Future Mobile Experiences:
next generation mobile interaction and contextualization

Workshop at NordiCHI 2008, Lund, Sweden, October 19th, full day.

DEADLINE EXTENDED: NEW DEADLINE 8. SEPTEMBER

NEWS: Keynote announced
Christian Sejersen is the Director of Mobile Engineering at Mozilla Corporation and he will briefly give a keynote about what Mozilla is doing on mobile devices.

Workshop theme and goals

Within recent years the mobile phone has been transformed from purely a mechanism for voice calls, to an internet device with advanced multimedia capabilities, location-based services and a growing number of sensors. However, this expanding feature set poses a number of serious challenges for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and the inclusion of contextual information. The key questions become: How to design efficient, easy to use interaction on a small device capable of offering dozen of different services and applications? And how do we make the best use of user context within applications? This workshop will investigate these questions by focusing on four key themes:

1. Device Interaction – What is the means to provide efficient interaction on mobile devices? Is it to provide more buttons and slide-out keyboards? to use touch screens? gesture,  on some other novel interaction techniques?
2. Social Interaction– A constraint of mobile devices is the trade-off between size of the device and screen space. A challenge for mobile interaction is that while the mobile devices are increasingly used in social situations the interaction and design is optimised for a single user. How can novel ways of using nearby devices, public displays and other resources enrich social interaction?
3. Location /Proximity Interaction– The combination of location-based technologies and always connected devices provides novel possibilities for letting the interfaces adapt to the users context and location. What are the new possibilities provided by location? Is proximity as important as actual location? How can location/proximity be used to filter interaction possibilities and dynamically adapt the user interface without reducing consistency and ease of use?
4. Physical Interaction –. With an increasing number of sensors in the mobile devices novel possibilities exists for bridging between the virtual and the physical world. What are the most applicable ways of interacting with nearby objects or locations? and how can rich sensor-based applications be designed for mobile devices?

The workshop will address these four themes and invite participants to submit examples of:  novel interaction techniques, frameworks for analysing mobile interaction, and experiences from prototyping and real-world deployment.
The overall goal will be to develop new ideas and concepts for how to advance research within the four themes.

The outcome of the workshop will be small workshop proceedings freely available on the internet along with an analysis of the key findings from the workshop. If the quality of the explored areas is sufficiently focused we will investigate the possibility for a relevant journal that would interested in making an open call within the workshop's scope.

Interaction design on mobile devices is clearly relevant to the broader field of HCI and especially in the Nordic countries where there is a strong tradition for focusing on mobile HCI. Secondly, there is a large synergy and knowledge transfer between mobile HCI and more traditionally based interaction with computers.

The intended audience is researchers working on HCI on the mobile platform and those from industry working with analysis, development and design of novel mobile services and applications.

Call for Papers

Instruction for how to participate

EXTENDED: Deadline for workshop paper submission: September 8th 2008
EXTENDED: Notification about acceptance: September 15th 2008

Comments or questions, please email Thomas Riisgaard Hansen