BTK University of Arts & Design

Fitness trackers promise a longer and better life for the people who engage with them. What is forgotten in their analysis for HCI, though, is how they re-conceptualise the very notion of what constitutes a 'step'. We discuss everyday edge cases illustrating how fitness trackers fail to address goals and ideals of people using them. They merely re-affirm the fitness of already fit people and can have an adversarial effect on others. For future designers, we offer strategies to become aware of their own biases and provide implications for designers potentially leading to more non-normative and diverse designs of trackers.

the installation Whisper is transforming spoken secrets into motion and light reflections. The thereby created visualization of the secrets is not understandable using common communication modalities. As such, Whisper is creating a magic moment of information translation into a language of motion and light. Whisper allows visitors to see the whispering of a secret without hearing it, and therefore it allows the secret to keep its most important feature, not to be revealed. As such, Whisper enables an engagement of the public with their hidden intimate part and thus, it is creating moments of intimacy and playful beauty.

The mobile application Be My Eyes connects blind users with sighted volunteers through a video and audio connection. In contrast to previous attempts, Be My Eyes has a large number of blind and sighted users. In this paper we report from a survey among 30 blind Be My Eyes users to guide future work in this domain. We describe for which situations blind users find Be My Eyes useful and which are challenging. Furthermore, we identify users' concerns and areas for improvements. Finally, we derive directions for future work.