Digital Well Being

Digital Well Being

About
Black & White Collection

The Digital Wellbeing Showroom is the first of a new kind of retail environment for digital lifestyle products. The showroom presents a selection of exclusive digital appliances that include software and internet services, alongside bespoke and customized products.

Digital Wellbeing believes in reducing choice whilst injecting personality into the collection as presented here. Digital Wellbeing seeks to create an inspirational retail environment that nurtures harmonious relationships between products.

Discover not just electronic appliances, but also furniture, accessories, fashion, books, music, games, online services and work from internationally acclaimed and locally sourced interaction designers and media artists. We are creating a platform to encourage a greater understanding of interaction design, the interactive media arts and industry.

We tune technology to create harmony in your life.

The Team
Mission

You can design award winning products, develop the technol-ogy, conduct deep anthropological research around the world, chart interaction architectures, create prototypes, perform user tests, develop marketing and brand strategies … in the end, if your product is placed on a shelf or website within a poor customer experience, and the sales person cannot formulate the benefit beyond the features of your product in comparison to others, your product will fail in the market place.

We are setting out to bring inspiration, not just choice, into the retail experience of digital lifestyle products and services.mission

Digital Wellbeing Labs are Alexander Grunsteidl (ex-IDEO, Apple) and Priya Prakash (BBC New Media) who believe in the celebration of simple, elegant, digital behaviours. We are establishing the first dedicated digital lifestyle showroom in London.

Filed under: new media

Community Bar: Designing for Informal Awareness and Casual Interaction

» MSc Thesis: Community Bar: Designing for Informal Awareness and Casual Interaction

Grego McEwan, University of Calgary
This thesis is the culmination of several years work on the Community Bar, a system supporting casual interaction within the Commons.

Abstract.
The Community Bar (CB) is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction for small social groups of people with a common purpose. CB’s design supports how communities of ad-hoc and long-standing groups are built and sustained: by maintaining awareness of one another and being able to casually transition into interaction. I begin this thesis by deriving design guidelines for awareness and interaction, primarily based on a comprehensive sociological theory. I then describe how CB was implemented according to the guidelines. I also describe the architectural design that supports awareness and interaction within a distributed group, including an extensible plugin architecture allowing customisation of CB’s functionality. Finally, along with some colleagues, I conducted an in-depth field study of CB. We used results from this study to reflect upon the matches and mis-matches that occurred between the theoretical usage behaviour predicted by the design principles versus the actual usage behaviours observed in the deployed implementation.
For more information

McEwan, G. Community Bar: Designing for Informal Awareness and Casual Interaction. MSc Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4. September, 2006. Supervisor: Saul Greenberg

Contact Name saul.greenberg@ucalgary.ca

Filed under: academic, thesis