Advancing ambiguity

ABSTRACT

Ambiguity is an important concept for HCI because of its pervasiveness in everyday life, yet its emergent nature challenges the role of design. We examine these difficulties with regards to Aoki and Woodruff's [1] proposal to use ambiguity as a resource for designing space for stories in personal communication systems. We challenge certain assumptions about ambiguity and propose a set of design and evaluation guidelines that flow from this re-conceptualization of ambiguity and design.

REFERENCES

• 1: Paul M. Aoki , Allison Woodruff, Making space for stories: ambiguity in the design of personal communication systems, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 02-07, 2005, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1054972.1054998]
• 2: Genevieve Bell , Mark Blythe , Phoebe Sengers, Making by making strange: Defamiliarization and the design of domestic technologies, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.12 n.2, p.149-173, June 2005 [doi>10.1145/1067860.1067862]
• 3: Brown, B. and Perry, M. Why Don't Telephones Have Off Switches? Understanding the Use of Everyday Technologies. Interacting with Computers, 12, 6 (2000), 623--634.
• 4: Clark, H. Using Language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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• 6: Fagerberg, P., Ståhl, A. and Höök, K. Designing Gestures for Affective Input: an Analysis of Shape, Effort and Valence, Proc. of Mobile Ubiquitous and Multimedia, MUM 2003, Norrköping, Sweden.
• 7: William W. Gaver , Jacob Beaver , Steve Benford, Ambiguity as a resource for design, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/642611.642653]
• 8: Jason I. Hong , James A. Landay, An architecture for privacy-sensitive ubiquitous computing, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services, June 06-09, 2004, Boston, MA, USA [doi>10.1145/990064.990087]
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.m Miscellaneous

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications

Keywords:
CMC, ambiguity, design, face saving, information interfaces and presentation, interpretation