The sleeping project

Last weeks I have been very busy with my group working on our design case about the sleeping experience. Currently we are designing an experiment to be run in the coming weeks, so we are running fast to decide about the research design, measures to be taken, recruitment and all the possible details one has to think about before having a scientific study.

After some changes we have made on the way here, now we are focusing on the sleeping experience of remote couples. Our intention is to put those couples connected in such a way that they can have a more pleasant experience when they go to bed in distant locations. The way we found to connect those people is through a pillow that warms up when the remote couple is in his bed.

In this work we have two research questions, which are:
1 – Are remote couples more likely to go to bed at the same time if they receive the information that his/her counterpart is going to bed?
2 – Quality of sleep research question
2.1. Do remote couples spend less time to fall asleep when they use our prototype?
2.2. Do remote couples experience a better quality of sleep when they use our prototype?

The 1st research question is related to an persuasion aspect we are exploring in this study. We want to know whether the fact that knowing that your partner is going to sleep now is good way to persuade people to sleep also.

We are expecting the end of this study for the end of December. I hope everything will be alright and I will publish the main findings we get here soon. Good luck for us!

Presence at Interaction’09 | South America confirmed!

Last week started with great news. I was confirmed as the representative of my group to present our paper at Interaction’09|South America. It is the 1st regional conference of Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and will take place on 26,27 and 28 November, in São Paulo.

This event is a fantastic opportunity to visit Brazil. It will be nice to see some friends that will attend the event and do some networking. If you are going to Sao Paulo, see you there!

Paper accepted at Interaction 09 | South America

Last week I received the great news. A paper that I wrote with my friends Ajoslja Jacobs, Dirk Verhagen, Ting-Ray Chang, and Sophia Atzeni got accepted at Interaction 09 | South America. The 1st regional conference of Interaction Design Association (IxDA) will be held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from 26th to 28th November, 2009.

Our paper is titled “Violent Video Games: Changes in non-verbal behavior and short-term effects on valence and arousal” and is the product of our assignment during the Observation Studies and non-verbal user behavior module at USI Program.

The abstract of the paper is the following: “Video gaming researchers have already studied the effects of violent video games on gamers’ behavior. The present study investigated gamers’ non-verbal behavior and short term effects during and shortly after playing violent video games. The research included three main phases: 1) preselecting violent versus non-violent video games; 2) setting-up an experiment with 20 male college students playing a pair of video games (one violent and one nonviolent game) on Nintendo Wii. After playing each game, participants’ degree of violence and arousal were measured by using the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) and the results were compared; 3) asking another group of 17 students to distinguish each gamer’s film clips of playing violent versus non-violent video games. While IAPS results showed that gamers’ degree of violence and arousal did not change significantly after a short experience of playing violent video game, gamers’ non-verbal behavior (facial expression) was 78% correctly distinguished by observers. Limitations are reported and further work is proposed.”

The work we reported in the paper was performed in 3 weeks, so having a paper accepted out of such a short project was really an award for us. Besides, it was real fun to run an experiment about Wii games. Actually this is how everything works here at my program. We choose the research question and run the study! We have a lot of freedom indeed. Currently we are looking for funding to support our trip to Brazil.

Researching the sleeping experience

Last weeks I have been busy with my colleagues at USI program discussing about sleeping. The reason why we started to talk about sleep is not any personal problem related to that. Currently we are working on our design case, that is a 10-week project for our professional doctorate course. The design case is a very precious moment in our program since we normally have 2 or 3 weeks to work in projects. During it we can run the whole design cycle and even evaluate different levels of prototypes with users.

My group is paying a lot of attention to the user research phase. So far we have run a survey with 80 participants, have done 6 interviews and 5 diaries. It is impressive how much of research has been done about sleeping, but people still complain about their sleeping habits. Thus in order to understand properly what kind of needs and requirements people have, we thought that we should make use of different tools. It has shown to be worthy.

Recently we had some brainstorms in order to translate the main findings of the user research into concepts. Soon we will evaluate these concepts with users. Our idea is to use a very low-fi prototype to be evaluated in this first moment. Later on we will increase the fidelity of the prototype as we will also add feedback from users.

In the future I will post more details about this project. For now, I would like to leave you with some interesting products we have found during a competitor analysis we have performed.

Take a look at some of them:
Zeo is a new kind of educational tool and motivational program that helps you understand how you are sleeping, reveals habits and behaviors that may be helping or hindering your sleep, and teaches new ways that may help you get a better night’s rest.

SleepPhones are the first headphones for sleeping. Soft and comfortable delivering excellent sound quality through thin speakers, SleepPhones help you fall asleep in bed while listening to nature sounds mixed with a sound technology that guides your brain to sleep. Use SleepPhones to reduce noise from snoring, relieve anxiety, and deepen your sleep.

BeoTime, Bang & Olufsen makes sure that even your basic morning ritual becomes an extraordinary experience. The humble alarm clock has been transformed with remarkable and unobtrusive design and surprisingly practical features, like built-in motion sensor and subtle automatic backlighting. The sleep timer lets you doze off to music or late night programming without a care.

I am a computer…

2 weeks ago I was introducing myself during the first class of a course at USI Program. That was not the first time I introduced myself to that group (except for the teacher) and maybe because of that, just after I had mentioned my name, I said “I am a computer… (ops!) psychologist!”. My trial to correct my mistake was not enough to avoid my friends to laugh at me. Ok, (although sometimes I doubt it) I’m a psychologist, so I don’t think my mistake was a simple mistake. Indeed, these days I have been thinking about what I REALLY am in terms of job title, role, etc.

Jan Chipchase in his talk at CHI’09 asked the audience about his role. If he is not sure about what he does and he also doesn’t care, why should I be so secure about it? In fact, my background is fully based on (cognitive) psychology, but in my working experience most of people who worked with me got very surprised and they got to know that I am a psychologist. This is still the case, by the way. People in general don’t have any clue about what a psychologist can do with technology and always I hear the same joke: “Ah! Do you help the engineers, so they don’t get crazy?”. Some time ago I thought that I should say I am a designer (I like to think that I help to design the user experience) to make things simpler. But then I thought that maybe the REAL designers (those with a diploma in graphical, product or whatever else design) would think that I was stealing their titles. Then I didn’t change consciously the way I introduce myself. Maybe I should. I will try next time. In the meanwhile I would be glad to hear suggestions about ways to describe what I do for a living.