Theme 1: Interactive Technology Enablers

This theme will bring together the expertise within India and the UK in addressing the technical challenges of enabling interactive technologies for novel user applications. The focus of the working group in this theme will be on exploring various emerging interactive technologies like multi-touch, gesture and multimodal input mechanisms along with audio, spatial sound, haptic, olfactory and visualisations for output mechanisms. This theme will also investigate suitable techniques for evaluation in the different cultural and usage contexts, a topic which has, as yet, received little attention in the literature.

Theme 2: Interactive Services and Applications

This theme will bring together expertise in both countries in addressing the challenges of the new kinds of services and applications that novel interactive technologies could facilitate. In particular, the working group members will explore the role of technology in improving education, financial, health care, and lifestyle services within the Indian and UK contexts. These applications will not be restricted to urban literates or technology savvy individuals but also for older people and rural communities. For example, micro-financing firms, that lend small sums of money to rural communities, have need of touch/ gesture based interactive technologies for rural members to manage financial data just like high-end financial institutions are exploring the role of touch in better manipulating, understanding and forecasting financial projections of a firm.

Theme 3: Sustainable Interaction Designs

Most of today's digital applications and services are aimed at making it effortless and convenient for users to use digital media and resources, without real concern for issues of sustainability. For example, the ready availability of always "ON" computational resources can place excessive demands on energy which may not be readily available in rural communities, or may have a high cost. The combination of new interactive technologies and their associated services and applications brings a new relevance and urgency to the area of sustainable interaction design. Designers need to be equipped to develop whole new interactive experiences and spaces in which users live and work without compromising usage of sustainable materials (low-cost devices needed for some markets in India), interaction paradigms (cannot expect the user to learn new interactions all the time) and excessive energy (like power-hungry displays). This working group will explore appropriate methods, tools, multimodal techniques and approaches for sustainable interaction design. This is a topic which is only just beginning to gain any interest in the HCI community, and one in which the network could make a big impact.