Gamifying everyday activities using mobile sensing

The addition of game design elements to non-game contexts has become known as gamification. Previous research has suggested that framing tedious and non-motivating tasks as game-like can make them enjoyable and motivating (e.g., de Oliveira, et al., 2010; Fujiki, et al., 2007; Chiu, et al., 2009). Smartphone applications lend themselves to being gamified as the underlying mobile technology has the ability to sense user activities and their surrounding environment. These sensed activities can be used to implement and enforce game-like rules based around many physical activities (e.g., exercise, travel, or eating). If researchers wish to investigate this area, they first need an existing gamified application to study. However if an appropriate application does not exist then the researcher may need to create their own gamified prototype to study. Unfortunately, there is little previous research that details or explains the design and integration of game elements to non-game mobile applications. This chapter explores this gap and shares a framework that was used to add videogame-like achievements to an orientation mobile application developed for new university students. The framework proved useful and initial results are discussed from two studies. However, further development of the framework is needed, including further consideration of what makes an effective gamified experience.

Habituated objects : everyday tangibles that foster the independent living of an elderly woman

The boundaries between 'the digital' and our everyday physical world are dissolving as we develop more physical ways of interacting with computing. This forum presents some of the topics discussed in the colorful multidisciplinary field of tangible and embodied interaction

How does homework 'work' for young children? Children's accounts of homework in their everyday lives

Homework is an increasing yet under-researched part of young children’s everyday lives. Framed by the international agendas of starting strong and school accountability, homework in the lives of young children has been either overlooked or considered from the perspective of adults rather than from the perspective of children themselves. This paper redresses this situation by reporting on an Australian study of 120 young children, aged four to eight years, where homework emerges as a key part of their everyday lives. Children’s own accounts of their everyday decision-making, using audio-taped conversations and concurrent paper-based timeline activities, show homework as accomplishing the institutional purposes of the school, while affording the children opportunities to demonstrate their competence in operating in an adult-generated education regime.

Information organisation behaviours within everyday life : an exploration using the diary method

This paper presents the results from a study of information behaviours (IB), with specific focus on information- organisation-related behaviours conducted as part of a larger daily diary study with 40 participants. The findings indicate that organisation of information in everyday life is problematic due to various factors, specifically temporal and spatial ones, i.e., the passage of time, along with the difference in the physical environment between when the information was organised and when the information is retrieved. These have implications for information organisation schemas, and point toward the need for a context-sensitive model of information organisation that reflects the relation between information objects, information representation, and information users.

Social and cultural borders in Rio de Janeiro : the everyday life of community and mainstream photojournalists

This paper takes a multimethod approach which combines ethnographic techniques and discourse studies to investigate two contrasting professional groups: community photographers, who are favela dwellers who have developed photographic projects in Brazil‘s favelas, and photojournalists of the mainstream media. Its purpose is to determine how a cultural and social divide in the city of Rio de Janeiro shapes both community photographers and mainstream photojournalists’ practices, discourses, and identities. While community photographers strive to establish a humane and positive view about favelas and their residents by shifting the focus from poverty, shortages, violence, and criminality to images of the ordinary life, mainstream photojournalists express the view that their role is of primary importance for the defence of human rights in the favelas by helping to prevent, for instance, police abuses and violations. As the data analysis indicated the existence of socio-spatial borders all over Rio de Janeiro, this study adopted the idea of a divided city without denying interconnections between favelas and the city’s political life. Through the analysis of categories which emerged from the data, the complex world of documenting favela life is explored. The major themes touched upon are: the breakdown between the mainstream media and the favela communities; the different kinds of relationships which arise in Rio’s low income suburbs; and the gradual return of mainstream news workers to favelas.

Strolling the coastline: criminology in everyday life : through ‘landscape’ from gaol to ‘badlands’

Part travelogue, part flight of fancy, this paper recounts a coastline stroll from Maroubra Beach to Bondi in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. The author as ‘travel guide’ points out features of potential interest to two visiting criminological colleagues as they ‘pass by’ scenery of great beauty shadowed by acts of spectacular violence. The everyday acts of walking and talking while passing through a ‘landscape’ serve to constitute a criminology of everyday life, illustrating the way in which a consciousness of crime, crime sites, analyses and theories permeates the ways a ‘tourist trail’ might be experienced and seen, myths made and histories forged. The walk starts with the unseen lines of penal force radiating from Long Bay Gaol, before skirting through surfing and its regulation; the ‘brotherhood’ of the BRA Boys; the Hines killing and the politics of self defence; the shark arm case, the Virgin Mary and the Bali bombing memorial at Coogee; zones of the beach and Jock Young’s Vertigo at Bronte and Tamarama; before finishing at the Marks Park ‘badlands’ at Bondi, scene of a series of mostly unsolved and unpunished homophobic killings, giving rise to reflections on ‘ungrievable lives’, memory, mourning and forgetting.

