Origami Desk Integrating Technological Innovation and Human-centric Design Research

1. Origami DeskIntegrating Technological Innovation and Human-centric Design Research Wendy Ju Design Division Mechanical Engineering Department Stanford University

2. Origami Desk: Project Description • Wendy Ju • project lead • interaction design • Tilke Judd • Rebecca Hurwitz • Jennifer Yoon • interface design • Leonardo Bonanni • architecture • Wendy Ju • Matthew Reynolds • Richard Fletcher • Rehmi Post • hardware and software

3. Research in Interactive Spaces Interactive environments can help people do things and learn to do things, not just do things for them.1 Principles of interactive environment design include: invisibility, manual override, feedback and adaptability.2 These principles require technological innovations that allow people to get feedback and adaptation without explicit interaction with a computer.3 1 Bush, “ As We May Think,” The Atlantic Monthly. July 1945: 101-108 2 Cooperstock, Fels, Buxton, Smith, Reactive Environments, Com.ACM, Sept 1997: 65-73 3 Neilson, “Noncommand User Interfaces,” Communications of the ACM, April 1993: 83-99

4. User Experiences with Origami Difficulties people have folding origami: • mapping instructions to spatial locations. (Where do I fold?) • translating discrete diagrams to dynamic actions. (How do I fold?) • perceiving if they are proceeding correctly. (Did I fold this right?) A key problem is the disjoint between real and virtual worlds.1 1Ockerman, Najjar, Thompson “Evaluation of a wearable computer performance support system” in Educational Multimedia/Hypermedia and Telecommunications. 1997:788-793

5. Fold Sensing in Origami Desk Human-centric reasons for fold-sensing • Provides positive feedback • Decreases uncertainty • Prevents errors early in process Technological reasons for fold-sensing • Origami is a spatial task • Instructions are easily modeled • Paper provides a tangible means of tracking progress • Lessons, technologies can be generalized to other spatial, linear tasks.

6. Electromagnetic Tags for Fold Sensing Hypothesis: Radio-frequency Electromagnetic coils (“tags”) can be used to sense dynamic act of folding Advantages of tags: 1,2 • Low cost • Consistent response • Obstruction independent • Orientation independent 1Want, Fishkin, Gujar, Harrison. “Bridging Physical and Virtual Worlds with Electronic Tags,” in Computer Human Interactions 1999 (CHI’99): 370-377 2Gershenfeld, Fletcher. US Patent No. 6025725A: Electrically Active Resonant Structures for Wireless Monitoring and Control, MIT Media Lab 2000

7. Fold Sensing System Design

8. Fold Sensing System Design Hardware Software

9. Fold Sensing: Paper The Origami paper was designed to provide feedback on a folded box pattern. • Five resonant tags (8.2, 12.9, 15.4, 21.5, 25.5 MHz) from Miyake, Inc. • Tested for variations in tag placement, folding • 18 unique signatures out of 28 possible positions detectable • Mounted on 15cmx15cm translucent vellum paper

10. Fold Sensing: Tag Reader Design The fold sensing reader was modified from an existing tag-sensor design. • Swept-frequency sensor with 18cmx18cm single turn copper coil • Frequency range between 6.5 MHz to 26.5 MHz • ~10 sweeps a second, sampling at 0.2MHz intervals

11. Fold Sensing: Data Output Normalized D Voltage Frequency

12. Fold Sensing: State Recognition Simple state recognition was used to determine what steps users were at. • Used 5-point running average with baseline subtracted out. • Picked frequencies where delta V reading was above threshold. • Assigned peaks to various frequency “buckets.” • Formed 8-bit bucket signature to map to various states.

13. Technical Design Results • Fold sensing demonstrated promise in the lab: • Can consistently distinguish sub-folds for eight of the eleven steps for Origami Box • Register folds three out of four times in practice • Robust in face of sensor placement, user fold speeds, station variations

14. Human-centered Design Results Fold sensing did NOT lead to success in field: • Limited field testing: differing noise conditions, and need automated setup and calibration routines. • Limited user response: feedback response was too subtle and somewhat inconsistent, occasionally motivated bad folding to see response. • Introducing new failure modes: thickness of the paper and tags made folding physically harder. No net negative impact due to design for technological risk mitigation.

15. Failure Analysis Typical user failure modes changed with design of rest of system. • Difficulty resolving video instructions. • Reorientation • Forget substeps Demonstrated functionality and “real” functionality are very different things. • Wider array of test populations, conditions • Need to decouple feedback response design from sensing mechanism Initial design overlooked setup and calibration as aspects in system design.

16. Design Guidelines (in progress) • Invisibility Coherency: Make tools usage, intent self-evident without distracting from core task. • Adaptability: Test in near field conditions with wide array of user populations • Feedback: Use wizard-of-oz techniques to test feedback mechanisms independently of sensing technologies • Comprehensiveness: Use solutions that integrate not only dynamic capabilities of computers, but also of physical context, perspective, process and interaction

17. Paths to Publication • Criticisms: • What is original about this work? • What is the right way to situate the work? • What is the proper way to capture user response? • What is the important contribution made in this work? • Audience: • More technical venue? • More design-oriented venue? • More education-oriented venue?

18. Future work… • Design methodology, metrics • Interdisciplinary design methods • Formalization of user needs, systems interactions • Event recognition and inference • User workflow modeling • Multi-sensor strategies for robustness, breadth • “Smarter” event inference techniques

19. Questions?