Voice & Gesture

Abstract: Home and automation are not natural partners–one homey and the other cold. Most current automation in the home is packaged in the form of appliances. To better understand the current reality and possible future of living with other types of domestic technology, we went out into the field to conduct need finding interviews among people who have already introduced automation into their homes and kept it there–home automators. We present the lessons learned from these home automators as frameworks and implications for the values that domestic technology should support. In particular, we focus on the satisfaction and meaning that the home automators derived from their projects, especially in connecting to their homes (rather than simply controlling their homes). These results point the way toward other technologies designed for our everyday lives at home.

From https://books.google.com/books?id=w5tVDKFqZscC&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=japanese+gricean+maxims&source=bl&ots=610OxYdBBb&sig=MmoA1BXg2MioIzCi_-I1TJn9qi8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjKwday643ZAhVrilQKHaUGCokQ6AEITzAE#v=onepage&q&f=false

The Neo-Gricean Formulation of Implicatures Grice's approach to conversational implicature has been streamlined and expanded in scope by Horn (1984), who separates out Grice's maxim of Quality, or the requirement of truthfulness, from the arena of conversational implicatures. (Sets upper and lower bounds for Quality - interesting)

This study used a revised Conversational Violations Test to examine Gricean maxim violations in 4- to 6-year-old Japanese children and adults. Participants' understanding of the following maxims was assessed: be informative (first maxim of quantity), avoid redundancy (second maxim of quantity), be truthful (maxim of quality), be relevant (maxim of relation), avoid ambiguity (second maxim of manner), and be polite (maxim of politeness). Sensitivity to violations of Gricean maxims increased with age: 4-year-olds' understanding of maxims was near chance, 5-year-olds understood some maxims (first maxim of quantity and maxims of quality, relation, and manner), and 6-year-olds and adults understood all maxims. Preschoolers acquired the maxim of relation first and had the greatest difficulty understanding the second maxim of quantity. Children and adults differed in their comprehension of the maxim of politeness. The development of the pragmatic understanding of Gricean maxims and implications for the construction of developmental tasks from early childhood to adulthood are discussed.

My favorite part of this study is that they evoked natural speech from the participants by asking them to tell a story "A later section of the interview leads up to the question, "Have you ever been in a situation where you thought you were in serious danger of being killed, where you thought, 'this is it'?" If the answer is "yes," we ask, "What happened?" There is a psychological pressure to prove that this was a real, not an imagined danger, and the speaker often becomes involved in his narrative to the extent that his attention is entirely focused on this re-enactment of the past."

Research referenced in the article: http://www.medisch-fitness.com/documents/75procentdagelijksegesprekkenbestedenweaanroddelen.pdf

The proposal examined here is that speakers use uh and um to announce that they are initiating what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in speaking. Speakers can use these announcements in turn to implicate, for example, that they are searching for a word, are deciding what to say next, want to keep the floor, or want to cede the floor. Evidence for the proposal comes from several large corpora of spontaneous speech. The evidence shows that speakers monitor their speech plans for upcoming delays worthy of comment. When they discover such a delay, they formulate where and how to suspend speaking, which item to produce (uh or um), whether to attach it as a clitic onto the previous word (as in “and-uh”), and whether to prolong it. The argument is that uh and um are conventional English words, and speakers plan for, formulate, and produce them just as they would any word.

from http://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/

I've known about these studies for a long time, but I hadn't really thought hard about how they applied to my own design work until recently. This blog post includes A LOT of research!

This ebook is free, so you should download it and check it out.

This chapter discusses interface metaphors and the user interface design. The integration of operational, structural, and pragmatic approaches to metaphors can provide guidance and a starting point for the design of a user interface that integrates a central metaphor, with a carefully analyzed similarity basis and a set of planned mismatches, with myriad other interface elements that support and exploit the matches and mismatches inhering in the metaphor. Metaphoric comparisons and interface presentations do more than render static denotative correspondences. They have motivational and affective consequences for users. They interact with and frame users' problem-solving efforts in learning about the target domain. Metaphors have been employed to increase the initial familiarity of the target domain, but they have an inevitable further role to play. The ultimate problem that the user should solve is to develop an understanding of the target domain itself—a mental model. Interface metaphors should also be viewed as tools proffered to users for articulating mental models.