ABSTRACT:

Digital wellbeing means that people use digital technologies to work productively, facilitate the social relationship, and sustain healthy lives in a balanced way without experiencing adverse side effects such as distraction, dependence, and safety/privacy threats. However, user interface research in HCI so far neglected how to design user interfaces that can effectively mitigate such side effects. While traditional user interface design mostly aims to minimize interaction friction, I argue that to promote digital wellbeing, increasing interaction friction or even blocking user interaction would be beneficial. This observation can be conceptualized as an interaction restraint framework that generalizes existing restrictive user interaction design for digital wellbeing. After illustrating the key design dimensions and related design concepts, I will review recent interaction restraint systems for regulating smartphone usage and in-vehicle conversational interactions and further discuss the roles of machine intelligence and behavioral economics in designing interaction restraint agents.

BIO:

Dr. Uichin Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and in the Graduate School of Knowledge Service Engineering at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He received the B.S. in computer engineering from Chonbuk National University in 2001, the M.S. degree in computer science from KAIST in 2003, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from UCLA in 2008. He continued his studies at UCLA as a post-doctoral research scientist (2008-2009) and then worked for Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs as a member of technical staff till 2010. His research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Social Computing, and Ubiquitous Computing, with specific focus on building and evaluating intelligent positive computing systems that leverage novel computing technologies with sensing, networking, and computing capability (e.g., smartphones, wearables, and Internet of Things) to better understand and deal with threats to the well-being of users.