Ted Selker is director of Considerate Systems Research at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, where he has also been helping develop the campus’ research mission. He is well known as a creator and tester of new scenarios for working with computing systems. Ted spent ten years as an associate Professor at the MIT Media Laboratory where he created the Context Aware Computing group, co-directed the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and directed the Counter Intelligence/Industrial Design Intelligence/Kitchen of the Future/ Product Design of the Future Project. His work is noted for creating demonstrations of a more considerate world in which intentions are recognized and respected in complex domains, such as kitchens, cars, on phones, and in email. Ted’s work takes the form of prototyping concept products supported by cognitive science research.

His successes at targeted product creation and enhancement earned him the role of IBM Fellow and Director of User Systems Ergonomics Research. He has also served as a consulting professor at Stanford University, taught at Hampshire, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Brown University, and worked at Xerox PARC and Atari Research Labs.

Ted's innovation has been responsible for profitable and award-winning products, ranging from notebook computers to operating systems. For example, his design of the TrackPoint in-keyboard pointing device is used in many notebook computers; his visualizations have made impacts ranging from improving the performance of the PowerPC to the usability OS/2 ThinkPad setup, to Google maps; his adaptive help system has been the basis of products as well. Ted’s work has resulted in numerous awards, patents, and papers and has often been featured in the press. Ted was co-recipient of the Computer Science Policy Leader Award for Scientific American 50 in 2004, the American Association for People with Disabilities Thomas Paine Award for his work on voting technology in 2006, and the Telluride Tech fest award in 2008.

Information systems are being called upon not only to help keep us organized and productive, but also to help in the fabric of the way we live. We are starting to see them as solving social problems as they might begin reducing disruption; they help people enjoy others or even increase self-awareness. This talk will introduce notions of how we can introduce social awareness in our design practices and artifacts.

The talk will frame the Considerate System stance of social feedback to a user. We will describe results from a variety of Considerate Research projects, with examples including systems supporting people in audio conference call communication, TV interactions, saving energy in the Sustainability Base Leeds Platinum building and Considerate Mobile phone reactions.

For example, l will show that variance in conversational dominance can significantly be reduced with proactive aural feedback. Our experiments reveal that considerate feedback can also reduce the impact of extraneous noise on conversations. We show that further loading the narrow channel of human teleconference can improve it. CAMEO seeks to sense communication problems, and frame and respond to them in considerate ways. These include scheduling of advisory prompts, and assistive mechanisms to augment this bandwidth-constrained medium.

In working towards considerate systems, we are building CAMEO and other technology into a cyber-physical meeting support system. This ambient social feedback system includes social responses that take into account environmental sensing, interactive TV, and physical rewards. We conclude that all interactions with people in the physical world require an appreciation that they are in a social environment and engagement.

Ben Schouten graduated from the Rietveld Art Academy in 1983. He found himself interested in patterns and iconography, and discovered his fascination for mathematics. In August 1995 he received a Master’s degree in mathematics, specializing in chaos theory. In 1996 Ben Schouten founded Desk.nl, providing innovative internet related solutions. Together with the Dutch Design Institute (Vormgevings Instituut), Desk was internationally acknowledged with a webby award in gaming.

In 2001 he received his PhD for his thesis on content based image retrieval and interfaces that allow browsing & searching for images in an intuitive way, according to human perception. His thesis was acknowledged with a Bronze World Medal for Design in the New Media category, sub-category Information and Education, in New York, USA.

In the following years Ben Schouten started a group in Biometrics and Human Behavior Analysis at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI, Amsterdam) as well as teaching at the Utrecht School of Art & Technology (HKU) in Interaction Design and Gaming. In 2006 he was appointed as a Professor in Ambient Intelligence at Fontys University of Applied Sciences and in 2010  Full Professor of Playful Interactions in Smart Environments at Eindhoven University of Technology  His group focuses on Games & Play for social innovations and culture. Since 2013 he also holds the chair of  Game & Play Design at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. He is an advisor for the European Commission on the ‘Internet of Things’ as well as for the Dutch Cultural Media Fund, responsible for E-culture.

Using ambient intelligence in games and play offer opportunities for more natural and improved interaction, which can extend to the real world, using everyday objects as interaction devices. In addition, ambient technology enables advanced awareness and personalization. This leads to more engaging experiences and increased flow, because the magic and suspension of disbelief are not broken by real world hurdles. In this way, in ambient gaming and play interaction moves from a more functional, goal-oriented role, to a playful experience that goes beyond usability, deriving meaning from its context.

Designing ambient games and designing for ambient play also requires a different role of the designer. Design processes shift to co-creation, participatory design and other design methods where the user and the context play an important and active role, reflecting the change to interaction as the creator, facilitator or mediator of Experiences.

In this lecture I will present new directions of ambient intelligence in game & play design and show the most appealing examples.