Time management as an important source of wellbeing is here described along with the opportunities to link this activity to physical space, contacts and mobile personal cloud. The user-centered design of a novel agenda is the theme of this chapter. Some user studies were carried on, concept design and rough evaluations followed. The fishtank paradigm of interaction is here presented. It overcomes the linear perception of time and provides a gradient of devices for attention starting from peripheral awareness to proper notification according to the urgency of the tasks to execute. The final aim of the project is to support prospective as like as autobiographical memory in order to live the present time at its' fullest.
TopIntroduction
Time management is becoming an essential field in which major research efforts are being made (e.g. Google Now, Apple Siri). It is clear that the opportunities derived from mobile ICT, Web 2.0, GPS infrastructures, and mobile cloud technologies are increasing the possibilities to deliver novel lifestyle enhancements by optimizing the work, life, activities, interactions with communities, and personal lives of individuals. These material conditions provide the opportunity to set up new ways to perceive time and manage daily life. The Witmee project described here (Torsi & Giunchiglia, 2015) maximizes the social and psychological potential of these possibilities (Figure 1). This paper introduces a new opportunity: to improve time management by combining a number of existing technologies into a single environment that can provide meaningful visualizations and a customizable level of peripheral awareness. Evidently, there are many existing tools for these tasks, but they are not integrated into a single device nor related to an individual’s actions. The added value in centralizing tools is that the system can shadow the user and provide tangible support for daily life, without forcing users to to step across different applications in order to manage tasks. Current technologies are revealing unprecedented ways to support all the different facets, duties, social roles, interests, and multiple identities of individuals. In the same way, new forms of awareness are equally available: being conscious about peers and family location, group activities and all that will allow people to get synchronized (Tolmie, Pycock, Diggins, MacLean, & Karsenty, 2002). Accordingly, this richness of roles, relationships and possible activities can be effectively supported by a system that helps people to better coordinate activities of daily living (Torsi & Giunchiglia, 2015). The project originated from a desire to create a different kind of agenda to fulfil the needs of individuals when managing different aspects of their daily life.
Figure 1. A diagram of the overall aims of the project
TopThe Project Team
The research group consists in: an Artificial Intelligence/Semantics core that is to create meaningful entities that will sort, rank and manage the contents the system has already collected. Afterwards, a development core integrates the computational resources and relates them to the metaphor that the system offers, and a design core responsible for the delivery of visualizations and notifications (Figure 2). The AI and the design cores work in parallel to determine the overall vision of what is desired: a virtual life companion helping users to manage daily living in the interplays across working activities, personal life and relationships. The development core, then, integrates the platforms, the infrastructures, and the applications involved in the system to produce a working prototype. This contribution focuses on the design core made by an HCI researcher and three computer scientists.
Figure 2. The different roles in the project and their crossover