CRII: SaTC: Lendable: Designing Modular Hardware and Unobtrusive Interactions to Enable Convenient and Trustworthy Lending of Small Personal Computing Devices

Dartmouth College, Hanover NH

Investigators

Abstract

People often want to borrow or lend personal computing devices for many tasks: to make a phone call, to take some pictures, to navigate, to watch a video. Lending devices is risky, however, because of the amount of personal information they store and the lack of good tools for managing access to that information. This leads lenders to closely monitor borrowers' use, or to not lend the devices at all, both of which limit the usefulness of device lending and can lead to awkward interactions. This project will develop mechanisms to provide lenders with better control over the functions and data that borrowers can use, exploring two main ideas. The first is to use smartwatches, which are increasingly common, to support unobtrusive remote control of loaned smartphones. The second is to use modular designs, in which the data is stored on a base unit and features are provided through detachable modules. When separated, the modules enter a 'guest mode' where they can communicate with the base to access needed functions such as location or cellular network services, but are unable to access the owner's personal data. This work will extend knowledge of how to develop miniature and modular technologies designed to be used by multiple people while protecting privacy. The project will also provide PhD and undergraduate students opportunities to gain interdisciplinary research experiences, and open-source software and hardware prototypes that can be taken up by other researchers, designers, and makers. The work will proceed in three main stages. The first stage will explore the privacy needs and interaction techniques around using a smart watch as the base unit for a smart phone. Through deploying prototypes with varying levels of guest access, the researchers will determine the common kinds of privacy requirements associated with common lending tasks. They will then design and evaluate the usability of unobtrusive interaction techniques, such as which hand a device is loaned with or the orientation of the device, for specifying privacy settings when the device is lent. The second stage will focus on designing modular smartphone systems such that the phone's functions are naturally divided among modules to balance usability and privacy concerns. For this stage, the researchers will start with focus groups using mock-ups to do requirements analysis aimed at determining how features can best be allocated to modules to support lending while still providing lenders with useful functionality. They will then develop physical prototypes that realize these requirements and, as with the first stage, design and evaluate the usability of unobtrusive mode-switching interactions, such as the direction or order in which modules are detached. Finally, inspired by prior work on dual-face smartwatches and the goal of continued miniaturization of computing devices, the researchers will marry the first two thrusts, designing modular smartwatch prototypes and the appropriate interaction techniques for managing access to them.