blog post, Eveline de Groot, Laura Beamuz, Markus Pandrea, and Nour Tanak, who took this course in the fall of 2020, talk about their group assignment, and the prototype they’ve created.
huggie – embracing the distance
For the Rapid Prototyping course, the assignment was to formulate a research question that addresses a specific problem space, and to develop a prototype that impacts the world. Looking at present-day world problems, we unanimously agreed on COVID-19 and elderly as a focus. Our assumption was that the elderly feel lonely and isolated, which has become more evident as the COVID-19 pandemic shifted to the forefront of their daily lives. We experienced this first hand with our own grandparents, since they were forced to socially distance themselves from their loved ones. This social distancing led to the absence of physical affection, which is greatly missed. Our focus point became haptic sensory technologies and how these could be of help during social distancing. In the end, we came up with the following research question: How can remote haptic sensory technologies decrease feeling of loneliness among the elderly?
We saw this assignment and this research question as an opportunity to get out of our comfort zones, as we set out to create a prototype of a product with not just digital components, but also physical parts. Throughout the course, we first engaged in individual parallel prototyping (see sketches below), after which we combined our best findings and ideas into a collectively iterative prototype .
Sketches of individual prototypes
Through several iterations (low, medium, and high fidelity) and feedback moments with Simone, we converged to a prototype that we came to call huggie. Huggie is a smart pillow (see pictures below) that connects people remotely through a sensory and tactile experience.
Medium fidelity prototype. This prototype was merged from the individual low fidelity prototypes during the parallel session, into one iterative prototype.
Besides a pillow, huggie also features a shirt (see high-fidelity prototype below). Both the pillow and the shirt are made of smart fabrics. The smart fabric of the pillow simulates the heartbeat and temperature of your loved ones and takes in the pressure of their hug. This data is sent wirelessly to the compatible, connected shirt. When one person hugs the pillow, the other person wearing a compatible shirt feels the pressure of the hug, heartbeat, and temperature of the other, bringing them closer to each other despite the distance. The lit-up huggie logo indicates that you and your loved one are connected over distance.
High fidelity prototype. The complete huggie concept with the logo, pillow, shirt, and box design.
We, Eveline de Groot, Laura Beamuz, Markus Pandrea, and Nour Tanak, as a group, had a lot of fun exploring the different ways to prototype and develop something we had come to love so passionately. Huggie is a product of love, born from the love we have for our grandparents struggling with the isolation.
Virtual reality (VR) technologies have been shown to be effective for teleoperation, or human operation of a machine at a distance. For instance, the integration of teleoperator and VR technologies allows for more accurate and safe human operation of machinery under high-risk conditions by providing immersive and realistic experiences. Particularly interesting in the body of research on VR-based teleoperators is the finding that rendering realism or human-likeness into the virtual body of a teleoperator seems to contribute to the perceptual illusion that the telerobot’s hands are part of worker’s body. Previous studies have shown that such an illusion improves the controllability of teleoperators and therefore enhances task performance.
However, a recent study by Mincheol Shin, who joined our NMD team this semester as an assistant professor, suggests that a human-like virtual body may not only have positive outcomes when operators carry out high-risk tasks. Although the use of a human-like virtual hand for teleoperation might enhance perceived body ownership of a teleoperator, Mincheol suspected that this may at the same time incur negative effects on workers’ task performance and their intention to use a VR-based teleoperator in the future, as a human-like virtual body may increase the level of perceived risk.
Robotic and human-like virtual hands used in the experiment (Retrieved from Leap Motion)
To research this further, Mincheol and his team compared a robotic and a human-like virtual hand in a virtual factory environment that allows for the teleoperation of a metal press machine in a virtual environment. Natural three-dimensional movement of a virtual hand was rendered using the Leap Motion software development kit (SDK), which allows for the seamless tracking of the forearm and fingers without the use of wearable devices (i.e., gloves). For the rendering of both robotic and human-like virtual hands, the Leap Motion core asset was used.
In the experiment, participants were instructed to put themselves into the shoes of factory workers who operate machinery using a VR-based teleoperator at a distance. In the virtual factory environment, participants were assigned a task that involved grasping raw material and placing it under a metal press machine. After the machine pressed the raw material, participants were to complete the task by grasping the processed material and placing it on a conveyor belt. During the task, participants were interrupted by the sound of an alarm if their hands got trapped in the machine, which indicated failure of the task, after which they had to restart. To manipulate the perceived risk of danger, different pressing intervals were implemented: 3 seconds in the low-risk condition and 1 second in the high-risk condition.
The virtual factory environment developed for the experiment showing the start button (A), the raw material (B), the metal press machine (C) and the conveyor belt situated on the right side of the work desk (D).
Mincheol’s research confirmed his suspicion, as he found that the rendering of realism into a virtual body for VR-based teleoperation paradoxically decreased the workers’ task performance by increasing their perceived risk. In addition, this increase in risk perception was found to reduce the intention to use the VR-based teleoperator in the future. Mincheol’s findings suggest that the enhancement of perceived embodiment in VR-based teleoperation may backfire when the risk of danger is high.
As such, while rendering realism into new media technologies has long been assumed to have positive effects on user’s perceptions, this study demonstrates that realism could backfire depending on situational contexts. To both HCI researchers and UX designers, the findings of this research provide some food for thought with respect to the role of realism in designing new media technologies.
