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Chapter 2. State of the Art of Application Development Processes
computing may see potential for new applications, but users focus on incremental
changes of an existing system. Their minds have to be stimulated first in order
to break with current practices. But also researchers have to realize what makes
sense in practice and what does not. As such, reasonable and compelling application
domains have to be found where these technology makes sense, both for the user
and the developer. “Wearable Computing currently has no concepts for application
developments”
[
Kjeldskov and Graham 2003
]
may be an overstatement, but clearly
shows deficiencies in this area.
Nevertheless, simply applying methodologies from HCI, which may o er answers,
is di cult due a di erent starting point: HCI works towards interaction design
and not on concept design. Accordingly, HCI practitioners do not have to think
about if and why people might use an application under di erent circumstances.
Their objective is to identify new and compelling interaction paradigms. However,
HCI has a long tradition in cooperating with users (see Section 2.2.4 and 2.2.5)
and developing new innovative solutions, at least to a certain extend. Research in
ubiquitous and wearable computing could benefit from those practices, if they can
be adapted. So far there has only been little research in this field. In the following
two approaches are mentioned that inspired and motivated our X’treme Prototyping
approach, presented in Chapter 4.
Humanistic Approach.
[
Oulasvirta 2004
]
suggests a process that helps to find
meaningful uses for context-aware technologies. It proposes to review statistics in
a first step to reveal common trends o ering opportunities for future applications.
After choosing the topic and demands for such an application ethnographic stud-
ies should be used for better understanding of the context of use and about how
technology will intervene. In a third step body-storming, a physical form of brain-
storming where participants actually visit a topic location, is used for acting out
use cases. This should allow playing with data in an embodied way and initiate
design. In a fourth step a simulation method is suggested for finding preconditions
for design. Several hours of video are used to derive task profiles which can be used
for a simulation. Then a program simulating the system’s perception and the sys-
tem’s context-aware behavior should o er an inexpensive way for examining future
scenarios.
This approach is based on the fundamental belief that statistics could reveal future
trends that are worth to be investigated. This helps during the phase of finding a
compelling application domain and provides a solid grounding in reality which fosters
the development of applications that are relevant. The idea of body-storming may
reveal innovative ideas, however, in practice this method will be limited to very
specific types of users: acting out ideas is not an ability everybody has and would
be willing to do. Furthermore, the value of this methodology is strongly linked
with how well the simulation corresponds to the real world. Moreover, a simulation
has to focus mainly on the behavioral aspects of the system – cognitive aspects of
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