We will be running a workshop as part of the DRS conference in Limerick on the 25th June 2018. This design workshop will be highly participatory with a short introduction to distributed systems followed by several group activities exploring trust in digital systems. We will investigate the changing trust relationships in existing centralised to more distributed systems using a wide selection of tangible materials. Using material affordances to represent different relationships and aspects of trust, participants will map relations between individual actors and organisations. Discussing and highlighting existing trust relationships and potential shifts emerging in distributed systems will raise questions around existing trust relationships in digital systems and how they emerge or manifest. Who do we trust and how do we build trust? What are the relationships between trust and aspects of transparency, control or convenience? What influences trust in digital relationships, and ultimately, what can the design community learn from this untangling of trust relationships in future distributed systems for novel forms of interactions? Using accessible, tangible tools in this workshop to investigate trust relationships will also offer insights into material affordances, their potentially representative nature of trust and their prospects of facilitating debate around various forms of relationships in distributed systems.

The workshop will take place on Monday 25th June 2018 from 14:00 – 17:30 at the University of Limerick in Ireland. Find more details about the workshop here or have a look at the overall conference programme on the Design Research Society website.

Members of the PACTMAN consortium represented the latest PACTMAN-related research at the 7th ACM Symposium on Pervasive Displays (PerDis 2018) in Munich, Germany.

Nigel Davies – Keynote at PerDis 2018

Nigel Davies was invited to give a keynote on “Saturated Display Environments”, introducing future research opportunities in the area of pervasive displays led by the trend and vision in which displays become truly ubiquitous and saturate the physical environment.

Mateusz Mikusz presenting work on helping students recall lecture content.

Mateusz Mikusz presented “Using Pervasive Displays to Aid Student Recall — Reflections on a Campus-Wide Trial“. This work formed the foundation and initial implementation for the PACTMAN-led display personalisation trial and specifically investigated the use of pervasive displays as part of an integrated learning environment to help students recall lecture content as they move across campus and walk by displays on their way to lectures, labs or colleges. The research on improving student recall was conducted as part of the PETRAS IoT Research Hub, the EU-funded FET7 project RECALL and PACTMAN.

Peter Shaw demonstrating display personalisation technology.

In the context of the display personalisation trial, Peter Shaw demonstrated the underlaying technology including the Tacita mobile application and corresponding display technology to participants of PerDis 2018. The demonstration sparked discussions for potential future collaborations with researchers from the pervasive displays community.

Jake Patterson presented SlideTalk, a piece of work conducted with Sarah Clinch on investigating new forms of smartphone-based interaction modalities specifically designed to improve user engagement and experience with public displays.