This research was published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior and can be accessed via this link to the paper).
Simone Ashby, who joined our team of NMD teachers this summer, has co-authored an essay in a very interesting book that was published last month. It will especially appeal to our (former) students who’ve enjoyed the design fiction assignment in the UX Design course (and to anyone who appreciates speculative design in general)!
The book is titled Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon. It is a volume of essays inspired by the revival of interest in Hannah Arendt and edited by Eduardo Staszowski (Parsons School of Design) and Virginia Tassinari (Politecnico di Milano). In her essay, which she wrote together with Julian Hanna, James Auger, and Sónia Matos, Simone wrote on the theme “Common World” — breaking it down for closer analysis into sub-themes such as “Common Time”, “Common Good”, and “Common Market”.
The book is part of a provocative new series, Designing in Dark Times / Radical Thinkers in Design, which is intended to “push at the boundaries of contemporary design thinking, responding to the world’s current and pressing social, economic, and environmental challenges and crises”. Forthcoming titles include Politics of the Everyday by Ezio Manzini and Designs to Reshape Humanity by Ann Light, as well as new editions of Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy by Tony Fry and Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby.
One of our recent NMD graduates, Oana Bogdescu, published an interesting article about her master’s thesis on the social journalism platform Medium.com. Oana’s thesis is about cognitive bias, or systematic errors in human thinking processes due to irrational judgement. In our irrational world, for instance, we find it easy to point out someone else’s fallibility but we often fail to see our own. Although everyone is prone to cognitive bias, we always seems to believe we ourselves are less susceptible than others.
Oana researched the role such cognitive biases play in UX practitioners’ work. What are the implications of the naive self-image regarding cognitive bias, and how can this be reduced? Read all about her findings in her article on Medium.com!
From having never done any academic research to passing my master’s thesis with flying colors and presenting my thesis study at an actual academic conference in Amsterdam. My time at Tilburg University the past 2 years has been quite the rollercoaster for me! In this blog entry, I am going to tell you more about my thesis topic of interactive narratives and how I got to present it at Etmaal 2020.
Let me introduce myself, my name is Iris Boogaard and I am a 25-year-old freelance videographer and editor. However, I am also a recent master’s degree graduate in New Media Design. This February, I had the opportunity to present my thesis at the “Etmaal van de Communicatiewetenschap”, the annual conference for all communication science scholars in the Netherlands and Flanders.
My thesis focused on interactive narratives, an expressive form of new media in which audience members are allowed to influence important aspects of the story. For instance, they can allow users to engage in multiple perspectives in a narrative. In contrast to traditional narratives, interactive digital narratives (IDN) present information in a non-linear way, as shown in the figure below.
IDN have emerged as promising means for providing new ways to engage us, in fields such as journalism, education and entertainment. However, when looking into previous studies, I soon realized that little empirical research had been carried out investigating whether interactive narratives have the ability to represent complex information. Is information presented in an interactive narrative easier to comprehend than information presented in a traditional linear narratives?
I explored this question by looking into the award-winning documentary Last Hijack Interactive. This online experience focuses on the Somali piracy crisis, in particular the hijacking of a cargo ship in the Arabian Sea that occurred in 2008. Interestingly, both the actual captain and the hijacker are interviewed to share their perspectives. For each chapter in the story, users of the online interface can decide which side of the story they want to hear.
By creating different versions of this documentary, I was able to study whether having agency and being able to witness multiple perspectives of a narrative can influence one’s understanding of a complex situation such as the Somali piracy crisis. After reviewing over 90 responses in my experiment, I found that participants who experienced multiple perspectives, scored significantly higher on their understanding of the situation. By looking into my qualitative results, I discovered that from a single perspective viewpoint, the hijacker was perceived as a flat character lacking character growth. Since participants weren’t able to create an extensive character model about the hijacker, their understanding scores were lower than participants who experienced the captain’s side or both sides to the story.
What do we learn from this? In order to demonstrate the complexity of a situation, both researchers as well as creators need to keep in mind that rich characters are required from multiple sides of the situation. Moreover, we might need to script interactors by providing both control as well as guidelines on how to interact with a non-linear narratives.
Curious to know how I studied this? I created a short explainer video with a short summary of our research, including explanation of how each variable was manipulated and the results of the study.
With the help of my teachers, we created a short paper about this research, which was accepted to both ICIDS 2019 as well as Etmaal 2020. Earlier this year, I was allowed to present my study at Etmaal. An exciting experience for me, very lovely to be complimented on my work by so many professionals!
Thanks to the help of my teachers for all their support and advice: Renske van Enschot from Tilburg University, and Hartmut Koenitz and Christian Roth from the University of the Arts Utrecht.
Click here to read the conference paper ‘The Potential of Interactive Digital Narratives. Agency and Multiple Perspectives in Last Hijack Interactive’.
Our NMD students are trained to become research professionals in the field of human-computer interaction (sometimes also referred to as computer-human interaction, for instance in the largest conference in the field, which is abbreviated as CHI). Although there has been a professional association connecting all HCI professionals located in The Netherlands for a long time, this association had been somewhat dormant. Fortunately, several HCI enthusiasts, including our own teachers, Jan de Wit and Karin Slegers(!), have committed themselves to reviving this association. Therefore, we proudly present to you: the new and revitalised CHI Nederland!!
