Assistant Professor, TU Eindhoven, the Netherlands
I am an Assistant Professor in the Future Everyday cluster of the Department of Industrial Design at TU Eindhoven. My research focuses on Human-Computer Interactions, especially the design of systems of smart things. I master the design thinking process in exploring novelty applications with emerging technologies. I also utilizes design languages to create proper sociotechnical solutions that can leverage technologies and social interactions to improve people’s quality of life. In 2006, I co-founded the International Journal of Design. Since then, I continus to serve as the Managing Editor. I have also been invited as the associate chair of the design committee of the ACM SIGCHI conference since 2018.
Element is an ambient display system that displays the user's emotional engagement level through color and shape change on a light fixture. Given the increasing number of people who experience exhaustion or burnout in professional contexts, our goal is to design an interface that helps people keep track of their engagements through an ambient display of real-time physiological data. We conduct two qualitative studies to investigate its possible benefits and users' concerns from an individual perspective and social contexts with multiple users. The result shows that our design can not only aid users' self-reflections and discovery on the intrapersonal level, it also shows the potential to help participants understand others' emotional engagement and provide vital support when needed. Interestingly, our findings also highlighted the ethical concerns of displaying personal data in a public space. Reflecting on this crucial challenge, we also propose three social guidelines for helping users establish positive mindsets and cultures of using \textit{Element} appropriately in sociotechnical environments.
Designing the Expressivity of Multiple Smart Things for Intuitive and Unobtrusive Interactions
Connected products and systems are becoming popular, but they seldom provide direct and intuitive communication to the users. In this study, we applied Disney's animation principles to design the expressivity with LED lights and speakers commonly embedded in electronic devices. We explored the subtle transitions of brightness and controlled the timing to compose individual and system-level behaviors with multiple devices. The result shows that group light behaviors could evoke meanings that are highly similar to the intents of the system. When the acoustic accompaniments were provided, participants could better perceive the presence of devices. We concluded with six sets of light behaviors that are capable of expressing smart devices and systems' intents intuitively and unobtrusively.
IoT Communicator: A Physical Interface for Expressing Situational Info of an IoT System
The Internet of Things and smart products are becoming ubiquitous in people's everyday lives. However, they rarely provide situational information to facilitate direct interactions. Users often need to check mobile devices to know the system's status. To improve user experience, we developed a communicator component that could be attached to any IoT devices. It consists of a low-cost LED and speaker. We applied Disney's animation principles to design light behaviors and musical soundscapes to convey meaningful messages.
This is a design fiction of the future smart home based on the collective brainstorming by the researchers in NTU IoX Center. The ideas is similar to the App Store for smartphone. After purchasing the specific package, people can download the Apps, tune the functions, and upload them to the store.
With this family’s edition, the customers can download the agents from the Apps Store to learn each member’s behaviors. Then, these agents will interact with the smart devices to help set up the personal preferences. Moreover, when the agents detect possible conflicts to the other users, they will help to negotiate. If they cannot reach an agreement on the settings, the system will invite the users to discuss and select the proper choices. Besides, the agents can also help to track pets’ activities, play the music, and create the right ambiences. With Apps4Home by their side, life at home is better than ever.
This design vision helps me and the design team identify five research topics in designing good user experiences between humans and an intelligent system. Currently, I am using the IoT communicator as the research device in designing physical interfaces that can enable intuitive interactions and seamless user experiences.
SlumberBot: An Interactive Agent for Helping Users Investigate Disturbance Factors of Sleep Quality
As sleep health is increasingly becoming important in recent years, many wearable products and mobile apps have been developed to track users' sleep and interpret their sleep quality. Most of the available designs have mainly focused on objective measurements, such as body movement, heart rate, and/or bedroom light, noise level, and temperature. However, due to the lack of users' subjective experience measurements, sleep trackers often fail to provide useful suggestions for improving their sleep. In this study, we developed SlumberBot with conversational chatbot technology to help users capture their subjective sleep experiences and relevant factors in daytime activities as well. With SlumberBot, we conducted a preliminary field study with five participants in a 4-week time period. The result shows that SlumberBot is easy to stay engaged with and supportive of users' self-reflection on contextual factors related to sleep quality. Besides, SlumberBot has shown the potential of triggering short-term behavior changes that would impact their sleep positively.
Designing for Triggering Self-Investigations and Reflections on Factors Related to Sleep Health
While sleep health is increasingly becoming important to many people, it is challenging to maintain good sleep quality. Because sleep can be affected by many internal and external factors, which may differ among individuals, it is therefore important to support people to explore and reflect on what factors truly affect their sleep as most existing sleep self-tracking tools mainly focus on showing how individuals slept. In this study, we developed two design probes to support users to investigate personal sleep factors through self-experimenting and reflection. The tangible probe enables individuals to track three personal sleep factors flexibly, while the digital visualization one provides weekly reports of their sleep together with the three tracked factors. We conducted a preliminary field study with five participants over four weeks. The results show that our designs could support users to investigate their personal concerned sleep factors in terms of the causal relationship with the subjective sleep quality.
Raising People’s Awareness of Hearing Health with Pleasant and Interactive Hearing Test Designs Installed in Public Spaces
Hearing loss is an emerging health challenge, but very few people check their hearing periodically. Unidentified hearing loss can lead to depression and social isolation. To improve public awareness of hearing health, we design an interactive testing system for being used in public spaces. It aims to create unexpected encounters with users and engage them in examining their hearing health regularly. We conducted two evaluations and reported the results in this paper. Firstly, we compared the hearing test results of our design and the conventional audiometry testing. The correlation is 0.78 on average. Secondly, we evaluated the user experience with 12 visitors in an art museum. The nature sounds and interactive design provided users a feeling of calm and made the testing an engaging experience. Meanwhile, the visualization triggered users’ discussions and reflections on the testing results. Overall, our design shows the potentials in raising people’s awareness of hearing health.
With this family’s edition, the customers can download the agents from the Apps Store to learn each member’s behaviors. Then, these agents will interact with the smart devices to help set up the personal preferences. Moreover, when the agents detect possible conflicts to the other users, they will help to negotiate. If they cannot reach an agreement on the settings, the system will invite the users to discuss and select the proper choices. Besides, the agents can also help to track pets’ activities, play the music, and create the right ambiences. With Apps4Home by their side, life at home is better than ever.
