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Objects of wonderment

Published: 25 February 2008 Publication History

Abstract

While we should celebrate our success at evolving many vital aspects of the human-technology interactive experience, we question the scope of this progress. Step back with us for a moment. What really matters? Everyday life spans a wide range of emotions and experiences - from improving productivity and efficiency to promoting wonderment and daydreaming. But our research and designs do not reflect this important life balance. The research we undertake and the applications we build employ technology primarily for improving tasks and solving problems. Our claim is that our successful future technological tools, the one we really want to cohabitate with, will be those that incorporate the full range of life experiences. In this paper we present wonderment as a design concept, introduce a novel toolkit based on mobile phone technology for promoting non-experts to participate in the creating of new objects of wonderment, and finally describe probe style interventions used to inform the design of a specific object of wonderment based on urban sounds and ringtones called Hullabaloo.

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cover image ACM Conferences
DIS '08: Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems
February 2008
487 pages
ISBN:9781605580029
DOI:10.1145/1394445
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 February 2008

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Author Tags

  1. DIY
  2. ringtones
  3. sounds
  4. toolkit
  5. urban computing
  6. wonderment

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DIS08
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DIS08: Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2008
February 25 - 27, 2008
Cape Town, South Africa

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%

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  • (2016)WandertroperProceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/3012709.3012725(129-140)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2016
  • (2016)From Research Prototype to Research ProductProceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2858036.2858447(2549-2561)Online publication date: 7-May-2016
  • (2016)JokeboxProceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing10.1145/2818048.2835203(38-49)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2016
  • (2015)Sustainable Making? Balancing Optimism and Criticism in HCI DiscourseACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/269974222:3(1-27)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2015
  • (2014)Public Goods: Using Pervasive Computing to Inspire Grassroots ActivismIEEE Pervasive Computing10.1109/MPRV.2014.3313:2(44-51)Online publication date: Apr-2014
  • (2012)Beyond destinations: exploring tourist technology design spaces through local–tourist interactionsDigital Creativity10.1080/14626268.2012.70993923:3-4(204-224)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2012
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  • (2011)Nurturing natural sensorsProceedings of the 13th international conference on Ubiquitous computing10.1145/2030112.2030144(227-236)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2011
  • (2010)WallBotsProceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems10.1145/1858171.1858208(208-217)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2010
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