Jun HU :: HU, Jun

BY René Ahn, Emilia Barakova, Loe Feijs, Mathias Funk, Jun Hu, Matthias Rauterberg

We cast a design view on the interactions that occur when humans face (interconnected) adaptive systems. As humans are also adaptive, the combined behavior of such systems and humans can exhibit various phenomena that are especially of concern to designers of adaptive systems dealing with the inherent complexity of systems, systems’ interfaces, interconnectivity, and other design factors. Based on examples of interactions between humans and systems at different levels of complexity, we propose a hierarchical taxonomy of increasingly complex challenges that system engineers will encounter when designing adaptive systems. Among adaptive systems, the taxonomy distinguishes closed and open systems, embodying processes that are unaware or aware, and finally, friendly and hostile. This taxonomy can be of use in designing these systems and their interfaces, as it helps to categorize the information needs of users. In fact, systems at various levels in the hierarchy need to offer certain cognitive affordances for users to operate these systems successfully. We illustrate how complex the information needs of users in these different situations can be, and formulate emerging design research questions. These could be of particular interest to designers who create intelligent systems, products, and related services in a societal context.

by Veranika Lim et al.
We introduced the concept of a community-based social recipe system which suggests recipes to groups of users based on available ingredients from these users (i.e. who can be from the same household or different households). In this paper we discuss the relevance and desirability of such a system and how it should be designed based on user studies. We identified the relevance of targeting ingredients and found positive expected experiences with the system such as to prevent habitual waste-related behavior, awareness of in-home food availability, creativity in cooking, moments for surprises and spontaneity, coordination among a group of friends, education and connectedness. Possible reasons of not using the system are trust and the inconvenience of distance among users in a group that are suggested with a social recipe. From our findings, we specify design implications for the system and optimization functions aiming at the prevention of food waste at a collective level.