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AIDL's research in interface design, collaboration and visualizations is diverse in nature.
Last Updated: April 22, 2014
Duration: September 2009 - Present
Interpersonal trust is an important part of teamwork and collaboration. Without proper trust, teams struggle to achieve effectiveness and performing stages. As teams move towards virtuality, developing trust between the team members becomes challenging. Therefore, in this research project, we explored the possibility of fostering interpersonal trust through the design of communication systems.
We initially focused on the development of a trust model that could explain the situational variability of trust and consequently, inform design (Morita and Burns, 2014a). With this knowledge in hand, we pursued an ethnographic study in which we identified effective mechanisms to convey trust-supporting information through design (Morita and Burns, 2014b). We followed by developing a trust metric that accounted for the situational variability of trust, allowing the evaluation of underlying components of trust (Morita and Burns, in revision).
Having the knowledge of how cues are perceived and integrated into a trust state, we developed interface design objects in the form of badges (called trust tokens) that carry the necessary trust-supporting information in information-deprived virtual teams (Morita and Burns, submitted). In this study, we validated the trust tokens, as well as investigated the effect of risk as a situational variable. The last study consisted of a cross-cultural study in the perceptions of trust factors (Morita, Horiguchi, Sawaragi, Burns, submitted). In partnership with Kyoto University we evaluated the usage of trust-supporting information in culturally distinct populations (Japan and Canada).
Through this series of studies, our objective was to investigate the possibility of influencing interpersonal trust through design; and to better explain and validate the situational dependency of trust. The ultimate goal of this research program is to raise awareness to the importance of interpersonal trust as a key requirement when designing for teams and collaboration.
Project funded by NSERC in the form of a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Post-Doctoral Fellowship.
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Duration: January 2012 - April 2012
Providing guidance that is relevant and timely can result in better business outcomes. In this project we will focus on how to provide human computer interaction guidance in a timely, low effort way to novice software designers. The Mitacs intern will be embedded at the Apps Factory where he will provide guidance to a team of four interns working on four apps projects. Using cognitive work analysis techniques he will uncover leverage points for guiding novice designers. This project is unique in several ways in that it extends a research technique, Cognitive Work Analysis to the modeling of a team in an agile programming environment. This project also provides key design guidance and recommendations that will remain with the Apps Factory for future projects and, on publication, contribute to other design project with novice design teams.
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Duration: 2011 - 2013
With the rise of mobile computing and an ever-growing variety of ubiquitous sensors, computers are becoming increasingly context-aware. A revolutionary step in this process that has seen much progress will be user-awareness: the ability of a computing device to infer its user's emotions. This research project attempts to study the effectiveness of enabling a computer to adapt its visual interface to counter user frustration. The study produced findings and guidelines that will be crucial in the future design of adaptive affective user interfaces.
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Duration: 2006 - 2008
Individuals with visual impairments have difficulty localising in unknown environments. Localisation can be attained through downconverted ultrasound echoes in the auditory domain, thus echolocation by ultrasound. The largest hurdle to overcome when developing devices for visually impaired individuals is the inability to provide sufficient information in a meaningful manner.
This study showed that ultrasound doppler signals that are down converted in the normal range of human hearing can provide an acoustic array with sufficient information for visually impaired humans to navigate their environment. Three studies showed that people could effectively localize objects, determine distances to obstacles, and navigate through apertures. More information on this research is available in publications.
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Duration: 2002 - 2003
This project developed a three dimensional world for managing complex computer networks. The project focused on visualizations of network health, device health, real and virtual network structures.
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The University of Waterloo acknowledges that much of our work takes place on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee peoples. Our main campus is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land granted to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River. Our active work toward reconciliation takes place across our campuses through research, learning, teaching, and community building, and is centralized within our Indigenous Initiatives Office.