Group B presenting their fieldwork

Find other pictures here: Pervasive 2009.

Translated by Shin’ichi Konomi.

Dawud Gordon, Michael Beigl
Distributed and Ubiquitous Computing, Institute for Operating Systems and Computer Networks, Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany

Masayuki Iwai
Department of Informatics and Electronics, Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo, Japan

This paper presents the outcome of a formative study – experiences and requirements – on using wireless sensor network technology in retail stores. The study was carried out in several steps. _ First, a simple approach to implementing a wireless sensor network system was used by a developer for building a retail store application. Here we collected experiences about the problems in the application implementation process. _ Second, the system was deployed in a real retail store. Here we collected feedback from customers and from retail store staff about the system, its usefulness and integration into the overall daily business workflow. _ Third, we analyzed requirements for the next generation of improved wireless sensor network systems by performing a requirements study. We will report our initial results of the requirements analysis study. The findings indicate a lack of abstraction from the technical details of the system needed to enable a high-level developer to create an application for a retail scenario, and we will list some of the important issues that need to be addressed.

Sooho Cho, Hosung Park, Dongbum Hwang, Hyun-joo Kong and Junehwa Song
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Although Internet shopping has been emerged and broadly spread, off-line shopping still has its advantages. We can make full use of our sensory organs and various communication skills. We can feel the materials and enjoy live face-to-face communication. All of these are the essential part of human shopping experiences. On the other hand, on-line shopping has apparent strong points. We have excellent accessibility to plentiful information and peers’ opinion about the products. Moreover, on-line shopping can customize shopping environment and information for each individual user. In this paper, we enrich off-line shopping experience by adopting advantageous characteristics of on-line shopping such as customized shopping environment, collective evaluation on products, and personalized shopping information. We embodied these design concepts into a digitalized show window with a large, touchable, interactive, public display system, called “Sweet Glass.” We conducted a user study with it in a shopping mall and derived a design guideline for developing public display for shopping activities.

Adam Little, Eilidh Dickson and Siddharth Muthyala
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID), the Danish Design School (DKDS).

Meet the Food You Eat is a physical and interactive scale that measures the environmental impact of food products. The scale calculates the carbon emissions of different products based on how many miles the food has travelled and what the primary method of transportation was. The user will place an RFID tagged product on the appropriate arm and try to balance the scale with tree shaped weights. The movement of the scale is driven by a motor and the amount of “trees” used to balance the scale represents the number of actual trees it would take to offset that product’s carbon emissions over one year.

Hiroshi Tamura [tamdai at innovation-lab.jp]
Innovation Laboratory, Hakuhodo Inc., Japan.

In this paper, we discuss the results of our experiment aiming at shopper’s decision aid at a physical grocery store by introducing a context-aware system embedded with shopping carts. Context-awareness is understood in a lot of ways, yet we emphasized shopper’s cognitive process. We conducted participant observations in grocery shopping process and discovered that the process is basically consisted of three phases, so that the system and services were developed according to the process. While the results reected the characteristics of each phase, shopper’s experiences in the third phase were particularly enriched.

David Boardman [dabo at mit.edu] , Federico Casalegno [casalegno at mit.edu]
MIT Mobile Experience Laboratory (MIT Design Lab)

Social Shopping and introduce the preliminary results of a related application named This or That (henceforth indicated as ToT). Despite what is commonly intended for Social Shopping2 as online platforms being largely based on aspects such as information sharing, recommendation systems and prices comparison, we intend to differentiate this area by stressing the role of Mobile Computing. ToT is in fact a way to explore the potentialities of Mobile Social Shopping. The main assumption of ToT is to maintain the in-situ and tangible characteristics of a common shopping session and to augment the social experience connecting the users to the own network in real-time. Shopping is in fact a rich-user experience that is both characterized by social aspects – discuss with friends about products and ask them opinions – and multi-sensorial ones – watch, touch, smell, taste, hear the available products. These conditions cannot be reproduced by online Social Shopping platforms that are rather focused on the simple exchange of information. With ToT we ntend to maintain the relevance of the physical context by a ding a constant social support for whom cannot access friends’ opinionin every moment

Mauro Cherubini [mauro at tid.es],
Rodrigo de Oliveira[roliv at tid.us],
and Nuria Oliver [nuriso at tid.es]

Telefonica Research, Spain

We conducted a qualitative user study with 77 consumers to investigate what social aspects are relevant when supporting customers during their shopping activities and particularly in situations when they are undecided. Twenty-five respondents (32%) reported seeking extra information on web pages and forums, in addition to asking their peers for advice (related to the nature of the item to be bought). Moreover, from the remaining 52 subjects, only 6 (8%) were confident enough to make prompt comparisons between items and an immediate purchasing choice, while 17 respondents (22%) expressed the need for being away from persuasive elements. The remaining 29 respondents (38%) reported having a suboptimal strategy for making their shopping decisions (i.e. buying all items, not buying, or choosing randomly). Therefore, the majority of our participants (70% = 32% + 38%) had social and information needs when making purchasing decisions. This result motivates the development of applications that would allow consumers to ask shopping questions to their social network while on-the-go.

Coco Krumme [coco@media.mit.edu]
eRationality group and Center for Future Banking, MIT Media Lab, USA

New forms of commerce –online and offline—offer new temptations for consumers, as well as new avenues to study consumer behavior. Today, it’s possible to buy almost anything in almost real-time: as decision-making becomes more complicated, I am interested in tools that help people make sound decisions about finances and set clear goals for purchasing.

Concrete Budgeting (CB) is an interactive web and mobile tool to make complex financial decisions, in a word, concrete. Existing budgeting tools present only monthly expenses to the user; here, we are help users make smart tradeoffs between today and the future. CB consists of a web interface and mobile application. Both link directly to transaction data to visualize monthly spending by category. The main innovation of CB is a long-term view that allows the user to set clear goals, to make tradeoffs between goals in different time periods, and to experiment with different scenarios of deferred spending and saving.

Laura Forlano, Ph.D.
Kauffman Fellow in Law Information Society Project, Yale Law School, USA

He looks around to make sure no one is watching him and sets the phone down next to the boxes of cheese. The little silver telephone fits the spot strangely well. It looks as though it has always been sitting there. Having left Shirakawa’s hand, it is now part of the 7-Eleven.
–Haruki Murakami, After Dark

Murakami’s novel After Dark (2007) seems a fitting place to begin a paper on shopping for a pervasive computing workshop in Japan. In it, the author chronicles a startling series of events that occur between 11:56pm to 6:52am on a typical night in Tokyo. Murakami’s main character, a salaryman-cum-murderer, hides the evidence of his evil deed by tossing a bag of clothing belonging to a Chinese prostitute into the garbage behind a 7-Eleven before going in to buy some milk. While inside, he gets rid of the girl’s cell phone by tucking it into the cheese aisle.

What is it about these objects, in particular, packaged consumer products and technological devices, which allow them to occupy adjacent spaces so easily without being noticed? As Murakami points out, “The little silver telephone fits the spot strangely well. It looks as though it has always been sitting there.” What would these objects say to us if they could talk? This paper examines the secret lives of objects by drawing on my own relationship to shopping and, in the context of the current economic and environmental crises, offers examples of the ways in which ubiquitous and pervasive computing technologies might introduce a new conversation with products, technologies and objects.