The influence of food literacy on the everyday practicalities of meeting nutrition recommendations

Contemporary nutrition policies and plans call for focussing efforts to improve nutrition through a closer connection with food and the everyday practicalities of how people live and eat. Various words have been used to articulate what this might mean in practice. More recently, the term “food literacy” has emerged to explain this gap between the policy aims the (in)ability of people to know, understand and use food to meet nutrition recommendations. Despite its increasing use, there is no common understanding of this term or its components. Once established, food literacy could be measured in order to examine its association with nutritional outcomes. A Delphi study of 43 Australian food experts from diverse sectors and settings explored their understanding of the term “food literacy”, the likely components and possible relationship with nutrition. The three round Delphi study began with a semi-structured telephone interview and was followed by two online surveys. Constructivist grounded theory was used to analyse data, from which a conceptual model of the relationship between food literacy and nutrition was developed. The model was then tested and refined following a phenomenological study of 37 young people aged 16-25 years who were responsible for feeding themselves. They were interviewed about their food intake, day-to-day food decision making, the knowledge and skills used and their perceptions of someone who is “good with food”. Analysis from the Delphi study identified, eighty components of food literacy and these were grouped into eight domains: 1)access, 2)planning and management, 3)selection, 4)knowing where food comes from, 5)preparation, 6)eating, 7)nutrition and 8)food related language. When these were compared to results of the Young People’s study it was found that while specific components of food literacy were largely contextual, the importance of all eight domains continued to be relevant. The results of these qualitative studies have set the boundaries and scope of meaning of food literacy and will be used to inform the development of measurable variables to be tested in a quantitative cross-sectional study. This prospective study will examine the relationship between food literacy and nutrition. This research is useful in guiding government strategy and investment, and informing the planning, implementation and evaluation of interventions by practitioners.

Crafting and retelling everyday lives : disabled people's contribution to bioethical concerns

This commentary draws out themes from the narrative symposium on “living with the label “disability”” from the perspective of auto/biography and critical disability studies in the humanities. It notes the disconnect between the experiences discussed in the stories and the preoccupations of bioethicists. Referencing Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s recent work, it suggests that life stories by people usually described as “disabled” offer narrative, epistemic and ethical resources for bioethics. The commentary suggests that the symposium offers valuable conceptual tools and critiques of taken-for-granted terms like “dependency”. It notes that these narrators do not un–problematically embrace the term “disability”, but emphasize the need to redefine, strategically deploy or reject this term. Some accounts are explicitly critical of medical practitioners while others redefine health and wellbeing, emphasizing the need for reciprocity and respect for the knowledge of people with disability, including knowledge from their experience of “the variant body” (Leach Scully, 2008).

‘It’s about finding a way’ : children, sites of opportunity, and building everyday peace in Colombia

The multiple forms of violence associated with protracted conflict disproportionately affect young people. Literature on conflict-affected children often focuses on the need to provide stability and security through institutions such as schools but rarely considers how young people themselves see these sites as part of their everyday lives. The enduring, pervasive, and complex nature of Colombia’s conflict means many young Colombians face the challenges of poverty, persistent social exclusion, and violence. Such conditions are exacerbated in ‘informal’ barrio communities such as los Altos de Cazucá, just south of the capital Bogotá. Drawing on field research in this community, particularly through interviews conducted with young people aged 10 to 17 this article explores how young people themselves understand the roles of the local school and ngo in their personal conceptualisations of the violence in their everyday lives. The evidence indicates that children use spaces available to them opportunistically and that these actions can and should be read as contributing to local, everyday forms of peacebuilding. The ways in which institutional spaces are understood and used by young people as ‘sites of opportunity’ challenges the assumed illegitimacy of young people’s voices and experiences in these environments.

Children, violence, and social exclusion: Negotiation of everyday insecurity in a Colombian barrio

Discourses on in/security are often concerned with structures and meta-narratives of the state and other institutions; however, such attention misses the complexities of the everyday consequences of insecurity. In Colombia’s protracted conflict, children are disproportionately affected yet rarely consulted, rendering it difficult to account for their experiences in meaningful ways. This article draws on fieldwork conducted with conflict-affected children in an informal barrio community on the periphery of Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, to explore how children articulate experiences of insecurity. It examines how stereotypes of violence and delinquency reinforce insecurity; how multiple violences impact young people’s lives; and how children themselves conceive of responses to these negative experiences. These discussions are underpinned by a feminist commitment of attention to the margins and engage with those for whom insecurity is a daily phenomenon. The effects of deeply embedded insecurity, violence, and fear for young people in Colombia require a more nuanced theoretical engagement with notions of insecurity, as well as the complexities of connections and dissonances within everyday life.

How everyday language can and will boost effective information retrieval

Typing 2 or 3 keywords into a browser has become an easy and efficient way to find information. Yet, typing even short queries becomes tedious on ever shrinking (virtual) keyboards. Meanwhile, speech processing is maturing rapidly, facilitating everyday language input. Also, wearable technology can inform users proactively by listening in on their conversations or processing their social media interactions. Given these developments, everyday language may soon become the new input of choice. We present an information retrieval (IR) algorithm specifically designed to accept everyday language. It integrates two paradigms of information retrieval, previously studied in isolation; one directed mainly at the surface structure of language, the other primarily at the underlying meaning. The integration was achieved by a Markov machine that encodes meaning by its transition graph, and surface structure by the language it generates. A rigorous evaluation of the approach showed, first, that it can compete with the quality of existing language models, second, that it is more effective the more verbose the input, and third, as a consequence, that it is promising for an imminent transition from keyword input, where the onus is on the user to formulate concise queries, to a modality where users can express more freely, more informal, and more natural their need for information in everyday language.

Playing with Technology: Young Children Making Sense of Technology as Part of Their Everyday Social Worlds

Games and activities, often involving aspects of pretence and fantasy play, are an essential aspect of everyday preschool life for many young children. Young children’s spontaneous play activities can be understood as social life in action. Increasingly, young children’s games and activities involve their engagement in pretence using play props to represent computers, laptops and other pieces of technology equipment. In this way, pretend play becomes a context for engaging with matters from the real world. There are a number of studies investigating school-aged children engaging in gaming and other online activities, but less is known about what young children are doing with online technologies. Drawing on Australian Research Council funded research of children engaging with technologies at home and school, this chapter investigates how young children use technologies in everyday life by showing how they draw on props, both real or imaginary, to support their play activities. An ethnomethodological approach using conversation analysis is used to explore how children’s gestures, gaze and talk work to introduce ideas and activities. This chapter contributes to understandings of how children’s play intersects with technologies and pretend play.

An embodied everyday peace in the midst of violence

Orthodox notions of peace built on liberal institutionalism have been critiqued for their lack of attention to the local and the people who populate these structures. The concept of an ‘everyday peace’ seeks to take into account the agency and activity of those frequently marginalised or excluded and use these experiences as the basis for a more responsive way of understanding peace. Further, reconceptualising and complicating a notion of ‘everyday peace’ as embodied recognises marginalised people as competent commentators and observers of their world, and capable of engaging with the practices, routines and radical events that shape their everyday resistances and peacebuilding. Peace, in this imagining, is not abstract, but built through everyday practices amidst violence. Young people, in particular, are often marginalised or rendered passive in discussions of the violences that affect them. In recognising this limited engagement, this paper responds through drawing on fieldwork conducted with conflict-affected young people in a peri-urban barrio community near Colombia’s capital Bogota to forward a notion of an embodied everyday peace. This involves exploring the presence and voices of young people as stakeholders in a negotiation of what it means to build peace within daily experience in the context of local and broader violence and marginalisation. By centring young people’s understandings of and contributions within the everyday, this paper responds to the inadequacies of liberal peacebuilding narratives, and forwards a more complex rendering of everyday peace as embodied.

Theorising youth and everyday peace(building)

This essay presents a locally-grounded theoretical framework for studying youth and everyday peace(building). Drawing on examples from fieldwork as well as insights from the articles to follow in the journal, the essay highlights three interrelated and overlapping spheres of inquiry. First, it makes the case for examining the age-specific as well as gender-, and other contextually-specific roles of youth as they relate to everyday peacebuilding. Second, the essay draws attention to how everyday peace is narrated by or through youth. It poses questions about what values, policies, and governmental structures are specifically being resisted and rejected, and how peace is conceptualised and/or hidden in the narratives of youth. Third, along with these concerns, the nexus of global and local (including discursive and institutional) structures that facilitate, curtail, and curtain everyday peace (building) practices are important to identify and evaluate for their impacts on the roles and ideas of youth. In proposing this theoretical framework that recognises the complex and multiple ways youth are engaged in their everyday worlds, this essay asks how we can engage this recognition within knowledges and practices of everyday peace(building).